What crack are you smoking? Go talk to any government agency that invests millions or billions of dollars in a software application. The State of California is still doing most of their payroll on a COBOL based system and migrating off of it has proven to be more difficult than anyone ever imagined.
It's really easy to not care about what happens in 10 years if your only real world experience comes from college projects and the latest web-centric mutual masterbation fest. In the rest of the world, people aren't too keen on having to rewrite their applications and they do appreciate backwards compatibility.
Everyone skipped Vista because it sucked. Those same people are now considering Win7 deployments because Win7 doesn't suck. It works great on current hardware. As XP boxes die of old age there isn't any reason to replace them with XP running on newer hardware. The only reason to stay on XP is because of application compatibility. Once the apps are updated, XP can die. In my organization, there is exactly one application that won't run on XP. I run it in virtualized XP. It kind of sucks to have to boot up the VM, but with a dual core processor that supports virtualization extensions, everything runs great.
Gotta love shell companies. It seems to me if they are stupid enough to claim on their own webpage that they are the largest cable company in the United States that they should be treated that way. If they aren't going to make the effort to identify themselves as, "The largest group of unified, state centric cable operators" in order to keep up their farce, then they should suffer the legislative reprocussions.
Does anyone really believe that the Chinese (or any other government) would be stupid enough to do this from their own servers? One of the key tenents of espianoge is to cover your tracks. The closest something like this will ever get to the Chinese government is if the CIA or some other intelligence service happens to catch someone handing off a USB drive filled with whatever digital loot was acquired from the botnet. The government itself does not need to directly sponsor this sort of activity. It would be political suicide to do so. It is much too easy to obfuscate the process by farming it out.
You missed the point I was making. Other than downloading large files, very few people are going to notice the difference between 25mb and 100mb. Short of downloading from Microsoft or another huge website, you'll have a hard time even getting a full 25mb throughput on a download.
No, without government regulation you'd be able to string your own wires and reach your customers regardless of what AT&T is doing. Instead we have a situation where local governments conspire with the telco and cableco to prohibit people from doing this. Pray tell, why should AT&T or Time Warner have special rights to access the utility easement that a start up lacks?
I wish I could just dig up my response the last time this short sighted argument came up. What it boils down to is liability and limited resources. Consider this example. This afternoon I am going to access the junction box that provides network connectivity to you and your neighbor. I am doing it because your neighbor wants my internet service. In the process I'm going to disconnect your service. It is just an accident. I drag my screw driver over the wrong binding post. Oops. Doesn't matter, because anybody can string cable anywhere. Or maybe we should get rid of shared junction boxes and common cable runs? There are natural monopolies over things like cable runs because duplicating infrastructure is a waste of resources. It is much easier to just enforce equal access to the infrastructure that is already there (and that has in many cases been partially or completely subsidized by tax dollars and/or tax breaks). You're just asking for problems if you're going to allow any Tom, Dick or Harry to crawl up onto utility poles and dive down into manholes.
Do you have any idea what the hell you are talking about. The following is quote directly from the About link on Comcast.com
"Today, we're the country's largest provider of cable services - and one of the world's leading communications companies. We're focused on broadband cable, commerce, and content. We deliver digital services, provide faster Internet and clearer broadband phone service, and develop and deliver innovative programming."
Read the bolded part where they claim to be the largest provider of cable services IN THE COUNTRY. Take all of your nonsense about State centric legislation and shovel it somewhere else among people who won't take five seconds to question it, and come to the conclusion that you're way off base.
Starting your own ISP requires an uplink to the internet? Who'd of thunk it!
It also requires government regulation to get you into the market. If you want to sell DSL to an AT&T subscriber, AT&T has to allow you into the market and has to allow you to co-locate your equipment in their CO. Without government regulation, AT&T would just give you the finger and your ISP would be dead in the water.
The cable companies are currently getting a free pass. There isn't any regulation that says Comcast has to allow you access to their copper so that you can provide "unfiltered" internet service to anyone who has cable service.
You mention that people have managed to start up ISPs in markets that aren't already franchised. Since you seem to have a lock on that data, find me an example of an ISP that didn't have support from the local municipality. Show me one of those ISPs that didn't have to rely on government regulation to provide them with access to the infrastructure. If you can find me an example like that, I will agree that opening your own ISP is a viable alternative to Comcast shaping traffic.
Quit while you're ahead. The cost of entry into the ISP market is a huge barrier that can't be overcome at this point. Anyone who wants to "start their own ISP" is going to end up leasing lines from the telcos. In case you missed it, the government had to step in to enforce competition and force the telcos to share their circuits. As others have pointed out, nobody is going to be able to overcome the expense of running more wire / fiber / cable to homes, businesses, etc.
If you want a good example of the hurdles facing someone trying to start their own ISP, take a look at how Verizon is struggling with FiOS. They are already in the ISP business but the infrastructure is lacking in many places. They are hemorraging money trying to bring up those fiber connections, and the uptake on their service has been well below expectations because with the current offerings, MOST people can't tell the difference between a 25mb cable modem connection and a 100mb fiber connection. The cable companies can undercut Verizon and provide almost identical (to MOST people) offerings. In this forum, people know the different between a 25mb connection and a 100mb connection. To a home user who just wants crisp 1080p digital tv, streaming Netflix, web surfing, iTunes downloads and online gaming... 25mb is more than adequate.
Intel couldn't do better and cheaper just by bolting some extra cache and a few extra Itanium features onto Xeons
That is exactly what Intel is doing. They are rolling some core Itanium features into the next generation Xeon processors. There was an article on it in the Wall Street Journal last week. It came across as a marketing piece from Intel where they were attempting to reassure Itanium owners that they weren't going to be abandoned.
Google Apps large scale IMAP migrations? What does that have to do with recovering data? Can I please give my email to Google? I thought I was searching for "recover deleted mailbox".
Look at that. A full page of results about how to recover deleted Exchange mailboxes.
Conclusion? Microsoft software sucks. Look how much time people have to spend recovering lost Exchange mailboxes. There are pages worth of information on how to do it. Google software rocks. Their applications are so uber that they don't even need to document how to do those barbaric things that "other" companies do, like recovering accidently deleted mailboxes.
Your rant ignores the legitimate cases where people open documents from untrusted sources. The Human Resources department is the often touted example of that. They receive resumes all the time. If they don't want to accept them in Word (maybe they're scared of being labeled Microsoft toadies?) then they will accept them in PDF.
I was considering a GAPE deployment for a much smaller organization (about 150 users) and ran into real problems finding answers to some questions. In my particular case I was considering a migration off of Exchange. The exact specifics involved were really vague and often times the suggestion was, "Talk to a solutions provider." I went ahead and talked to two of them. When I pressed them for specifics about GAPE replication of Exchange features (Public Folders for example), I got a lot of vague answers along the lines of either, A. "Well, it can kind of do that." or B. "You don't need to do that because the Google way is better."
The major consideration that turned me away from Google was their support (or seeming complete lack of it). I had a terrible time getting my pre-sales questions answered when I went directly to Google. The "premiere partners" (companies that are trying to make a business based on deploying GAPE for organizations) were just as vague. One of them even admitted to me that they have problems getting answers out of Google about new features, or the status of outstanding issues.
I am subscribed to a thread on Google's forums that details people's real world problems with Google support.
Some of the people are obviously idiots who can't read the documentation. The large majority of them have serious problems that are ignored. Just recently someone mentioned that Google quoted them 5 days to recover an accidently deleted mailbox.
I don't doubt that Google Apps could very well be a great product. The key is that it "could" be a great product. Great products require great support. Great products require a certain ease of implementation and use. As it stands currently, GAPE is more like a beta framework that requires a lot of heavy lifting on the part of an IT department. It is hardly a production ready, polished product that can be sold as a service.
Forget about the DRM. It's the hackers that drove me onto the PS3. I wanted a platform where I could play FPS games without having to put up with aimbots and wallhacks. It looks like Sony is doing what they have to stay one step ahead of the hackers. As much as it seems obvious to want to blame Sony for this, put the blame where it lies.. on the hackers. Sony is doing what they need to do in order to provide a fun platform to play games on. There are numerous devices that I can install Linux on. There aren't nearly as many that I can get a fair game of CoD on.
Of course the sad reality is that despite Sony's best efforts, their console will eventually be cracked. It would be nice if at that point they would go ahead and re-enable the support for other OSes. Once the horse is out of the barn...
When Microsoft introduced Windows Update there was a lot of speculation that it would be compromised and used as an infection vector. That threat never seemed to materialize. I always thought that the 3rd party apps like Adobe, Java, etc would be more vulnerable due to the fact that they run on the local machine.
At the rate it takes Microsoft to adjust, we should have a centralized patch management system by 2020.
Where I work a policy had to be implemented limiting the use of personal devices to access work resources (ie email). There are a lot of hourly employees here and by law if an hourly employee responds to an email after hours, they need to be paid for time worked. HR decided that they didn't want to deal with tracking all of the random hours so they just implemented a policy that denies employee devices on the network. If there are outlier cases like where an hourly employee needs to help with an after hours event, they are given a Blackberry.
For the rest of the staff, they are encouraged to buy their own devices. The organization saves money on repair bills and the employees tend to take better care of their devices. Once they realize what the replacement cost on a smartphone is, they stop dropping them and mishandling them. Our director of development was the worst. She went through three phones in a single year. Since she was put on the hook for her own device costs, she has miraculously managed to not damage or lose it. The organization still pays for the monthly calling / data plans.
My limited understanding of Hong Kong vis a vi China is that the Chinese allow a certain amount of economic freedom to Hong Kong in order to reap the benefits. Although Hong Kong might enjoy more freedom than the rest of China, there is no doubt that the Chinese do in fact own Hong Kong and Hong Kong is in fact part of China. I wonder if there will be any backlash against Hong Kong as a whole because of what Google is doing.
In a nutshell it seems like they're saying, "Nahy nahy, we're in Hong Kong now. You can't touch us." That seems rather short sighted to me. On the other hand, they have a fairly defensible position. Would the Chinese risk looking like even more severe tyrants by disrupting the dynamics that govern companies in Hong Kong?
The only part of Google's business that is leaving China is the search engine. Their other divisions (mobile phone with Android, advertising, etc) are staying put. They have a lot of avenues through which to offer their products to the Chinese. The search engine is their core tool, but it isn't their only one.
Is it safe to presume that Munich has similar "open" access to the city budget processes that we enjoy here in America. It would be an interesting project to monitor their IT budget for the next five years. If it goes down then we can agree the project is a success. If it doesn't, I think we can say that they did a great job of re-inventing the wheel.
So rather than benefiting everyone, they benefit the local economy. That seems sort of selfish, in a nationlistic, protectionist sort of way. (I'm just teasing, I tend to promote local solutions whenever possible). The real meat of my question is what the savings really are. They are spending a certain amount of money on "licensing fees". They are going to stop spending money on licensing fees and start spending it on "in house development". What I'm curious about is the real difference between the two.
I used to do IT work for a local city government here in California. Their building and planning department used a Windows based permit system. It was the same permit system used by government agencies all over the state, and the country. Permits aren't that complex and the functionality could have easily been recreated as a web app, or even a local app. Lets say that Munich uses a similar permit system. Where is the benefit of having their own system that is different from everyone else? The permit system I was familiar with exported to Word (.doc), Excel (.csv) and PDF. It supported OCR of the city's specific forms.
The only way I can see the Munich solution being a win is if they sell or lease their code and applications to anyone else who is willing to pay for them. If they don't, they're simply replacing one system with another. On top of it, they're replacing one system that is used by numerous organizations (and understood by that many people) with a system that only they understand (and is therefore that much harder to find / train people on). I'm not talking about Samba and OpenLDAP and what have you. I mean the day to day applications that support the government processes.
VBA was probably their only choice. In 2000, where was OpenOffice? Where was the Linux desktop? VBA has been around for a "long time" when measured in IT years. At the time they probably went with the "free" tool built into the application that happened to be compatible with the majority of their other applications.
People bag on VBA like it is worthless. If was totally worthless it wouldn't have been used as often as it was. If there were good alternatives it wouldn't have the market penetration that it does. It is only now that there are alternatives that people are complaining about it. It's kind of like bagging on a 10 year old application for not being optimized for a dual-core CPU.
With in house you have the pleasure of spending money on developers. Either you pay Microsoft developers or you pay your own developers. Don't like MS developers? You can pay IBM devs, Oracle devs, India devs, Vietnamese devs, American... (who am I kidding).
You CANNOT escape the fact that software requires maintenance. It comes down to cost. Is it more cost effective to do it yourself, or to pay someone else? There are benefits to each solution. You don't get a free lunch. How is an in house solution and less "locked in" than a proprietary one? You have access to the source code? Whoopie. What happens when your lead dev gets hit by a bus, or asks for too much money? What happens in five years when nobody can remember what function(23) does?
If you go with a known vendor, you are getting an application that a lot of people are using. Other organizations might find problems with the software before you do. The vendor will patch them before you have problems. With a big vendor they have the resources of all their licensing fees. It doesn't matter if the vendor is developing using Linux, Windows or BeOS. The real question is who does a better job of managing developers and development resources?
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What crack are you smoking? Go talk to any government agency that invests millions or billions of dollars in a software application. The State of California is still doing most of their payroll on a COBOL based system and migrating off of it has proven to be more difficult than anyone ever imagined.
It's really easy to not care about what happens in 10 years if your only real world experience comes from college projects and the latest web-centric mutual masterbation fest. In the rest of the world, people aren't too keen on having to rewrite their applications and they do appreciate backwards compatibility.
Everyone skipped Vista because it sucked. Those same people are now considering Win7 deployments because Win7 doesn't suck. It works great on current hardware. As XP boxes die of old age there isn't any reason to replace them with XP running on newer hardware. The only reason to stay on XP is because of application compatibility. Once the apps are updated, XP can die. In my organization, there is exactly one application that won't run on XP. I run it in virtualized XP. It kind of sucks to have to boot up the VM, but with a dual core processor that supports virtualization extensions, everything runs great.
Gotta love shell companies. It seems to me if they are stupid enough to claim on their own webpage that they are the largest cable company in the United States that they should be treated that way. If they aren't going to make the effort to identify themselves as, "The largest group of unified, state centric cable operators" in order to keep up their farce, then they should suffer the legislative reprocussions.
Does anyone really believe that the Chinese (or any other government) would be stupid enough to do this from their own servers? One of the key tenents of espianoge is to cover your tracks. The closest something like this will ever get to the Chinese government is if the CIA or some other intelligence service happens to catch someone handing off a USB drive filled with whatever digital loot was acquired from the botnet. The government itself does not need to directly sponsor this sort of activity. It would be political suicide to do so. It is much too easy to obfuscate the process by farming it out.
You missed the point I was making. Other than downloading large files, very few people are going to notice the difference between 25mb and 100mb. Short of downloading from Microsoft or another huge website, you'll have a hard time even getting a full 25mb throughput on a download.
No, without government regulation you'd be able to string your own wires and reach your customers regardless of what AT&T is doing. Instead we have a situation where local governments conspire with the telco and cableco to prohibit people from doing this. Pray tell, why should AT&T or Time Warner have special rights to access the utility easement that a start up lacks?
I wish I could just dig up my response the last time this short sighted argument came up. What it boils down to is liability and limited resources. Consider this example. This afternoon I am going to access the junction box that provides network connectivity to you and your neighbor. I am doing it because your neighbor wants my internet service. In the process I'm going to disconnect your service. It is just an accident. I drag my screw driver over the wrong binding post. Oops. Doesn't matter, because anybody can string cable anywhere. Or maybe we should get rid of shared junction boxes and common cable runs? There are natural monopolies over things like cable runs because duplicating infrastructure is a waste of resources. It is much easier to just enforce equal access to the infrastructure that is already there (and that has in many cases been partially or completely subsidized by tax dollars and/or tax breaks). You're just asking for problems if you're going to allow any Tom, Dick or Harry to crawl up onto utility poles and dive down into manholes.
Do you have any idea what the hell you are talking about. The following is quote directly from the About link on Comcast.com
"Today, we're the country's largest provider of cable services - and one of the world's leading communications companies. We're focused on broadband cable, commerce, and content. We deliver digital services, provide faster Internet and clearer broadband phone service, and develop and deliver innovative programming."
Read the bolded part where they claim to be the largest provider of cable services IN THE COUNTRY. Take all of your nonsense about State centric legislation and shovel it somewhere else among people who won't take five seconds to question it, and come to the conclusion that you're way off base.
Starting your own ISP requires an uplink to the internet? Who'd of thunk it!
It also requires government regulation to get you into the market. If you want to sell DSL to an AT&T subscriber, AT&T has to allow you into the market and has to allow you to co-locate your equipment in their CO. Without government regulation, AT&T would just give you the finger and your ISP would be dead in the water.
The cable companies are currently getting a free pass. There isn't any regulation that says Comcast has to allow you access to their copper so that you can provide "unfiltered" internet service to anyone who has cable service.
You mention that people have managed to start up ISPs in markets that aren't already franchised. Since you seem to have a lock on that data, find me an example of an ISP that didn't have support from the local municipality. Show me one of those ISPs that didn't have to rely on government regulation to provide them with access to the infrastructure. If you can find me an example like that, I will agree that opening your own ISP is a viable alternative to Comcast shaping traffic.
Quit while you're ahead. The cost of entry into the ISP market is a huge barrier that can't be overcome at this point. Anyone who wants to "start their own ISP" is going to end up leasing lines from the telcos. In case you missed it, the government had to step in to enforce competition and force the telcos to share their circuits. As others have pointed out, nobody is going to be able to overcome the expense of running more wire / fiber / cable to homes, businesses, etc.
If you want a good example of the hurdles facing someone trying to start their own ISP, take a look at how Verizon is struggling with FiOS. They are already in the ISP business but the infrastructure is lacking in many places. They are hemorraging money trying to bring up those fiber connections, and the uptake on their service has been well below expectations because with the current offerings, MOST people can't tell the difference between a 25mb cable modem connection and a 100mb fiber connection. The cable companies can undercut Verizon and provide almost identical (to MOST people) offerings. In this forum, people know the different between a 25mb connection and a 100mb connection. To a home user who just wants crisp 1080p digital tv, streaming Netflix, web surfing, iTunes downloads and online gaming... 25mb is more than adequate.
Here is an article scrounged up by a quick Google search that re-iterates what I read in the WSJ.
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/5/27/intel-nehalem-ex-xeon-spells-the-voice-of-doom-for-itanium.aspx
The WSJ mentioned that Intel was porting a lot of the Itanium specific fault tolerance features over to the Xeons.
Intel couldn't do better and cheaper just by bolting some extra cache and a few extra Itanium features onto Xeons
That is exactly what Intel is doing. They are rolling some core Itanium features into the next generation Xeon processors. There was an article on it in the Wall Street Journal last week. It came across as a marketing piece from Intel where they were attempting to reassure Itanium owners that they weren't going to be abandoned.
Your suggestion fails the real world test.
http://www.google.com/search?q=recover+deleted+google+apps+mailbox&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1
Google Apps large scale IMAP migrations? What does that have to do with recovering data? Can I please give my email to Google? I thought I was searching for "recover deleted mailbox".
To throw more fuel onto the fire.
http://www.google.com/search?q=recover+deleted+exchange+mailbox&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1
Look at that. A full page of results about how to recover deleted Exchange mailboxes.
Conclusion? Microsoft software sucks. Look how much time people have to spend recovering lost Exchange mailboxes. There are pages worth of information on how to do it. Google software rocks. Their applications are so uber that they don't even need to document how to do those barbaric things that "other" companies do, like recovering accidently deleted mailboxes.
Your rant ignores the legitimate cases where people open documents from untrusted sources. The Human Resources department is the often touted example of that. They receive resumes all the time. If they don't want to accept them in Word (maybe they're scared of being labeled Microsoft toadies?) then they will accept them in PDF.
I was considering a GAPE deployment for a much smaller organization (about 150 users) and ran into real problems finding answers to some questions. In my particular case I was considering a migration off of Exchange. The exact specifics involved were really vague and often times the suggestion was, "Talk to a solutions provider." I went ahead and talked to two of them. When I pressed them for specifics about GAPE replication of Exchange features (Public Folders for example), I got a lot of vague answers along the lines of either, A. "Well, it can kind of do that." or B. "You don't need to do that because the Google way is better."
The major consideration that turned me away from Google was their support (or seeming complete lack of it). I had a terrible time getting my pre-sales questions answered when I went directly to Google. The "premiere partners" (companies that are trying to make a business based on deploying GAPE for organizations) were just as vague. One of them even admitted to me that they have problems getting answers out of Google about new features, or the status of outstanding issues.
I am subscribed to a thread on Google's forums that details people's real world problems with Google support.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?hl=en&tid=384dd0d72db87c6d
Some of the people are obviously idiots who can't read the documentation. The large majority of them have serious problems that are ignored. Just recently someone mentioned that Google quoted them 5 days to recover an accidently deleted mailbox.
I don't doubt that Google Apps could very well be a great product. The key is that it "could" be a great product. Great products require great support. Great products require a certain ease of implementation and use. As it stands currently, GAPE is more like a beta framework that requires a lot of heavy lifting on the part of an IT department. It is hardly a production ready, polished product that can be sold as a service.
Forget about the DRM. It's the hackers that drove me onto the PS3. I wanted a platform where I could play FPS games without having to put up with aimbots and wallhacks. It looks like Sony is doing what they have to stay one step ahead of the hackers. As much as it seems obvious to want to blame Sony for this, put the blame where it lies.. on the hackers. Sony is doing what they need to do in order to provide a fun platform to play games on. There are numerous devices that I can install Linux on. There aren't nearly as many that I can get a fair game of CoD on.
Of course the sad reality is that despite Sony's best efforts, their console will eventually be cracked. It would be nice if at that point they would go ahead and re-enable the support for other OSes. Once the horse is out of the barn...
When Microsoft introduced Windows Update there was a lot of speculation that it would be compromised and used as an infection vector. That threat never seemed to materialize. I always thought that the 3rd party apps like Adobe, Java, etc would be more vulnerable due to the fact that they run on the local machine.
At the rate it takes Microsoft to adjust, we should have a centralized patch management system by 2020.
What do you mean? Are you saying that beer and alcohol trigger the same kind of weight gain that HFC does?
Where I work a policy had to be implemented limiting the use of personal devices to access work resources (ie email). There are a lot of hourly employees here and by law if an hourly employee responds to an email after hours, they need to be paid for time worked. HR decided that they didn't want to deal with tracking all of the random hours so they just implemented a policy that denies employee devices on the network. If there are outlier cases like where an hourly employee needs to help with an after hours event, they are given a Blackberry.
For the rest of the staff, they are encouraged to buy their own devices. The organization saves money on repair bills and the employees tend to take better care of their devices. Once they realize what the replacement cost on a smartphone is, they stop dropping them and mishandling them. Our director of development was the worst. She went through three phones in a single year. Since she was put on the hook for her own device costs, she has miraculously managed to not damage or lose it. The organization still pays for the monthly calling / data plans.
My limited understanding of Hong Kong vis a vi China is that the Chinese allow a certain amount of economic freedom to Hong Kong in order to reap the benefits. Although Hong Kong might enjoy more freedom than the rest of China, there is no doubt that the Chinese do in fact own Hong Kong and Hong Kong is in fact part of China. I wonder if there will be any backlash against Hong Kong as a whole because of what Google is doing.
In a nutshell it seems like they're saying, "Nahy nahy, we're in Hong Kong now. You can't touch us." That seems rather short sighted to me. On the other hand, they have a fairly defensible position. Would the Chinese risk looking like even more severe tyrants by disrupting the dynamics that govern companies in Hong Kong?
The only part of Google's business that is leaving China is the search engine. Their other divisions (mobile phone with Android, advertising, etc) are staying put. They have a lot of avenues through which to offer their products to the Chinese. The search engine is their core tool, but it isn't their only one.
Is it safe to presume that Munich has similar "open" access to the city budget processes that we enjoy here in America. It would be an interesting project to monitor their IT budget for the next five years. If it goes down then we can agree the project is a success. If it doesn't, I think we can say that they did a great job of re-inventing the wheel.
So rather than benefiting everyone, they benefit the local economy. That seems sort of selfish, in a nationlistic, protectionist sort of way. (I'm just teasing, I tend to promote local solutions whenever possible). The real meat of my question is what the savings really are. They are spending a certain amount of money on "licensing fees". They are going to stop spending money on licensing fees and start spending it on "in house development". What I'm curious about is the real difference between the two.
I used to do IT work for a local city government here in California. Their building and planning department used a Windows based permit system. It was the same permit system used by government agencies all over the state, and the country. Permits aren't that complex and the functionality could have easily been recreated as a web app, or even a local app. Lets say that Munich uses a similar permit system. Where is the benefit of having their own system that is different from everyone else? The permit system I was familiar with exported to Word (.doc), Excel (.csv) and PDF. It supported OCR of the city's specific forms.
The only way I can see the Munich solution being a win is if they sell or lease their code and applications to anyone else who is willing to pay for them. If they don't, they're simply replacing one system with another. On top of it, they're replacing one system that is used by numerous organizations (and understood by that many people) with a system that only they understand (and is therefore that much harder to find / train people on). I'm not talking about Samba and OpenLDAP and what have you. I mean the day to day applications that support the government processes.
VBA was probably their only choice. In 2000, where was OpenOffice? Where was the Linux desktop? VBA has been around for a "long time" when measured in IT years. At the time they probably went with the "free" tool built into the application that happened to be compatible with the majority of their other applications.
People bag on VBA like it is worthless. If was totally worthless it wouldn't have been used as often as it was. If there were good alternatives it wouldn't have the market penetration that it does. It is only now that there are alternatives that people are complaining about it. It's kind of like bagging on a 10 year old application for not being optimized for a dual-core CPU.
With in house you have the pleasure of spending money on developers. Either you pay Microsoft developers or you pay your own developers. Don't like MS developers? You can pay IBM devs, Oracle devs, India devs, Vietnamese devs, American... (who am I kidding).
You CANNOT escape the fact that software requires maintenance. It comes down to cost. Is it more cost effective to do it yourself, or to pay someone else? There are benefits to each solution. You don't get a free lunch. How is an in house solution and less "locked in" than a proprietary one? You have access to the source code? Whoopie. What happens when your lead dev gets hit by a bus, or asks for too much money? What happens in five years when nobody can remember what function(23) does?
If you go with a known vendor, you are getting an application that a lot of people are using. Other organizations might find problems with the software before you do. The vendor will patch them before you have problems. With a big vendor they have the resources of all their licensing fees. It doesn't matter if the vendor is developing using Linux, Windows or BeOS. The real question is who does a better job of managing developers and development resources?