Devis just lost its bid on a big US government software contract through the GSA (General Services Administration). That's just competition. But how it lost that contract is exceptionally frustrating if you're a US taxpayer:
GSA told Devis at its debriefing that contractor risk was not a determining factor in the award decision, despite the fact that a majority of the evaluation panel found the [winning] Symplicity proposal to be "unacceptable" and offering "little confidence" of successful performance.
I'm all for a software proposal that stinks at the outset. How about you? :-)
Taking this one step further, I'm positive that the US federal government is also not taking into account just how risky every purchase of proprietary software is. Every dime of my tax dollars that is spent locking up government files (Microsoft Office) and/or content (Microsoft Sharepoint), email (Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus/Domino), database records (Oracle, IBM DB2), etc. is money thrown down the overpriced toilet. The US military alone, as the Government Accountability Office notes, is wasting billions and billions of dollars on shoddy software that is only promised to work.
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