

Google Wins Freeze on U.S. Contract With Microsoft  - petethomas
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-01-05/google-wins-freeze-on-u-s-contract-with-microsoft.html

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tjsnyder
It seems the point of this fight is bidding when the company/government is
already biased towards a specific vendor.

I have seen too many software vendors beat out the competition on an objective
technical scale that I have taken a part in evaluating only to have Oracle win
the entire contract with a sub par product and watching management skew the
numbers into Oracle's favor so that their bosses remain happy. They'll spend
more money for a lesser product simply because that is the status quo.

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phunel
Does $560 per user for _email_ in 2011 strike anyone as borderline ridiculous
(minus the borderline part)?

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tallanvor
The contract is probably for 3 or 5 years, so the yearly cost is probably
around $110 - $190 per user per year. $190 would probably be a bit on the high
side, but it depends on the technical and security requirements.

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nowarninglabel
I just wish Google would have taken 508 compliance more seriously and thus
gotten more government contracts in the past. They have only recently begin
catching up to Microsoft on 508 compliance in their hosted e-mail solution. If
they had done it sooner, more of the CSU system would be using Gmail instead
of live@edu and OWA.

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eps
As much as I like seeing MS getting shafted, Google was pitching _hosted_
email solution whereby they would run a "government only cloud". Telling them
No was a very sensible thing to do. I'd rather have the government use an
Exchange server than share its internal documents with Google. Apparently the
govs are of a similar opinion which is quite telling.

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rfugger
Microsoft's solution was also cloud-hosted:

 _Microsoft, in an e-mailed statement, said Interior “determined that the
dedicated, U.S.-based cloud solution offered by Microsoft met its minimum
security and other requirements after a careful and thorough evaluation, and
that Google’s solution did not.”_

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Athtar
I could be totally wrong but I think the issue was that Microsoft was willing
to host it (the private cloud) on-premise whereas Google wanted it in their
data centers.

