
New York Police reportedly needs to replace 36,000 'useless' Windows Phones - cm2187
https://www.neowin.net/news/the-new-york-police-department-reportedly-needs-to-replace-36000-useless-windows-phones
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grizzles
I tweeted about this. For $100M they could have bought a Chinese phone
manufacturer and still had more than enough budget ($60M) left over to easily
pay wages and produce the phones. I'm not joking. As an entrepreneur, I find
these type of corporate conquest deals hard to watch. Any no bid contract
awarded like this should trigger an automatic bribery investigation.

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throwawaycanada
Agreed. I've worked in the public sector though and this is shockingly equally
likely to be nothing but regular old stupidity mixed with total lack of
accountability. If a government department throws away all it's money they are
just given more.

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mikestew
It's easy to criticize such decisions in hindsight, but after WinMo 6.5 as a
response to the iPhone I began to question Microsoft's dedication to the
mobile space. Were I in charge of purchasing 36K mobile devices, that would
certainly have factored into my decision. OTOH, I'm guessing the purchase
decision was made somewhere toward the end of the WinMo 7.x timeframe, when it
could have looked like maybe Microsoft was going to stick with it.

On the other other hand, if you've been making purchase recommendations for
more than a few years, feel free to cast a stone or two if you've never made a
recommendation that, in hindsight, was kind of a poor choice. Me, I'm leaving
those rocks on the ground.

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moftz
But 18 months ago, Windows phone was sitting at a low single digit market
share in the US. I can't see anyone with more than half a brain deciding to
purchase a Windows phone over an iPhone for enterprise unless the only
determining factor was price. I'm assuming the IT director is getting some
major volume discounts or even some kickbacks from MS: NYPD have started
giving academy recruits Microsoft Surfaces to replace books. Spending
somewhere in the neighborhood of +$1M ($300 per phone and a support contract)
for smartphones should have been something decided by a committee, not a
single director.

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mikestew
So let's assume for the moment that the IT director isn't a complete idiot.
How did they come to this purchase decision? What other factors beside "it's
obvious Windows Phone is a dead-end" were considered? I'm not trying to give
anyone the benefit of the doubt, but rather wondering how I can personally
avoid the same mistakes in the future by identifying the blindspots. I don't
learn anything by just blowing them off as idiots that shouldn't be allowed to
have a budget. (Though that hypothesis is still on the table.)

For instance, with the Surface example, maybe it's not outright graft but
rather "in for a penny, in for a pound"? So they already have the Surfaces,
and by golly, they're staying in the ecosystem come hell or high water?

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bigleagueposter
Not taking a bribe would help you avoid such taking such decisions.

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Multicomp
On the one hand, Windows Phone 8.x/10 devices have had a shelf life just
shorter than that of a banana. On the other hand, Windows Mobile 6.5-based
devices are __STILL__ sold by the likes of Datalogic for warehouse and
embedded/in the field setups. They aren't cheap either, on the order of >800
dollars per device.

Just a rather ironic scenario, that the Pocket PC family seems to have way
more staying power than the non CE-based WP architectures.

