County Meeting

On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Robert Bushman wrote:

> On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Bill Nash wrote:
>

> >     It still is a worthy project.

>
> Agreed.
>
> > How do ants defeat a bear?
>
> By dedicating enormous resources (relative to
> their available resources) for very long periods
> of time. This is worthwhile if the bear has the
> highest ROI relative to other targets of
> opportunity.
>
> > The big problem with this: How important are county docs to us? I,
> > personally, never look at them.
>
> Moreover, how important is Maricopa County as a
> migration target? Are there other targets that
> could provide a higher ROI?

There are no better targets than the Government at all levels. The
Government sets the standards. This was clearly demonstrated with the
comment about needing MS for products that interface with the FBI.

If you can convince the government to convert to open standards, the rest
will follow. Government is allowed to dictate on all levels what sorts of
policy and procedure are followed to do business with Government.
Regardless of your standings on how big government should be, our
government is currently big business. When our Government requires
businesses to interact with them using MS products, the businesses will
all choose MS products, as the Government is big and has big pockets. It
is not worth the risk for most busniesses to lose Government money trying
to switch to an open alternative, for fear of non-interoperativability.
However, if the Government uses open standards, it opens competition from
the hardware to the OS to the end-application software realm, and now
businesses who deal with the government will have greater incentive to
reevaluate their options.

And if they reevaluate and change, they will require that the
subcontractors submit stuff in the open standards.

If you get the Goose, you get the Gander.

-- RJV --                    ..ooOO miracle@procyon.com

-- Institution of Postgraduate Education - Graduation 2001
-- Institution of Undergraduate Education - Alumnus 1997

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