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Story: Microsoft upgrade knocks out 80,000 government PCs

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The real problem is that just about everyone considers themselves IT expert enough to make 'informed decisions' based on 'facts' presented by persons who are commercially motivated and consider themselves IT expert enough also.

This means that wannabees, never minds, not there yet and real (multi-platform) professionals get equal voting and the latter ones are greatly outnumbered by the former.

As a result overall quality goes down the tube yet revenues for the commercially motivated increase.

Add to that that absolutely no-one (certainly high level decision makers) will really get axed, trialed and executed no matter how big the mistakes, how large the budget overruns, how empty the promises turn out to be and how huge the clean-up costs are.

Then ask yourself what possible reasons the responsible people (decision makers, managers, advisors, consultants and external commercial companies) actually have to change their behaviour and attitude as long as they're not made responsible and realisticly fully accountable for their actions, decisions and advises.

As history has shown: buying into build-in required extra work with zero liability for the ones providing it will not get you what you need. It'll get you what they told you to ask for. And that's only good for them.

The fact of business life is that they won't do what lowers their profits unless there's a real risk of having to pay a fine of some sort that's significantly larger then the probable revenues they gain from just going ahead as they see fit.

As such certainly governments are advised to require from their solution providers at least two total solutions (otherwise you can say you're dealing with a company that doesn't have a clue enough) along with the requirement that the providing party will specifiy a complete and total roll-back plan beforehand which they will be fully accountable for if the pre-arranged delivery conditions are not completely satisfied in time.

On an individual case level that'll increase the price at first but on an overall scale and in the longer run it'll significantly lower cost because it'll require responsible business behaviour and a greater demand for real professionals that can provide more then one answer (thus improving competition which will automaticly provide a lasting better value for money overall).

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