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Tim Cook wrote: | On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 11:42, Tim Churches wrote: | | |>The question |>is, could any vendor have come up with a contract offer to swap 500,000 |>NHS desktops from Microsoft to Linux and OpenOffice and other open |>source within 3 years, including the porting of all the Windows-specific |>health software. | | | A rhetorical question no doubt. | I don't think so. Once you factor in certain criteria for vendor acceptance, such as size, history, financial stability, existing impact, they may not be a vendor to compete! I have seen this in action elsewhere, but have no knowledge of the NHS decision process. | | [preaching to the choir alert] | Why is it that they haven't yet figured out that they are on a | treadmill? They must take a longer term view if they are to break this | vendor lock-in, upgrade on demand cycle. | There is another view of this. It is not a treadmill, it's part of economic growth. The longer term view of government is that they are building a robust economy and helping local industry. And that's where the case begins to get wobbly. One needs to break down the economic impact to the UK economy and then show how a different kind of contract would have had a better impact. Remember all those UK companies and employee's getting paychecks from this? You need a better overall outcome.
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