What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you. Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare. That you can get all in one from Microsoft is one of their biggest strengths in the market and you must compete with that.
This is what gets us in this mess in the first place.
> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare.
Then scale down the bureaucracy and bring back the decision-making power down to the leaf nodes. Have each institution working as a "microservice" which is responsible only for defining the interfaces on how to interact with them, but leave the internal implementation completely up to the department. You can of course have some collaborative structure where these departments can use as a reference guide, but they are completely free to override those decisions when it best suits them.
Dear god no. That's how you end up with contracts assigned to "Joe's Nephew Software Design" that don't just smell but reek of nepotism (although I will admit, the "big bodyshops" aka Accenture and friends aren't much better), neverending GDPR et al. compliance issues, and massive employee overhead in training and onboarding costs when every local government does its own shit and economies of scale can't be leveraged.
Also, even assuming "Joe's Nephew Software Design" manages to complete the DMV software on time and in budget... who's guaranteeing that in 10 or 20 years Joe's Nephew will still be around to provide updates? It's (way) easier and cheaper to do continuous maintenance when there are lots of clients to fund upkeep, compared to just one.
You said it yourself. Corruption and abuse of power will always exist. But if I had to choose between the invisible corruption of faceless bureaucrats enabling cronies or the local crook who will try to put his finger on the pie, I will take the local crook every time. At the very least, I can get a bunch of people and bang on their doors with some pitchforks.
> who's guaranteeing that in 10 or 20 years Joe's Nephew will still be around to provide updates?
We are taking about a scenario where open source is the norm and the stakes for each individual project are lower. "off-the-shelf" components would be the norm. Whatever customization or improvements done by the departments would also be released as FOSS.
For that, you gotta hear about the issue first. Local reporting is all but dead, and the few local journalists that remain and have the expertise and time to do investigative pieces on local money wastes are way more easily silenced by SLAPP lawsuits and political pressure (up to and including death threats) than something like, say, the New York Times.
I can't imagine how hard it would be to do this with people. Each working with their own little bubble.
Just the other week someone decided that an api needed a tweak, so they adjusted the code and the tests, but missed one external system. Took 4 days to fix, because we couldn't figure out what had changed. And the team who owned the external system wasn't around. People as microservices.. no just no.
Works for supermarkets, department stores etc. Companies employ too much red tape in their acquisition processes.
I’ve seen organisations pay way over the going rate for cloud services by insisting on a bidding process and talking to salespeople, when they could have just purchased direct from the console.
> people as microservices
No, departments as microservices.
While I understand what you're saying, isn't that surely the problem?
Putting all of your eggs in one basket may give you a nice vertically integrated system you can buy off-the-shelf with little effort, but then you're wholly dependent on that org for everything from the platform you're hosting your infra on, to the tools you communicate with and the software suite running on your workstations; having your org use _everything_ Microsoft might be easy, and a little bit spendy, but the moment Microsoft is off the table, you're left without an org.
Disparate systems from all over the place might very well be more effort, and also likely cheaper/free in terms of licensing costs, which you can then spend on creating jobs and/or contributing back to those systems. The larger your org, the more you'll save and the more you can spend on creating jobs, and more importantly, those jobs can be created locally.
Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.
For many companies, the idea of having the proverbial "One Throat To Choke" is actually a feature not a bug. (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22one+throat+to+choke%22)
The alternative of modular components with interoperable interfaces means more multiple vendors "finger pointing" at each other with the blame game instead of problems getting resolved. Yes, modular components can theoretically combine "best-of-breed" software ... but the extra complexity of interfaces integration is not worth the tradeoffs for many CIOs.
>Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own.
It goes both ways. A lot of USA companies depend on a big German software company (SAP AG) for their global ERP system. This includes Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and most of Fortune 500 companies, etc. They all use SAP for consolidated accounting & finance. Google used to use Oracle (USA) but switched to SAP. SAP is an example of a "integrated system" instead of interfacing a bunch of disparate software silos from various vendors ("accounting software vendor", "demand forecasting software vendor", etc)
The solution is simple: build a business environment that would allow a home-grown alternative to have developed over the last 40 years.
And even if I agreed, they did hire that former MS exec. So they wouldn't have been that alternative, because in no universe would Apple or Google put Stephen Elop in charge of iPhone/Android, and in this universe, Nokia would.
Time travel is a simple and elegant solution to many problems. (Ignoring unintended consequences at least.)
I'm thinking a portfolio of auth, storage, chat, email, code repository, project management... Everything an organization could in theory host itself but realistically does not have the personnel for.
But the most interest thing is that in the process I also wanted to remove my dependency on the other centralized SaaS, so I ended up setting up my own git repository (gitea), my own CI (woodpecker), my own project management tool (Taiga), my own knowledge-base/data sharing tool (Baserow).
On the one hand, I agree with you and think it could be a great business opportunity. On the other, the whole thing is so easy to be completely commoditized that I don't see a practical path to profitability. If I go to investors with the idea, they will say (rightly so) that there is no easy way to establish a competitive advantage. If I bootstrap (like I have been doing with Communick) I can not be fast enough to do both customer acquisitation and development.
That aside, governments have the resources to do this themselves, that's how they currently do so. Extending those services to local organisations would be a step in the right direction.
The thing about services and tooling is that for many orgs, there's not a whole lot you need, and once you're at a scale where you need tooling to manage that scale, you presumably have the resources for an operations team to deal with that, and can outsource the bits you can't do.
The org I work for outsources our public-facing website work to a web-design co, because that's their speciality, and not ours.
All of that is to say; I agree with you, but I think they already exist in the form of SIs.
If you replaced that Microsoft system right now you would have to find individual vendors for each of the parts that Microsoft provides. Getting them together would be a huge nightmare, because even the basics do not work.
The end user devices are Windows 11, we use M365, but government services are mostly homegrown and the infrastructure runs on Broadcom (VMWare) and IBM (Openshift) software.
Replacing Windows 11 with some kind of Linux and M365 by an MTA is technically feasible, there is political momentum building against US-centric services, but here in Europe politicians are historically highly suspicious of technicians, so nothing gets done yet.
It's a rich country, COTS replaced a lot of technical excellence, but the trend can be reversed as we have bright engineers on the inside still.
In poorer countries and regions, the engineering excellence is way better and they are much more independent.
The Microsoft servers are most likely azure running linux. Thats quite possible to replace by any number of vendors.
The main MOAT microsoft has are the contacts and the lobby. There always is some politician around fighting for Microsoft because they like Outlook more than Thunderbird.
It’s also reason why i think they will keep their dominant position. Even though the idea they provide something rare is increasingly more untrue.
Let's suppose that is true, because it is. But how is that different from any other entreprise, commercial or public?
It also depends on how your relationship is structured and what you demand. I work for a very large company, but some of our customers won't even look at us until we pass a third party interoperability certification, and thus getting that certification becomes critical to us even though most customers don't care. Once we are certified interoperability issues are rare (they happen all the time because of the sear number of customers, but most of the time things just work because everyone is following the standard). The standard and certification has been refined over a couple decades now and so most of the things that can go wrong either are either updated in the standard and certification test; or they are at least tribal knowledge of "don't do that it won't work"
Not only is managing 20 vendors a nightmare, they all live in their own bubble and moving data from one to the other is normally not that easy.
Most people using MS desktops use AWS rather than Azure. Lots of software from other vendors does reliably work on Windows.
You can't on the one hand maintain the myth that there will somehow be private competition but then on the other set the barriers so high that only the largest most entrenched monopolies can succeed.
Er, why? If France buys a lot of Microsoft licences, they are suddenly an oligarchy?
This is just a thought that ignores all the economies of scale etc., but what if monopolistic tech conglomerates were seen as a negative vs interoperable, modular systems? If that were the case, simply repeating US tech's blunders wouldn't be a true alternative, just more of the same with garden walls made of a different material.