One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.
Loving the stories of the Obama administration’s move into the west wing, which seems to have been somethng of a technological backwater. No tales of superglued ‘w’ keys as yet but we’ll see.
I have a theory here, that we will know that true change has come with the new Obama team when the White House becomes an all Mac operation. Never mind closing Gitmo, this would be the first sign of a new and progressive dawn for mine.
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nah; they’re saving money. Just load ubuntu up and open office. Will work fine on anything, and will show that they’re not being outrageously wasteful. And think of the environmental cred it would show!!!
Bernard could be right: Obama shows interest in open source
Open source isn’t free. There are numerous hidden costs related to support, customizations and maintenance that a large company or Government department will invariably end up paying for. So you can pay now or pay later, but either way, you will pay. The only difference between these two options is that after you’ve come to the realization that it’s not free, you’ll want to switch back to commercial software.
Whether using free open source software or commercial closed-source software, the cost of software licensing is usually a very small proportion of the overall cost of the IT project. And so, for that matter, is the hardware. Typically the total cost of ownership (TCO) of an information system is between 5x an 10x the hardware cost.
The key factors affecting cost are coherent specification and planning (inadequacies here can cause costs to inflate massively as work is re-done to meet ever-shifting requirements), training and on-going maintenance and support. There may also be the need to re-work other systems. For example, if Centrelink decided to consolidate staff in a central office and interview its “customers” by video, their network would have to be upgraded to provide significantly more bandwidth.
Costs are usually a lot higher in a government environment thanks to additional documentation requirements, and often additional security needs.
Selecting IT system components via slogans is a very poor strategy.