8 ms·

US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass

67 points by eysquared 2y ago

hanniabu 2y ago
And they can charge what they want
dogb0wl 2y ago
Journalists have value to society and get “free passes”. Isn’t that how it works? Not saying it should but that it does. A whole lot of the economy is given a “free pass” because it keeps people from investigating government agents behavior and demanding change The elders are trying to keep what they know alive as that as enriched them. This is just a generational Ponzi scheme. It’s all a bunch of 70+ year old racists and poorly educated post war, Cold War paranoids who huffed leaded gas fumes know; run hustles, cons, and protection rackets.
j7ake 2y ago
Of course if another country does it, USA cries foul and tries to ban them from operating in USA. It is government directed capitalism, just like other global superpowers like China.
mewse-hn 2y ago
Here's a radical idea: One government worker sending a document to another government worker should not involve a proprietary, for-profit data format. With a hardcopy paper document this would obviously be unacceptable, but since digitization and software eating the world, we pay our fees to Microsoft and go about our merry way. I'm middle-aged and tired, I'm not going to fight this fight anymore. Maybe some day legislators will grow fangs and start giving a shit about strategic interoperability. Probably not.
- dr-detroit 2y ago
  [dead]
- scarface_74 2y ago
  To a first approximation, every word processor can open Word documents including open source ones.
  - lapetitejort 2y ago
    Is that a result of an open standard, or from constantly reverse engineering whatever change Microsoft makes?
    - ckcheng 2y ago
      I think open standard? Download is here? https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-376/ https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... MS made it open because... > More than a year after being asked by the European Union to standardize their Office 2003 XML formats, Microsoft submitted 2,000 pages of documentation for a new file format to the Ecma International consortium for it to be made into an open standard. [1] The competing OpenDocument Format was standardized first though [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
- smt88 2y ago
  Of all the things to be upset about here, this should be low on the list. Microsoft Office documents haven't been proprietary for a long time. The formats are publicly-documented and Microsoft maintains open-source libraries that read/write them. They're all XML-based and unobfuscated (beyond their convoluted design). There are also many FOSS applications, including LibreOffice, that are perfectly fine as replacements for Microsoft Office. Proprietary formats are a problem, but not with Microsoft Office anymore. We should all be a lot more annoyed by PDFs, honestly.
  - the_snooze 2y ago
    >There are also many FOSS applications, including LibreOffice, that are perfectly fine as replacements for Microsoft Office. From my own experience dealing with MS Office-based government organizations, this is absolutely false. Sure, LibreOffice can read and write DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files that are nominally interoperable with MS Office. But more often than not, MS Office mangles the formatting of LibreOffice-generated files. For example, text sizes, fonts, and element alignments in PPTX files get thrown off noticeably. As another reply mentions, there's this nominal open-source standard. But the de facto standard is the MS Office implementation. I have to use MS Office instead of LibreOffice to eliminate the risk of document mangling when I send files over to the government people in charnge of my funding.
    - delfinom 2y ago
      Print PowerPoint to PDF. And hope that both of you are using Adobe lol Or make your presentations as a website and hope their browser follows the same standards, they don't have bad extensions or security policies setup that may break it too. Can't really win in human friendly days interchange, because all this crap gets layered on due to humans having their own things going on.
- mostlysimilar 2y ago
  > Maybe some day legislators will grow fangs and start giving a shit about strategic interoperability. Not so long as their paychecks require them to not have fangs.
  - boring-alterego 2y ago
    It is questionable with some of the lawmakers getting older and older whether they are hiding fangs though.
- paxys 2y ago
  The legislators do have fangs, but they are pointed towards you.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  Every digital document needs to be encoded somehow, and that encoding is going to be a function of supoorted features. If you're saying that we've reached a point of maturity in everyday digital paperwork documents that we can formally standardize some and move away from vendor innovation, you may be right, but the transition is a matter of timing and discussion because of the tradeoffs involved when that happens, not a rhetorical principle.
- layer8 2y ago
  > should not involve a proprietary data format. For that very reason, Microsoft turned the Office formats into open standards: https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-376/ https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... https://www.iso.org/standard/71691.html https://www.iso.org/standard/71691.html Well, at least nominally. The real standard is still Microsoft’s implementation.
- maxnoe 2y ago
  That's exactly the reason why Microsoft documents have an open standard, they were essentially forced to do that. That that standard has several thousand pages and internal inconsistencies, ... well https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Op...
- butlike 2y ago
  If only there was a separate arm of the government dedicated to sending and receiving communiqué. You could also use it to send _citizen's_ communiqué as well!
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related: On Microsoft, the U.S. Government Must Embrace the Stick https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801670
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  The U.S. government is losing trust in Microsoft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39937288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39937288
ankushnarula 2y ago
It is a sad state of affairs that the most technologically advanced government in history is incapable of rolling its own in-house tech. Taxpayers deserve better.
- generic92034 2y ago
  Are the taxpayers willing to pay higher taxes for IC government employees receiving Microsoft level salaries?
  - ankushnarula 2y ago
    I expected this question - the answer as it stands is hell no. And who can blame us for being skeptical. But as a taxpayer, I’d be very open to those salaries IF government IT was overhauled and run like a competent and agile tech startup, unencumbered by politics and red tape - at least to bootstrap some initital momentum. Longer term, we need something like a “Tech Corps”, akin to a branch of the military, where new recruits are trained in tech bootcamps, and then deployed to one of the thousands of government departments that require resources for their projects/processes. Ideally, these roles should be viewed as an honorable monastic vocation, not a bureaucratic or political career.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - linguae 2y ago
    1. How many software engineers are necessary for the federal government to build its own office software, or at the very least contribute to open-source projects such as LibreOffice? Depending on the size of the team, this may be a drop in the bucket compared to the federal government's multi-trillion dollar budget, even if the developers made Microsoft-level salaries. Let's make a very liberal estimate: suppose there were a team of 20 engineers dedicated to contributing to LibreOffice, and each engineer costs $400,000 in salary and overhead. The total is $8 million per year. When spread out over a population of 333 million, that's less than 2.5 cents per person. Now compare that $8 million per year to the cost of Microsoft Office licenses. 2. I consider myself a limited government proponent, but even if government were cut down to the bone, there is still a need for the government to maintain in-house software. Just imagine the internal software that the military and the IRS has, for example. The Library of Congress probably has very interesting software for helping manage its collection. It is conceivable for the federal government to build and maintain office software to aid its operations.
autoexecbat 2y ago
I'm surprised other countries put up with microsoft for basic things like email/word rather than a "must be built within country for security reasons"
- brokenmachine 2y ago
  I saw a video in a Russian missile factory yesterday and they were using Windows 11 on a laptop. I mean, of course they were, but it's definitely a weird situation.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
exitzer0 2y ago
Until we sort out the whole idea that it is OK for the US intelligence communitity to use Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, N-other big tech companies to act as their data collection services. They will all continue to basically do whatever they want including jeopardizing our national security with their plainly stated profit motives. It isn't that Microsoft does not care at all about security it is just that they see it as some business that they can/must make 40-50% margin on like the rest of their operations.[aka outsource it all to countries where folks have fake credentials]
jsnell 2y ago
> "We are committed to adapting to the evolving threat landscape and partnering across industry and government to defend against these growing and sophisticated global threats" > “committed to secure by design and secure by default.” > “As an industry leader we must be accountable for the security of our products and services.” Wow, that sure is a lot of commitment and accountability! I'm not seeing much in the way of consequences for failing to meet those commitments though, and obviously there is absolutely no accountability. What's the value of a commitment that you can just fail to meet with impunity again? This almost reads like all those tech company CEOs taking full responsibility for layoffs last year.

67 points by eysquared 2y ago

And they can charge what they want

Journalists have value to society and get “free passes”. Isn’t that how it works? Not saying it should but that it does. A whole lot of the economy is given a “free pass” because it keeps people from investigating government agents behavior and demanding change The elders are trying to keep what they know alive as that as enriched them. This is just a generational Ponzi scheme. It’s all a bunch of 70+ year old racists and poorly educated post war, Cold War paranoids who huffed leaded gas fumes know; run hustles, cons, and protection rackets.

j7ake 2y ago

Of course if another country does it, USA cries foul and tries to ban them from operating in USA. It is government directed capitalism, just like other global superpowers like China.

mewse-hn 2y ago

Here's a radical idea: One government worker sending a document to another government worker should not involve a proprietary, for-profit data format. With a hardcopy paper document this would obviously be unacceptable, but since digitization and software eating the world, we pay our fees to Microsoft and go about our merry way. I'm middle-aged and tired, I'm not going to fight this fight anymore. Maybe some day legislators will grow fangs and start giving a shit about strategic interoperability. Probably not.

dr-detroit 2y ago
[dead]
scarface_74 2y ago
To a first approximation, every word processor can open Word documents including open source ones.
- lapetitejort 2y ago
  Is that a result of an open standard, or from constantly reverse engineering whatever change Microsoft makes?
  - ckcheng 2y ago
    I think open standard? Download is here? https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-376/ https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... MS made it open because... > More than a year after being asked by the European Union to standardize their Office 2003 XML formats, Microsoft submitted 2,000 pages of documentation for a new file format to the Ecma International consortium for it to be made into an open standard. [1] The competing OpenDocument Format was standardized first though [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument
smt88 2y ago
Of all the things to be upset about here, this should be low on the list. Microsoft Office documents haven't been proprietary for a long time. The formats are publicly-documented and Microsoft maintains open-source libraries that read/write them. They're all XML-based and unobfuscated (beyond their convoluted design). There are also many FOSS applications, including LibreOffice, that are perfectly fine as replacements for Microsoft Office. Proprietary formats are a problem, but not with Microsoft Office anymore. We should all be a lot more annoyed by PDFs, honestly.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  >There are also many FOSS applications, including LibreOffice, that are perfectly fine as replacements for Microsoft Office. From my own experience dealing with MS Office-based government organizations, this is absolutely false. Sure, LibreOffice can read and write DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files that are nominally interoperable with MS Office. But more often than not, MS Office mangles the formatting of LibreOffice-generated files. For example, text sizes, fonts, and element alignments in PPTX files get thrown off noticeably. As another reply mentions, there's this nominal open-source standard. But the de facto standard is the MS Office implementation. I have to use MS Office instead of LibreOffice to eliminate the risk of document mangling when I send files over to the government people in charnge of my funding.
  - delfinom 2y ago
    Print PowerPoint to PDF. And hope that both of you are using Adobe lol Or make your presentations as a website and hope their browser follows the same standards, they don't have bad extensions or security policies setup that may break it too. Can't really win in human friendly days interchange, because all this crap gets layered on due to humans having their own things going on.
mostlysimilar 2y ago
> Maybe some day legislators will grow fangs and start giving a shit about strategic interoperability. Not so long as their paychecks require them to not have fangs.
- boring-alterego 2y ago
  It is questionable with some of the lawmakers getting older and older whether they are hiding fangs though.
paxys 2y ago
The legislators do have fangs, but they are pointed towards you.
swatcoder 2y ago
Every digital document needs to be encoded somehow, and that encoding is going to be a function of supoorted features. If you're saying that we've reached a point of maturity in everyday digital paperwork documents that we can formally standardize some and move away from vendor innovation, you may be right, but the transition is a matter of timing and discussion because of the tradeoffs involved when that happens, not a rhetorical principle.
layer8 2y ago
> should not involve a proprietary data format. For that very reason, Microsoft turned the Office formats into open standards: https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/standards/ecma-376/ https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st... https://www.iso.org/standard/71691.html https://www.iso.org/standard/71691.html Well, at least nominally. The real standard is still Microsoft’s implementation.
maxnoe 2y ago
That's exactly the reason why Microsoft documents have an open standard, they were essentially forced to do that. That that standard has several thousand pages and internal inconsistencies, ... well https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Op...
butlike 2y ago
If only there was a separate arm of the government dedicated to sending and receiving communiqué. You could also use it to send _citizen's_ communiqué as well!

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related: On Microsoft, the U.S. Government Must Embrace the Stick https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801670

ChrisArchitect 2y ago
The U.S. government is losing trust in Microsoft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39937288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39937288

ankushnarula 2y ago

It is a sad state of affairs that the most technologically advanced government in history is incapable of rolling its own in-house tech. Taxpayers deserve better.

generic92034 2y ago
Are the taxpayers willing to pay higher taxes for IC government employees receiving Microsoft level salaries?
- ankushnarula 2y ago
  I expected this question - the answer as it stands is hell no. And who can blame us for being skeptical. But as a taxpayer, I’d be very open to those salaries IF government IT was overhauled and run like a competent and agile tech startup, unencumbered by politics and red tape - at least to bootstrap some initital momentum. Longer term, we need something like a “Tech Corps”, akin to a branch of the military, where new recruits are trained in tech bootcamps, and then deployed to one of the thousands of government departments that require resources for their projects/processes. Ideally, these roles should be viewed as an honorable monastic vocation, not a bureaucratic or political career.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- linguae 2y ago
  1. How many software engineers are necessary for the federal government to build its own office software, or at the very least contribute to open-source projects such as LibreOffice? Depending on the size of the team, this may be a drop in the bucket compared to the federal government's multi-trillion dollar budget, even if the developers made Microsoft-level salaries. Let's make a very liberal estimate: suppose there were a team of 20 engineers dedicated to contributing to LibreOffice, and each engineer costs $400,000 in salary and overhead. The total is $8 million per year. When spread out over a population of 333 million, that's less than 2.5 cents per person. Now compare that $8 million per year to the cost of Microsoft Office licenses. 2. I consider myself a limited government proponent, but even if government were cut down to the bone, there is still a need for the government to maintain in-house software. Just imagine the internal software that the military and the IRS has, for example. The Library of Congress probably has very interesting software for helping manage its collection. It is conceivable for the federal government to build and maintain office software to aid its operations.

autoexecbat 2y ago

I'm surprised other countries put up with microsoft for basic things like email/word rather than a "must be built within country for security reasons"

brokenmachine 2y ago
I saw a video in a Russian missile factory yesterday and they were using Windows 11 on a laptop. I mean, of course they were, but it's definitely a weird situation.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

exitzer0 2y ago

Until we sort out the whole idea that it is OK for the US intelligence communitity to use Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, N-other big tech companies to act as their data collection services. They will all continue to basically do whatever they want including jeopardizing our national security with their plainly stated profit motives. It isn't that Microsoft does not care at all about security it is just that they see it as some business that they can/must make 40-50% margin on like the rest of their operations.[aka outsource it all to countries where folks have fake credentials]

jsnell 2y ago

> "We are committed to adapting to the evolving threat landscape and partnering across industry and government to defend against these growing and sophisticated global threats" > “committed to secure by design and secure by default.” > “As an industry leader we must be accountable for the security of our products and services.” Wow, that sure is a lot of commitment and accountability! I'm not seeing much in the way of consequences for failing to meet those commitments though, and obviously there is absolutely no accountability. What's the value of a commitment that you can just fail to meet with impunity again? This almost reads like all those tech company CEOs taking full responsibility for layoffs last year.