5 ms·

> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single compo

> Which is that Apple and Microsoft are the only real system vendors, corporations who can offer an entire integrated system and aren't just either single components or many different components packaged together, but without the interaction necessary to compete with Apple or Microsoft. 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.

constantcrying 1y ago
I think that is a question of architecture. 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.
- mvanbaak 1y ago
  Add integration between all the parts to it and you will see why those big companies stay successful. 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.
  - monade 1y ago
    Using standards typically makes a big difference. And having redundancy, so that lack of interoperability/lock in is actually not something you find out after it is too late.
  - Guthur 1y ago
    Microsoft has a terrible history of integration even among it's own products and has forced obsoletion throughout. If it's literally you only have a single vendor to pay then you must look for a nationalised solution otherwise you'll just be creating oligarchy. 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.
    - robertlagrant 1y ago
      > you must look for a nationalised solution otherwise you'll just be creating oligarchy Er, why? If France buys a lot of Microsoft licences, they are suddenly an oligarchy?
  - graemep 1y ago
    No organisation of any size buys everything from one vendor though. Microsoft dominates desktops, but Apple and Google dominate mobile devices, an organisation might have Oracle databases running on Linux servers on top of that, some SaaS suppliers, some desktop software suppliers....
    - robertlagrant 1y ago
      But still - think how much more you'd need to buy and validate it all works together. Microsoft gives you AD, which works with Outlook, Sharepoint, Azure, Office365, Teams, then all of those, plus Excel, Word, Powerpoint all bundled, and not for very much money.
      - graemep 1y ago
        True, but it varies depending on how well those fit your organisation's needs whether buying into the full bundle is what you want to do. The less of it you want, the less the advantage. Most people using MS desktops use AWS rather than Azure. Lots of software from other vendors does reliably work on Windows.
- sam_lowry_ 1y ago
  I work for a government institution and I assure you that we have more than 20 vendors for IT.
  - constantcrying 1y ago
    Of course. But your basic IT system, presumably, is a Microsoft system. On top of that you are deploying many more systems, for all the kinds of different use cases. 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.
    - sam_lowry_ 1y ago
      Not really. 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.
      - Mossy9 1y ago
        I'm also working on a government institute, but unlike you, we're absolutely owned by Microsoft. Disruptions to that relationship could be existential threats, which is why (slow) movement has started on detaching from them.
        john_the_writer 1y ago
        Yep years ago I was a palm-os dev and worked for cities. One government offical told us to switch to windows mobile, because "no one ever got fired buying microsoft"
- alias_neo 1y ago
  > there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you 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.
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    > Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own. The solution is simple: build a business environment that would allow a home-grown alternative to have developed over the last 40 years.
    - alias_neo 1y ago
      I agree, and I'm not sure whether the reason it hasn't happened is that they can't do it, or they won't do it.
      - Wobbles42 1y ago
        These are not mutually exclusive.
    - monade 1y ago
      Nokia and the rest of the Symbian ecosystem actually led the market by a long stretch, just a short while ago. If they hadn't hired a former Microsoft exec to lead the company, and perhaps with a bit of luck, Nokia/Siemens/etc would have been that alternative. But that is another discussion.
- repelsteeltje 1y ago
  > Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare. Let's suppose that is true, because it is. But how is that different from any other entreprise, commercial or public?
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    There is a difference between having 20 and 40 vendors, though?
    - flir 1y ago
      Yes. If you want your vendors to interop with each other in any way, it's the same n^2 lines of communication problem you have in dev teams. In fact, it's worse, because the vendors are antagonistic towards each other - it's in their interests that you ditch some of the others and give more of your business to them.
      - bluGill 1y ago
        That depends on the vendor. Small vendors know that they can't do everything and are happy they are part of the pie. Medium sized often dream of getting big and so if they think they can by taking a large slice they will. 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"
  - sybercecurity 1y ago
    Sometimes one large corporation feels like working with multiple smaller vendors. Products are too siloed and don't work together the way they claim, etc.
- rglullis 1y ago
  > What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you. 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.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > 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.
    - rglullis 1y ago
      > the "big bodyshops" aka Accenture and friends aren't much better. 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.

constantcrying 1y ago

I think that is a question of architecture. 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.

mvanbaak 1y ago
Add integration between all the parts to it and you will see why those big companies stay successful. 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.
- monade 1y ago
  Using standards typically makes a big difference. And having redundancy, so that lack of interoperability/lock in is actually not something you find out after it is too late.
- Guthur 1y ago
  Microsoft has a terrible history of integration even among it's own products and has forced obsoletion throughout. If it's literally you only have a single vendor to pay then you must look for a nationalised solution otherwise you'll just be creating oligarchy. 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.
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    > you must look for a nationalised solution otherwise you'll just be creating oligarchy Er, why? If France buys a lot of Microsoft licences, they are suddenly an oligarchy?
- graemep 1y ago
  No organisation of any size buys everything from one vendor though. Microsoft dominates desktops, but Apple and Google dominate mobile devices, an organisation might have Oracle databases running on Linux servers on top of that, some SaaS suppliers, some desktop software suppliers....
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    But still - think how much more you'd need to buy and validate it all works together. Microsoft gives you AD, which works with Outlook, Sharepoint, Azure, Office365, Teams, then all of those, plus Excel, Word, Powerpoint all bundled, and not for very much money.
    - graemep 1y ago
      True, but it varies depending on how well those fit your organisation's needs whether buying into the full bundle is what you want to do. The less of it you want, the less the advantage. Most people using MS desktops use AWS rather than Azure. Lots of software from other vendors does reliably work on Windows.
sam_lowry_ 1y ago
I work for a government institution and I assure you that we have more than 20 vendors for IT.
- constantcrying 1y ago
  Of course. But your basic IT system, presumably, is a Microsoft system. On top of that you are deploying many more systems, for all the kinds of different use cases. 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.
  - sam_lowry_ 1y ago
    Not really. 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.
    - Mossy9 1y ago
      I'm also working on a government institute, but unlike you, we're absolutely owned by Microsoft. Disruptions to that relationship could be existential threats, which is why (slow) movement has started on detaching from them.
      - john_the_writer 1y ago
        Yep years ago I was a palm-os dev and worked for cities. One government offical told us to switch to windows mobile, because "no one ever got fired buying microsoft"
alias_neo 1y ago
> there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you 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.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  > Too much of the world depends on a few big orgs in the US with potentially different goals and values to their own. The solution is simple: build a business environment that would allow a home-grown alternative to have developed over the last 40 years.
  - alias_neo 1y ago
    I agree, and I'm not sure whether the reason it hasn't happened is that they can't do it, or they won't do it.
    - Wobbles42 1y ago
      These are not mutually exclusive.
  - monade 1y ago
    Nokia and the rest of the Symbian ecosystem actually led the market by a long stretch, just a short while ago. If they hadn't hired a former Microsoft exec to lead the company, and perhaps with a bit of luck, Nokia/Siemens/etc would have been that alternative. But that is another discussion.
repelsteeltje 1y ago
> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare. Let's suppose that is true, because it is. But how is that different from any other entreprise, commercial or public?
- wqaatwt 1y ago
  There is a difference between having 20 and 40 vendors, though?
  - flir 1y ago
    Yes. If you want your vendors to interop with each other in any way, it's the same n^2 lines of communication problem you have in dev teams. In fact, it's worse, because the vendors are antagonistic towards each other - it's in their interests that you ditch some of the others and give more of your business to them.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      That depends on the vendor. Small vendors know that they can't do everything and are happy they are part of the pie. Medium sized often dream of getting big and so if they think they can by taking a large slice they will. 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"
- sybercecurity 1y ago
  Sometimes one large corporation feels like working with multiple smaller vendors. Products are too siloed and don't work together the way they claim, etc.
rglullis 1y ago
> What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you. 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.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > 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.
  - rglullis 1y ago
    > the "big bodyshops" aka Accenture and friends aren't much better. 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.