G-Cloud is interesting. What G-Cloud is doing as far as I'm aware is making a lot of government IT stuff into a commodity. So, for instance, something like maki

G-Cloud is interesting. What G-Cloud is doing as far as I'm aware is making a lot of government IT stuff into a commodity. So, for instance, something like making a Wordpress theme or providing a hosting service, that becomes a commodity service. There are then pre-approved suppliers. This is kind of sensible: in the private sector, I don't have to go through a complicated process to decide whether to use Rackspace or Linode or EC2 or whatever for a small project. (Incidentally, just because it's called G-Cloud doesn't mean that all or even most of the things they are spending money on are "cloud computing" services, but then that's a big fuzzy bullshit word anyway. Pretty much everything these days involves putting things on the Internet, so I guess it could be claimed to be cloud computing since there are computers hooked up to The Cloud, formerly known as the Internet). The problem is that quite a lot of technological spending by the government isn't on commodity stuff but on custom development work. And because of the procurement process, that often doesn't get done in a lean manner. (But I don't know, I'm just a developer. I only play a bureaucrat on TV.)