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Competitors can bid, but will have generally worse answers for the specially crafted requirements. The competitors can either say "no, we don't do that" and hop
by beering 12y ago
Competitors can bid, but will have generally worse answers for the specially crafted requirements. The competitors can either say "no, we don't do that" and hope that the committee doesn't mind, say "yes, we could do that" and see if the agency will pay extra for that special req, or say "yes, we do that" and build out that feature if they win the bid.
- danielweber 12y agoEh, once i was at a startup where we were selling our mostly COTS software to a government agency, but they had to put it out for a bid. They basically lifted our marketing material into the req and said "software must do all <X> and cost $<Y>." We had a competitor who had copied a bunch of our stuff, including our typos, but they were missing one essential feature. Yet they still got the bid somehow. A mystery for the ages.
- pc86 12y agoIn this case, the bid specified company requirements (e.g. number of employees, past projects, etc) that immediately narrowed the field to 2 or 3 firms. Add in special consideration (the owner of the company I worked at was a woman and my state gives preference points to woman-, minority- and veteran-owned businesses) and it was about as close to a no-bid contract as you can get.