Link Microsoft better get their Vista compatibility ducks in a row before Google steps in and capitalizes on these big government contracts.
Google is the biggest data mining operation in the world, and they're so great that we give 'em all voluntarily. I can't believe that gov't or corporations would surrender everything to them. Doesn't matter for mom and pop type companies and private users but I simple can't see giving them anything confidential. As ridiculously overblown Office suites are, at least you can control what happens to your data.
It is not Microsoft's responsibility to ensure program compatibility. Government organizations are notorious for using kludged-together pieces of shit for software. Not only that, I find it laughable that they think it'd be cheaper to port those agency-specific programs over to Linux instead of doing the few necessary fixes to get them up and running on Vista. Hell, most of the time, they won't even pay to get these things updated to run off of 9X-based systems. And if a program like Lotus Notes won't run on Vista, that sure as fuck is IBM's problem, which, according to their web site, isn't a problem at all - they claim Vista compatibility, which leads me to wonder just how accurate this piece is in the first place. Meanwhile, with volume licensing and the like from Microsoft, I have a feeling that the Office software would probably drop well into the same range of the Google Apps over the agency lifetime. Not to mention that the Google Apps are missing things like, oh, database software (Access) and presentation software (Powerpoint), and I think we all know how much the government loves Powerpoint. In short, this article is little more than a cash-in on the Google Apps and business-as-usual anti-Microsoft dramas.
