Faced with £40B budget hole, UK public sector commits £9B to Microsoft The UK public sector expects to spend around £9 billion on Microsoft products and services over five years under its current contract. Launched last autumn, the Strategic Partnership Arrangement 2024 (SPA24) memorandum of understanding (MoU) took effect in November, allowing public bodies to use the buying power of the whole …
Not to mention US companies can not guarantee the US Gov wont insist on backdooring US generated code.
"enhanced value across Microsoft's portfolio of products and services."
The only enhanced value here is the enhancement of M$'s balance sheet. We should be taking a leaf out of the Germans book.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1bw7fdz/german_state_ditches_microsoft_for_linux_and/
FFS if the gov would spend a Billion on Linux based systems we could probably have a ERP system to beat Oracle without the lock in and drug dealer tactics, a NHS IT system to support hospitals and all their old equipment much more secure than the mess we have now and potentially a load of stuff to sell all over the world to avoid relying on the orange one's wims. But no that would require forward thinking and no backhanders.
I think that you are missing all the "dark patterns" that run through the NHS and other public bodies to protect the status quo.
For instance, I know a board member of a Hospitals Trust. She has a long list of what any sane person would call sensible improvements (time, money and patient care) to the way the Trust is organised and run.
She has to propose these one at a time and face months of opposition and negotiation with unions and often other board members.
She says that often she achieves only one successful change per year.
For an NHS IT System you also have to include dozens of other "interested parties" who could stretch any simple change over decades.
Public services in the UK are very broken.
And there was the senior IT managers of a certain internal IT department that supported several Trusts, who were looking for a new IT kit provider to move away from Dell. They got invited to visit HP in the US, on HPs dime. When they came back they showed off some fancy touchscreen laptops they'd been given (this was still XP days). It wasn't kit to test for the Trusts, it was given to the senior managers. We pointed out this was classed as a bribe, they claimed it wasn't and kept them.
HP got the contract.
The people at the top of that IT setup were as bent as fuck and the chief exec was just riding her way to retirement doing fuck all. They broke up some years ago when new government got in, I've seen one of the directors is still grifting.
Yes, it would have been but I was young, didn't know who could have turned too and didn't want to be blacklisted of ever getting a job again. And as we've now seen in trumps America, he is attempting to get a maga trump lover to be in charge of the whistleblower program, essentially so he can then find out who all the whistleblowers are and prosecute them into silence.
"much more secure than the mess we have now"
This assumes competence in who architects and maintains it—unfortunately, this is naive, even if I do agree with the sentiment.
After the Track and Trace debacle using an Excel spreadsheet, it doesn't bode well. IMO, there's a high likelihood it would be just as insecure as it is now, perhaps even more so as undoubtedly some self-proclaimed genius would insist on heavily using AI in wholly inappropriate ways to roll it out.
*nix 101 should be taught in all schools. Once the general populace are familiar with it there will be less resistance to adopting it, Offer some tax incentives for laptop makers to offer FOSS on their hardware would be a nice sweetener to steer the market toward better alternatives.
Hmmm. Tricky one that. I think most of us would want and expect schools to teach children the skills necessary to be productive in the workplace. If a school leaver is being interviewed for a job do you think they'd stand more chance of success if they have a proficiency with Microsoft tools or something from the chaotic Linux world?
I'd like to think that colleges and above could show the more talented pupils An Other Way to do Things. At least that sows the seeds of change, without disadvantaging the pupil.
NO NO NO
That sort of reasoning is part of the reason we're in this midden now. The purpose of schools should be to equip children with the skills they need for a lifetime of life and work - and that fundamentally means an ability to think and learn new stuff.
Analogy:
${education_establishment} teaches "how to program in ${some_language}" - result is a load of people who know how to write ${some_language} but are stuffed if faced with something else
${education_establishment} teaches "fundamentals of programming" plus supplementary courses in ${some_language} - result is a load of people who know how to programme in more or less any language, with some learning time needed to learn any specific language. They be less desirable in the short term to an employer that only wants a C programmer, but longer term they should be more desirable due to a better understanding of the fundamentals and an ability to adapt as fads come and go.
Similarly, if all people leave school knowing is "how to use Microsoft Office" then they'll be stuffed if faced with anything else. Long term you store up more difficulty changing to something better. And adding a personal gripe about the MS crapware I'm forced to use at work, indoctrinated with a mindset where completely illogical ways of working are accepted as normal - seriously, the mind boggles at how some of the rubbish ways of working were ever dreamt up.
And lets face it, knowing "how to use MS Office" is only of use for a few years before they find some new way to "improve" the UI to be a foreign land to anyone with more than a few years experience.
A billion does not need to be spent - the GNU OS and a GNU ERP has already been developed; https://www.gnuhealth.org/
GNU Health will likely need quite a few changes to suit the NHS, but that's a simple matter of paying the GNU Health developers a few thousand or tens of thousand (if it's something really extensive), or finding any custom software business that doesn't commit fraud and hires competent developers to make the wanted changes.
If the goal is to spend a billion in funding, then with that level of funding, then all the backdoored computers in NHS can be replaced with existing hardware that has all the proprietary software replaced or even by new hardware developed from a free hardware design that runs 100% free software and is acceptably performant (the latter will take a while to design, test and manufacture).
I have a project specific email for a government project I am involved in (hence anonymous).
A week and a half ago, I was required to justify why I needed to have that email account.
While I am as cynical as the rest of you as regards government waste, there is, at least sometimes, an attempt to control expenditure.
How much does it cost to run an email account for a year? Pennies when compared to the cost of say.... Oracle to the Birmingham tax payers.
Justify all you like but that must start at the top with the most expensive items.
Now that I think about it, it probable cost around 10X the cost of an email account to justify its existence.
Also with a UK Gov work hat, our organisation has gone the full "lets do whatever MS tell us to" mode. Naturally, after a while (long enough for the addiction to kick in and going clean becomes "too hard), subscription rates go up. Cue a policy where based on some arbitrary measure of emails set and received, people get moved from the full licence to a cheaper one with only online programmes (e.g. Outlook, Word, Excel in their web versions only). Anyone wanting the full suite back has to justify why they need it - and "because I can't do my f'in work without" isn't accepted apparently.
Had I been affected, I'd have been tempted to justify the full licence on the basis that "it'll be cheaper than replacing the laptop every time I frisbee it out of the window in frustration" !
IIRC, the full licence is something around £8/person/month - which quickly adds up when the user count is measured in the 100s of k, i.e. it soon gets into some multiple of £10m/year
Of course. When you run out of money, the first thing you do is spend more.
If you're government, that is.
If you're a private individual, then you're accused of being a spendthrift and no bank is going to lend you the money,
But government doesn't care. It doesn't need a loan, it can raise taxes . . .
When you run out of money ...
The problem at hand is not the spending, the problem is how you spend it and what you spend it on.
For that, you need people in government who actually know what they are doing.
Once you get that important bit properly sorted out, if you don't have enough money then you raise what you need with taxes.
As any government should.
The (apparently not so obvious) solution to that is to tax accordingly*.
* no, "accordingly" is not the practise of giving transnational corporations and the upper 10% countless trillions in tax breaks.
Trickle-down economics, represented by the Laffer Curve, is nothing but a shameless scam to fuck over all those below the 10%.
.
It the rich that pay most of the taxes. Please don't attempt to conflate tax avoidance (which anyone with an ISA is doing) with tax evasion which is illegal.
The Laffer curve has got nothing to do with trickle down economics. It is a model that proposes that beyond a certain point the total tax take goes down as tax rates rise.
The Laffer curve has got nothing to do with trickle down economics.
"Much of the blame for the trickle-down lie goes to conservative
economist Arthur Laffer, godfather of “supply-side” economics,
a.k.a. “Reaganomics.” He argued, using an easy-to-understand
graph — the Laffer curve — that as tax rates go down, government
revenue goes up."
.
@Pascal Monett
"But government doesn't care. It doesn't need a loan, it can raise taxes . . ."
They have already run out of room for that. It has been an ongoing issue for some time but nobody cared because it was buying lots of nice stuff, then it was supporting us after the crash, then shielding us from covid and now Rachel from accounts has to contend with spendthrifts borking the economy further.
I like the theory that labour believed their propaganda about austerity and expected some pot of gold to be sitting there. Unfortunately spending kept rising as did tax. We wont be happy with the crash but the money has already been spent and our tax contributions will be to pay off what was spent maybe a decade ago. I doubt the gov will suddenly figure out how to tighten its belt and find the willpower to do it in the face of opposition.
There is a way to stop the wealth extraction, but it's still an unthinkable step to take for western governments. The US of course is accelerating wealth extraction.
I had the misfortune to follow the link. I gave up partway through, not because of the subject matter (which may have been brilliant) but from the presentation. I think whatever his name was had had one (at least) coffee to many, and was reading from a teleprompter to his right.
I could have just closed my eyes and listened to the presentation but his voice grated.
Of course. You borrow £100 today and invest to turn it into £110, and also the money you borrowed is now only worth 90% of its original value and you're 20% up, and all that while you've created jobs and encouraged others to invest too.
This is why governments have to run a deficit, because not to do so damages economic growth.
Not only that, but the people you are borrowing from are mostly large scale domestic investors such as pension funds, which buy gilts and bonds as a very safe investment - ensuring growth of those funds and a secure retirement for your population.
That's not how government lending works. You *still* need a surplus to be able to pay the loans back (and your example is exaggerated). Also you're wrong about deficit, because in the grand scheme of things budgets need to have surplus (which sometimes comes from welfare payments, which go directly to consumption because that's how the poor *must* live, and the money circles several times in the system, generating jobs, tax revenue, all that). You also can save yourself to death even on a national scale. When people can't affors to spend, the economy stalls.
So the government invests in the use of a toolset that the majority of FTSE companies also invest in and the general consensus is it's a waste of money and they don't know what they're doing? This also suggests all those, for profit large organisations are equally naive?
Putting together a purchasing strategy to save money on the product, operation and management thereof should be commended.
>The criticism of this is nonsense.
The criticism is justified. Fundamentally, the issue is the Conservative belief that governments should not interfere with the operation of "The Market", so instead of using its purchasing power to influence the market and aid the domestic economy, it follows "The Market" and so cripples the domestic economy...
The seeds to the current mess, with respect to IT purchasing, were sown by Thatcher in the late 1980s. Consecutive governments have spent tens of billions building Microsoft el al over the decades, instead of building a domestic IT economy...
The UK needs to spend on the vast amount of outdated IT still being used throughout the sector.
Note your comment on spending on new schools. This ignores the huge amount of spending on old schools that urgently require remedial works to replace rotten and dangerous pre cast concrete roofs.
We apparently cannot do anything any more without paying GAFA for the privilege. Despite FOSS alternatives, and despite having run the country for centuries before the personal computer arrived.
We need to use less tech, simpler tech and FOSS tech. And we need someone in power with an IQ higher than a brick.
At the very least mandate that any software should last for 10 or 15 years, minimum without requiring new hardware or more cash. Or no contract.
It could be done. First, though, there'd be a short term increase in costs because you can't simply switch over on a Monday morning: there'd be some retraining required, costs for getting some code ported over and almost certainly a period of dual-running. None are insurmountable of course - and the long term savings once the move was made would be substantial.
Now put yourself in the position of the elected official, usually a government role. You have finite time before the next elections/your overlords review your performance. Suggesting you spend MORE now in order to save in the very long term generally doesn't go down well with those above you (or with the electorate) and the opposition would make huge political capital out of your 'overspend'. To make matters worse, if the project goes to plan and starts to make significant savings in license costs, there's a very high chance the people who'll benefit from the healthier balance sheet and be shouting from the rooftops about how much less they're spending compared to the last lot...will be your opposition. You'd be making a rod for your own back.
All this could be avoided if we (UK PLC) took a far longer-term view of public services and spending but we generally don't because it'd be political suicide.
Is another disaster for the human race.
Those who have made such decision should be prosecuted for corruption (but it won't happen).
It's a terrible financial decision alone, as if you were to assign less than £0.5 billion to a bounty system for each part of microsoft's handcuff-in that needs replacing with free software, all of it would be completely replaced with funds left over.
It's entirely obvious that the current "government" will carry on or extend the scam deal "negotiated" by a leader of a previous Labour administration, because they hope that they will also receive a Belgravia house in return. Troughers, the whole lot of them.
AC, because I was there at the time!
