I blame Tony Blair for this
Just when the government had an infrastructure plan that used open standards as a guiding principle, in walks T Blair who then let Bill Gates zap that principle as fast as they could pump Microsoft "consultants" into the government, and boy oh boy did they make a mess - a mess for which said B Gates eventually was knighted, by the way.
I don't think governments will ever learn that Microsoft isn't really suitable for government-sized deployments because the people that take those decisions typically only have a clue about playing golf, and if it all goes wrong there will be some middle level managers sacked as sacrificial lambs.
I can see the same happening in another country now where new management are Microsoft fans. The fact that some "Microsofted" processes now run at about 10% of the speed and triple the amount of manpower (and thus costs) as before is enthusiastically being ignored. As extra bonus, the data protection authorities in the country have been explicitly told to ignore the many privacy violations that this change introduces, they won't investigate.
Strangely, at the same time they're all complaining about bad security and increased break-ins. What a weird coincidence, no?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
