Reply to post: Re: That's news

UK.gov's Open Source switch WON'T get rid of Microsoft, y'know

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: That's news

"and to those who suffered 13 years of Blair/Brown too"

.. only to discover it had been a dream compared to the nightmare of sleazebag Camoron and the loathsome, spineless, execrable Clegg

Ah, my dear boy, from an IT perspective I VERY MUCH prefer the Conservatives (I think we can safely continue to ignore the Lib Dems :) ). What you guys probably don't know is that the Open Source and open standards battle was one that the Conservatives actually started around 1995 - that's where the central government network came from, and the eGIF attempt to set standards across government.

A couple of years in, the Blair cretins landed, and with them came Microsoft in various guises (you find a couple of hints in an earlier post). The worst of the Microsoft invasion were their "consultants" - basically very much underpaid contractors who got a Microsoft badge, a speedy clearance and were let loose on systems they had neither the competence or talent for to handle. But that didn't matter, as far as I can tell from the contracting fees I saw and the charge out rate, each produced upwards of £750/month of raw profit - THAT mattered. I had to dig these idiots out of self made holes time and time again, but in the end even I gave up, because it only made them still look good and nothing changed. Or did you really think that the massive amount of IT disasters in government over the last, say, 15 years or so was a coincidence? My kids could do a better job with just the XBOX knowledge they have..

It has taken the people tasked by the Conservatives this long to wade through the mess this created, so it's no surprise that the decision went this way - there must be quite a lot of anger when competent people started to lift the floor boards and discovered what exactly was stinking underneath.

Cameron may not be able to pretend leadership as well as false-smile Tony, but on the other hand he's also not in need of setting up his own private bank to stash all the loot gathered. Pray to $DEITY that Labour, New or Old, will not come in again - the country can ill afford that level of spending abuse and incompetence again.

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