* Posts by Ozymandias

4 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Nov 2015

Standing out from the crowd with an Android phone? You and 90 per cent of the market

Ozymandias

Re: Is market share relevant ?

An S-Class is only better than a Beetle if you can afford it, and afford to run it. The definition of quality is fitness for purpose. So for a middle income Asian Android is usually better than Apple, but if you're a high income Californian the money isn't such a big part of the equation.

Microsoft: We're hiking UK cloud prices 22%. Stop whining – it's the Brexit

Ozymandias

Re: Cloud costs

it's definitely a bit odd on that cloud price hike - even though demand is less elastic than the resource, MS have been using every price tweak to incentivise cloud uptake since they started. Given their new UK datacenters I don't follow the logic of the PR justification or strategy at all. Odd

UK.gov is doing sod all to break £20bn of locked-in IT contracts

Ozymandias

Re: No Microshaft?

No they spend plenty on M$ but they're mainly indirect contracts held by resellers, not direct with Microsoft. Which reminds me of the time we pointed out to a large UK government department that they were licensed for 5 million users of a popular unified communications product, despite having about 40 times less IT users. They weren't especially interested, which I think illustrates the major barrier to transparency in public sector IT spending - the CBE-jeopardising embarrassment it could cause to the good public servants that signed off the deals in the first place.

Capita increases share of public sector revenue to measly £1.8bn

Ozymandias

Well I'd call G4S a BPO rather than an SI, but the discontent goes back a long way further than that - the aborted National Programme for IT in the NHS being the biggest in a succession of SI-led, £billions over-budget, years-late, never-worked programmes that sprayed political shrapnel all over various governments.

Francis Maude tells the tale of the first days of the last government when he dragged the top 5 SIs into Cabinet Office and the conversation went along the lines of:

right you've been fleecing us for years, the game changes as of today. You have these major contracts running for years, and they're far too expensive. You can either cut 1/3 off the cost immediately, same service, or you'll never win another HMG contract, what's it to be?

I guess Capita played the long game...