Hacker News Reader

Comment by mitchi | Hacker News Reader

Do you have an idea of how much an IT project costs a Government? The firearm registry in Canada, a country much smaller than the US and with a lot less firearms, costs 66M a year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry

I don't see where the big deal is. MS is an American company that employs a lot of people. That money will come back to the government in taxes and spending someday.

View on HN

That sounds incredibly expensive. I think these companies just price software that way because they don't get a lot of contracts through out the year, if they make only custom software for governments, and they need to make every license very expensive to survive. Then the government pays up, because what the hell - it's not really their money.

So I don't think the prices these companies are asking from governments is in any way related to development time of the software, or even with maintenance time. I think it's mostly based on how much the government is willing to pay.

And I disagree with your last remark, too. By that logic the government can just spend it on anything and as much as they want. They need to be efficient with the money, to be able to make or sustain multiple projects at once. Otherwise they'll have to raise taxes, fire people from other programs, or they wouldn't start new needed projects.

The major problem with Government contracts, and often part of the reason the costs seem insane, is that these are about as established/regimented and non-technical an environment as you can imagine.

Small companies founded+run by agile hackers struggle to navigate their way to contracts under those circumstances. Or at least that's what I've seen from reading about efforts to encourage it in the UK.

In my last remark I am not entirely right but you get the idea. Microsoft employs almost 100 000 individuals and most of them are US taxpayers. If you give them a big contract, it's good for the company, good for jobs in the US and it stimulates the economy in some way. Of course that money doesn't come back automatically the next day. But consider an alternative. Let's say that they get a contract with Samsung instead, the biggest korean company. Let's assume we had the means to follow the flow of money, how much of that money that goes to Korea will return to the US? One can start thinking about this for a long time. It's easier to assume that money spent on Microsoft = jobs and salaries and other things = taxes for govt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com