When I was young I worked in the defense industry. If I remember correctly, pushing back hard when not winning a contract was not done. I can’t imagine how much this would sour future contracts and future negotiations.
I admit a little bias since I preferred Microsoft winning this contract. I am a very happy Amazon and Google customer, but as a taxpayer I felt better about Microsoft winning this. This is just an opinion that admittedly is not based on any expertise in government procurement of cloud services.
Yes. Similar experiences. Basically the position I ended up in was mandatorily selling out to Oracle with no other choice on the table. The key purchasing decision was whether Sun or HP got to bugger us for hardware. This was loudly shouted out to drown out the “why do we need oracle” question. This took months of noise and pretendering (pretend tendering) and all sorts of meetings where no one knew anything about anything that was being required. But everyone was doing Six Sigma of course do the cargo culting was justified by process. Eventually HP was pulled out of the hat because someone saw a nice shiny sales brochure.
In the end, £1m down the shitter, 9 web pages written in JSP backed with a full 42U rack HP/UX crate running oracle was seen as a success. The whole platform was scrap in three years. each http request made cost £83 in the end ($100ish).
And that’s defence spending in a nutshell.
No one says a thing to stop this happening.
Also, the magic mouse with it's horizontal gestures are insane. I don't understand how some people I know like it so much.
Apple trackpads are king :-) And I'd love to have a keyboard+trackpad combination, basically the bottom case of the macbook. Somehow the positioning of a separate keyboard and magic trackpad doesn't quite work.
You’re right about the positioning as well. If you have a full size Apple keyboard the trackpad is too far away always. If you have the compact layout Apple keyboard it’s too much of a compromise with keys.
Best outcome for me was turfing the lot and the Mac and getting a Logitech mouse and a TKL layout cherry MX red based keyboard. So much better.
I’m sorry but the Apple input devices are inferior even to the lowest grade no brand stuff from Aliexpress at this point.