New York Police reportedly needs to replace 36,000 'useless' Windows Phones | Hacker News Reader

New York Police reportedly needs to replace 36,000 'useless' Windows Phones

neowin.net

29 pointscm218711 comments

I tweeted about this. For $100M they could have bought a Chinese phone manufacturer and still had more than enough budget ($60M) left over to easily pay wages and produce the phones. I'm not joking. As an entrepreneur, I find these type of corporate conquest deals hard to watch. Any no bid contract awarded like this should trigger an automatic bribery investigation.

Agreed. I've worked in the public sector though and this is shockingly equally likely to be nothing but regular old stupidity mixed with total lack of accountability. If a government department throws away all it's money they are just given more.

Cannot the no bid nature itself be construed to be in breach of fiduciary public duty just by virtue of absence of comparisons?

A formative experience was consulting on a "public - private" NHS tender, but total absence of the process is unlawful in the UK.

Two great ideas

It's easy to criticize such decisions in hindsight, but after WinMo 6.5 as a response to the iPhone I began to question Microsoft's dedication to the mobile space. Were I in charge of purchasing 36K mobile devices, that would certainly have factored into my decision. OTOH, I'm guessing the purchase decision was made somewhere toward the end of the WinMo 7.x timeframe, when it could have looked like maybe Microsoft was going to stick with it.

On the other other hand, if you've been making purchase recommendations for more than a few years, feel free to cast a stone or two if you've never made a recommendation that, in hindsight, was kind of a poor choice. Me, I'm leaving those rocks on the ground.

>It's easy to criticize such decisions in hindsight,

In this case, I think it's reasonable to criticize that New York had some foresight of risks when buying a phone with hardly any market share.

It's one thing to make a bet on Microsoft Windows 7 smartphones in 2010 when reasonable people might it interpret that market as still being a 3-way horse race.

But buying Microsoft phones in 2016? That's an ok decision for a home gear enthusiast doing a review for youtube.... but not for a city buying 36,000 phones.

But 18 months ago, Windows phone was sitting at a low single digit market share in the US. I can't see anyone with more than half a brain deciding to purchase a Windows phone over an iPhone for enterprise unless the only determining factor was price. I'm assuming the IT director is getting some major volume discounts or even some kickbacks from MS: NYPD have started giving academy recruits Microsoft Surfaces to replace books. Spending somewhere in the neighborhood of +$1M ($300 per phone and a support contract) for smartphones should have been something decided by a committee, not a single director.

So let's assume for the moment that the IT director isn't a complete idiot. How did they come to this purchase decision? What other factors beside "it's obvious Windows Phone is a dead-end" were considered? I'm not trying to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, but rather wondering how I can personally avoid the same mistakes in the future by identifying the blindspots. I don't learn anything by just blowing them off as idiots that shouldn't be allowed to have a budget. (Though that hypothesis is still on the table.)

For instance, with the Surface example, maybe it's not outright graft but rather "in for a penny, in for a pound"? So they already have the Surfaces, and by golly, they're staying in the ecosystem come hell or high water?

Not taking a bribe would help you avoid such taking such decisions.

I could see someone making the decision on the basis of active directory integration

On the one hand, Windows Phone 8.x/10 devices have had a shelf life just shorter than that of a banana. On the other hand, Windows Mobile 6.5-based devices are __STILL__ sold by the likes of Datalogic for warehouse and embedded/in the field setups. They aren't cheap either, on the order of >800 dollars per device.

Just a rather ironic scenario, that the Pocket PC family seems to have way more staying power than the non CE-based WP architectures.

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