US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass | Hacker News Reader

US government’s reliance on Microsoft means the company gets a free pass

wired.com

67 pointseysquared32 comments

Here's a radical idea:

One government worker sending a document to another government worker should not involve a proprietary, for-profit data format.

With a hardcopy paper document this would obviously be unacceptable, but since digitization and software eating the world, we pay our fees to Microsoft and go about our merry way.

I'm middle-aged and tired, I'm not going to fight this fight anymore. Maybe some day legislators will grow fangs and start giving a shit about strategic interoperability. Probably not.

To a first approximation, every word processor can open Word documents including open source ones.

Is that a result of an open standard, or from constantly reverse engineering whatever change Microsoft makes?

I think open standard?

Download is here? https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...

MS made it open because...

> More than a year after being asked by the European Union to standardize their Office 2003 XML formats, Microsoft submitted 2,000 pages of documentation for a new file format to the Ecma International consortium for it to be made into an open standard. [1]

The competing OpenDocument Format was standardized first though [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

Of all the things to be upset about here, this should be low on the list.

Microsoft Office documents haven't been proprietary for a long time. The formats are publicly-documented and Microsoft maintains open-source libraries that read/write them.

They're all XML-based and unobfuscated (beyond their convoluted design).

There are also many FOSS applications, including LibreOffice, that are perfectly fine as replacements for Microsoft Office.

Proprietary formats are a problem, but not with Microsoft Office anymore.

We should all be a lot more annoyed by PDFs, honestly.

>There are also many FOSS applications, including LibreOffice, that are perfectly fine as replacements for Microsoft Office.

From my own experience dealing with MS Office-based government organizations, this is absolutely false. Sure, LibreOffice can read and write DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files that are nominally interoperable with MS Office. But more often than not, MS Office mangles the formatting of LibreOffice-generated files. For example, text sizes, fonts, and element alignments in PPTX files get thrown off noticeably.

As another reply mentions, there's this nominal open-source standard. But the de facto standard is the MS Office implementation. I have to use MS Office instead of LibreOffice to eliminate the risk of document mangling when I send files over to the government people in charnge of my funding.

Print PowerPoint to PDF.

And hope that both of you are using Adobe lol

Or make your presentations as a website and hope their browser follows the same standards, they don't have bad extensions or security policies setup that may break it too.

Can't really win in human friendly days interchange, because all this crap gets layered on due to humans having their own things going on.

> Maybe some day legislators will grow fangs and start giving a shit about strategic interoperability.

Not so long as their paychecks require them to not have fangs.

It is questionable with some of the lawmakers getting older and older whether they are hiding fangs though.

The legislators do have fangs, but they are pointed towards you.

Every digital document needs to be encoded somehow, and that encoding is going to be a function of supoorted features.

If you're saying that we've reached a point of maturity in everyday digital paperwork documents that we can formally standardize some and move away from vendor innovation, you may be right, but the transition is a matter of timing and discussion because of the tradeoffs involved when that happens, not a rhetorical principle.

> should not involve a proprietary data format.

For that very reason, Microsoft turned the Office formats into open standards:

https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...

https://www.iso.org/standard/71691.html

Well, at least nominally. The real standard is still Microsoft’s implementation.

That's exactly the reason why Microsoft documents have an open standard, they were essentially forced to do that.

That that standard has several thousand pages and internal inconsistencies, ... well

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Op...

If only there was a separate arm of the government dedicated to sending and receiving communiqué. You could also use it to send _citizen's_ communiqué as well!

It is a sad state of affairs that the most technologically advanced government in history is incapable of rolling its own in-house tech. Taxpayers deserve better.

Are the taxpayers willing to pay higher taxes for IC government employees receiving Microsoft level salaries?

I expected this question - the answer as it stands is hell no. And who can blame us for being skeptical.

But as a taxpayer, I’d be very open to those salaries IF government IT was overhauled and run like a competent and agile tech startup, unencumbered by politics and red tape - at least to bootstrap some initital momentum.

Longer term, we need something like a “Tech Corps”, akin to a branch of the military, where new recruits are trained in tech bootcamps, and then deployed to one of the thousands of government departments that require resources for their projects/processes. Ideally, these roles should be viewed as an honorable monastic vocation, not a bureaucratic or political career.

1. How many software engineers are necessary for the federal government to build its own office software, or at the very least contribute to open-source projects such as LibreOffice? Depending on the size of the team, this may be a drop in the bucket compared to the federal government's multi-trillion dollar budget, even if the developers made Microsoft-level salaries. Let's make a very liberal estimate: suppose there were a team of 20 engineers dedicated to contributing to LibreOffice, and each engineer costs $400,000 in salary and overhead. The total is $8 million per year. When spread out over a population of 333 million, that's less than 2.5 cents per person. Now compare that $8 million per year to the cost of Microsoft Office licenses.

2. I consider myself a limited government proponent, but even if government were cut down to the bone, there is still a need for the government to maintain in-house software. Just imagine the internal software that the military and the IRS has, for example. The Library of Congress probably has very interesting software for helping manage its collection. It is conceivable for the federal government to build and maintain office software to aid its operations.

Regarding your point (1):

How many developers/PMs/etc. are working on Office software at Microsoft? With 20 you might be several orders of magnitude off. Why would a government project be leaner?

What is more, at least where I live there is not even a salary structure allowing to pay developers those figures, while managers several levels above them would earn less. Hierarchy is everything in government organizations.

Estonia does, because well... policy wise the US is not functioning very well. (Well various German goverments have their own inhouse tech, but kind of get the critic of German goverment lack of digitalisation)

That's the last thing I'd want my government spending time and money on. Govs can't even build apartment buildings without being half a decade late and 2x over budget, let alone extremely complex software.

If you start to look at the purpose of government as being to distribute tax dollars to themselves / campaign contributors / friends, rather than to serving the common good and the will of the people, things start to make a lot more sense. I think government can be to solution to a lot of problems IFF that government is actually responsive to voters. Here in the U.S. our political parties and politicians work quite hard to ensure this is not the case.

Hell no, tech is a really hard job, and the legacy in-house software I've seen the french public companies use were definitely a machine to convert heaps of tax money into mediocre software that became obsolete a few years later. A tax-to-tech-debt pipeline.

The tech market makes progress through booms and busts, hype cycles, and bankruptcies. The government can't afford that, and it should not.

The taxpayers deserve the most efficient use of their tax dollars, and that's not through in-house tech.

The best you can probably get is public support for open source companies and open source products.

> "We are committed to adapting to the evolving threat landscape and partnering across industry and government to defend against these growing and sophisticated global threats"

> “committed to secure by design and secure by default.”

> “As an industry leader we must be accountable for the security of our products and services.”

Wow, that sure is a lot of commitment and accountability! I'm not seeing much in the way of consequences for failing to meet those commitments though, and obviously there is absolutely no accountability. What's the value of a commitment that you can just fail to meet with impunity again?

This almost reads like all those tech company CEOs taking full responsibility for layoffs last year.

Until we sort out the whole idea that it is OK for the US intelligence communitity to use Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, N-other big tech companies to act as their data collection services. They will all continue to basically do whatever they want including jeopardizing our national security with their plainly stated profit motives.

It isn't that Microsoft does not care at all about security it is just that they see it as some business that they can/must make 40-50% margin on like the rest of their operations.[aka outsource it all to countries where folks have fake credentials]

Journalists have value to society and get “free passes”.

Isn’t that how it works? Not saying it should but that it does.

A whole lot of the economy is given a “free pass” because it keeps people from investigating government agents behavior and demanding change

The elders are trying to keep what they know alive as that as enriched them. This is just a generational Ponzi scheme. It’s all a bunch of 70+ year old racists and poorly educated post war, Cold War paranoids who huffed leaded gas fumes know; run hustles, cons, and protection rackets.

I'm surprised other countries put up with microsoft for basic things like email/word rather than a "must be built within country for security reasons"

I saw a video in a Russian missile factory yesterday and they were using Windows 11 on a laptop.

I mean, of course they were, but it's definitely a weird situation.

On Microsoft, the U.S. Government Must Embrace the Stick

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801670

The U.S. government is losing trust in Microsoft

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39937288

And they can charge what they want

Of course if another country does it, USA cries foul and tries to ban them from operating in USA.

It is government directed capitalism, just like other global superpowers like China.

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