The future we feared in 1973 is the reality of 2008.

The real scenario is what will happen when any of the remaining two comes along with a better offer? Will the public sector organization move to the new bidder? Are they willing to move / migrate data every two to three years? What are the legal consequences and delays of such a route? Do the users really benefit from such moves, or do they suffer?

I have played this game in a public sector organization: When you make the transition, the old contractor is unhelpfully helpful. Why should they help anyway? They are losing revenue from you. They will give you any information you ask for, but not a bit more. Even if it is needed to make things work.

As to recruiting the best talent, not all people work for money, nor change countries for even a lot of it. Some people (OK very few) especially in the public sector, work aiming to offer their best- which cannot always be offered via a corporate employer.

As you have stated years ago: We do not have to agree on all issues. It would be terribly boring!

As to your question, the answer would be yes, if that would free resources for other more important task and if it would make the actual outsourced task more efficient. In addition, economies of scale help in becoming the “lowest bidder”, without necessarily sacrificing quality. Of course, things can always turn foul later, but as a short-term solution (potentially a greedy approach here) it makes sense.

However, there is also another thing you should consider here: the lack of qualified technical personnel. The thing is: unless you can compete with the big 3 in terms of salary, the best talent will more likely end up there (in fact, they are fighting among each other to grab the best talent). So they can get both the best human resource quality AND offer a lower price for their product; which puts in-house development at a short & middle-term financial disadvantage.

Again, as I said before, I see the reasons for those decisions and they make business sense to me. Whether they make business sense in the *long term* remains to be seen, but in times of recession, short-term cost minimization seems to be the order of the day.

Other than that, we have entered an era where we are supposed / expected to outsource our digital life to the “big three” (G, Y!, M$) just because it looks cheaper for the next two years. And with nobody worrying what will happen if the deals go sour.

Do we really want to outsource our data management to the lowest bidder?

It might as well have been management which didn’t keep up and decided it’s easier to shut down than to look at themselves making mistakes. We’ve all seen enough management types doing that to know it’s a possibility. All we have is hearsay and guessing.

Fact is: they gave up. Which is unfortunate, for what we had in this guy and his work. Google and the like may provide a free service and a bit of free code now and then, but here we talk about someone who gave us a *technology*.