What government does
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June 13th, 2012 at 12:31 pm
The $6,000 Kindle is this century’s $600 toilet seat.
June 13th, 2012 at 3:54 pm
This is a bit misleading… the kindles won’t be standard, as they won’t tie into the Amazon web store, but will be fed only from a State-Department-controlled server. (If you read the fine print.)
The contract also doesn’t say exactly how many kindles will be supplied for that much money or what the supported servers might cost – including what support is included.
Since they only publish the account summaries, and not the detail, it is a bit early to bash them.
The other question to ask is how much are we spending to day on translators, document prep and distribution, document shredding etc. Elimination of paper is usually a big cost savings. (When I was doing it, we used 4 cents per page – just for the paper, the ink, and the printer – but my guess is that paper hasn’t gotten a lot cheaper.)
I know it is fun to bash the government, especially when the party you don’t like is in power, but not everything they do is crazy.
June 13th, 2012 at 3:55 pm
The other thing you need to sign up for, when you sell equipment to the government, is the longevity requirements. You can’t let a product go obsolete in a year, you usually have to sign up for 10 years of support. Sometimes longer. (How long does the average tech company support the average tech gizmo these days?)
June 13th, 2012 at 4:12 pm
Look at the contract, as Zendo says (plus that price is confusing a 5 year contract maximum with a single purchase).
This contract is for a custom device (they want video, for one thing), and a complete custom infrastructure on top of it, with maintenance and support.
It’s not like they could have just bought some Kindle Touches and shipped them out and saved all the money.
June 13th, 2012 at 7:59 pm
If what Zendo Deb and Sigivald wasn’t true, then my response would be:
What private business does: charges the government (taxpayers) $6,000 for a Kindle.