It’s not only the Tea Party that’s upset with the Federal government. Google is too, and their suing the Department of the Interior about it. According to a lawsuit just filed by Google and Onix Networking in Federal District Court, the DOI tailored its specs for Department software for Microsoft products, effectively shutting Google out of the bidding process, and losing it a potential 88,000 government employees as clients.
Google argues that the problem is not just an unfair bidding process, which favors Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) for federal employees. It also claims that the decision was made even though Google’s own offering is inherently more secure than Microsoft’s for handling sensitive documents and emails. Microsoft’s servers, they say, are hosted in part overseas, in countries like the Netherlands, Ireland, and Singapore, while all of Google’s servers would be hosted in data centers in the U.S. Google also claims that the government relaxed its requirement that federal documents be hosted on designated servers only just to win the Microsoft bid.
Microsoft has responded that in the future, all federal government files will be hosted in data centers in the U.S. and that physical access will be limited to federal employees who have passed the appropriate security checks. Google, however, argues that from its inception its own solution was developed to meet these security specifications, whereas Microsoft’s was not. The federal government has added that as of now, Google does not even have a license to provide services to the government.
A federal judge will now have to decide whether Google has a case.
Read More at the Business Insider.
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