In theory it seems like government contracting for commodity software, if managed by competent IT departments, could be used as leverage against the kind of hollowing-out of software quality that has been the repeated play of certain private equity firms, perhaps most notably Thoma Bravo. Basically the play is to try to get customers (including governments) locked into a software product that has pretty high switching costs, and then slash investment in maintenance, improvements, security, etc, and milk the subscription for as long as possible.
Of course, we'd need to actually pay enough to recruit people who _understand_ the software they're procuring, to negotiate the government's side of those contracts, to require that the contractor maintains the product in a state where it's cross-compatible with other tools the buyer might want to use, so that switching costs would potentially be low and the company providing the software has to actually keep the product healthy or face loss of their contract.
This part seems especially critical: “If both the people asking for the money and those approving it see stopping and starting as signs of failure instead of signs of learning and de-risking, there will be strong incentives to keep to the idealized trajectory, even when a messier trajectory is needed.”
Getting that kind of mindset into something like the budgeting process is really important and also... quite the challenge 😅
In theory it seems like government contracting for commodity software, if managed by competent IT departments, could be used as leverage against the kind of hollowing-out of software quality that has been the repeated play of certain private equity firms, perhaps most notably Thoma Bravo. Basically the play is to try to get customers (including governments) locked into a software product that has pretty high switching costs, and then slash investment in maintenance, improvements, security, etc, and milk the subscription for as long as possible.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-to-get-rich-sabotaging-nuclear
Of course, we'd need to actually pay enough to recruit people who _understand_ the software they're procuring, to negotiate the government's side of those contracts, to require that the contractor maintains the product in a state where it's cross-compatible with other tools the buyer might want to use, so that switching costs would potentially be low and the company providing the software has to actually keep the product healthy or face loss of their contract.
This is an excellent point. I was thinking more of real commodity stuff. There are a ton of terrible gov tech products out there.
This part seems especially critical: “If both the people asking for the money and those approving it see stopping and starting as signs of failure instead of signs of learning and de-risking, there will be strong incentives to keep to the idealized trajectory, even when a messier trajectory is needed.”
Getting that kind of mindset into something like the budgeting process is really important and also... quite the challenge 😅