November 5, 2010 – Google and Microsoft have ended up in court over the Government’s decision to adopt Microsoft’s BPOS at the Department of the Interior without letting Google bid for some of the action. As a result, Google is heading to court.
This information was found on CMSWire in their article, “Document Management Roll-up: Gov in Court with BPOS, SharePoint’s New Doc Web Part.” According to the complaint filed by Google and its reseller partner Onix Networking, Google was shut out of the bidding process despite efforts to enter the competition. Instead, the government specified that only Microsoft’s BPOS-Federal service would be considered.
Even though this isn’t a large project considering we are talking about Google, it seems to be a principle issue and fear of setting precedence. There is also the issue of BPOS and its rebranding as Office365. If Office365 moves into the public sector and becomes popular, competition will have just gottten much more intense.
This will be an interesting battle to watch from the sidelines.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
