Technical Tidbits™

Warning: The language in this post may be offensive to Microsoft and it’s supporters.

Recently, on both The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert, I heard mention of the cost of the Recovery.gov website. According to these comedic – and often satirical – show hosts, the cost of the website was, $18 Million.

Well, I now totally understand not only the cost but the errors on the site. This quote from a recent Information Week article explains it all!

Earlier this year, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon began offering to host public data on their cloud services, and the competition will likely only heat up. Microsoft has touted the fact that SharePoint is the front-end platform for stimulus-tracking Website Recovery.gov, and clearly has a few other ideas up its sleeves.

via Microsoft Taps Into Open Government Market — Cloud Computing — InformationWeek.

Do you get the same picture I’m getting?

So, maybe Microsoft isn’t getting the full $18 million for the district creating website that’s supposedly tracking our stimulus money, but I have a few concerns about the site now that I know Microsoft is behind it.

But first, I want to know what web design company got this contract and what happened to small business in the government procurement process? But I digress.

Oh, never mind! I just looked at the “View Source” of one of the web pages on recovery.gov and saw this:

meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft SharePoint"
meta name="progid" content="SharePoint.WebPartPage.Document"

Microsoft obviously did get paid most of that $18 million! But again, I digress.

We all already know that we can’t trust Microsoft for security, nor accuracy. And that’s based on their software – not the recovery.gov website.

But now, we have them touting their crap to the government. How secure do you think your information is going to be now?

And now, we have Microsoft with both hands in our pockets. Suckering us to into buying their new Operating System and other products, and then using a reach around the back to grab our tax dollars by courting the government.

But as they say in the infomercials, “But wait! There’s more!”

On December 10, CNN Money announced that Microsoft plans to acquire health information-technology company Sentillion Inc.  According to the article:

Massachusetts-based Sentillion provides identity and data access management services to more than 500,000 caregivers across North America and Europe.

This is all part of Microsoft’s Health Care Solutions strategy. And if you don’t think that’s a scary proposition, look at what they have line up here: Microsoft Health Care Solutions.

Now, if you’ve ever applied for Health Insurance, you may or may not know that when you sign the papers for a policy, you give the health insurance company permission to input all your data on that form into a global health insurance industry database.  (That could explain why you suddenly start getting junk snail mail from health insurance providers once you investigate a policy!)

So, now your intimate health details are part of a global industry database. And if you have heath insurance currently, your data is already there!

How do you feel about Microsoft having access to that information?

Can you imagine the amount of money they can make from selling just the names and addresses to their partners? Which we all know they are famous for anyway! (READ YOUR EULA IF YOU’RE IN DOUBT!)

I won’t even get started with Government control or mandatory heath care either! That’s a whole other blog post.

And if the way the errors on the recovery.gov website are any hint to what we’re in for, imagine how erroneous information will affect your health care! I can hear it now…. “Oh, we’re sorry! The database said your husband had cancer. Don’t worry. The Chemo will wear off and he’ll get his hair and immune system back in time. Now what were we supposed to be treating him for?”

Suffice it to say that with the government in bed with companies like Microsoft and Google – whether health care or websites, we taxpayers are literally screwed.

There’s no amount of KY Jelly® that’s going to keep this from hurting.

And in case you don’t happen to enjoy The Colbert Report and haven’t heard the news about the governments recovery website, for your enlightenment: