spending

The goal of the US Army is to move from Windows to Linux. In the meantime, the Army has to find ways to make the two work together. It's turning to Red Hat to do so and to a group of internal IT professionals to create a "Battle Command" that will explore how to move the Army from 20th-century Windows to 21st-century Linux.

In the case of the US Army, integration is a matter of life and death. The Army is "talking about taking the battle command applications [they] are building and combining them with the battle command capabilities that are in the Air Force, Navy and Marines, making sure they work together and draw from the same data." The US Army didn't turn to Microsoft for patent-approved Linux but rather to Red Hat:

At the moment, Linux-based operating systems can communicate only to a limited degree with Microsoft-based systems, according to an Army official familiar with the summits.… Read more

The Huffington Post's new "Fundrace 2008" feature allows you to see who the big donors are in the 2008 presidential race campaigns, with a Google maps mash-up that lets you search by region, donor name, party affiliation and donation amount. It's a light-hearted but also serious look at who the big donors are (it mostly tracks donations over $200) and, in some cases, you can see who's playing "both sides". They also track donations from employees at specific companies. For example, Microsoft and Google employees have primarily given to Democrats by over 2:… Read more

Normally IT gets walloped in a recession, with new projects put on hold until the economy thaws. Take the 2001 recession, for example, which saw IT budgets that had been growing 12.9% per year shrink to a 2.8% growth. In such circumstances, enterprises have traditionally placed existing projects on life support while cutting off the air supply to new projects.

But as the New York Times reports, this time around IT spending may not get hit as hard, at least, not everyone will get equally hard:

"You only want to start projects you are dead-serious about," ...said [Pitney Bowes' CIO]. "A downturn really heightens that discipline."… Read more

The Guardian is reporting that the United Kingdom government has flushed over ?2 billion (More than US$4 billion) since 2000 on failed IT projects. IT projects fail. It's a fact of life. It would be nice if the UK government weren't squandering so much with so few vendors, and if all the waste weren't locked up in proprietary software, and if it were mitigating its IT failure risk with open-source software.

Indeed, could there be a correlation to the UK government's fetish with Microsoft and seven other proprietary vendors? In other words, putting all of its IT eggs in just a few proprietary baskets doesn't seem to be working for the UK. Are the projects failing, in part, because the government is attempting to use proprietary, unwieldy software?

Or is it just a matter of incompetence? The Guardian writes:

The failure of the multimillion-pound police site marks the latest chapter in the government's litany of botched IT projects, with several costly schemes biting the dust. Blunders overseen by Downing Street have included the much-derided ?486m computer upgrade at the Child Support Agency (CSA), which collapsed and forced a ?1bn claims write-off, and an adult learning programme that was subjected to extensive fraud.… Read more

In what should be a boon to commercial open-source software vendors, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that tech spending is set for a big slowdown in 2008. Just as a housing and credit crunch should lead to more prudent consumer spending, so, too, should economic malaise at the corporate level lead to more intelligent IT spending.

In other words, less silly spending on licensed shelfware and more savvy spending on real value: open source and SaaS that focus on actual service, not licenses. Proprietary software's loss can be open source's gain:

Last week, IDC cut its 2008 projection for world-wide tech-spending growth to between 5.5% and 6%, down from a previous forecast of 6.6% and from this year's expected growth of 6.9%.… Read more

Late in 1999, Cisco cautioned in a filing with the Securities and Exchange commission that sales were slowing. A financial analyst quoted at the time downplayed Cisco's comments on future growth. "This is not news," said Bill Meehan, who followed the stock for Cantor Fitzgerald.

Well, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we now know that Cisco's warning turned out to be news. It turned out to be quite prophetic news and the technology business soon found itself smack in the midst of an ugly recession that shuttered companies and led to the evaporation of … Read more

Politicians are famous (infamous, some would say) for setting aside billions of federal taxpayer dollars each year to bankroll pet projects in their home districts. Now it's possible to map precisely where at least some of those funds may be headed.

The Sunlight Foundation on Tuesday released a downloadable Google Earth layer that plots what it says are some 1,500 earmarks attached to a proposed U.S. House of Representatives defense spending bill. The Washington-based group describes its mission as promoting political transparency through use of Internet technologies.

Once activated, each project shows up on the layer in … Read more

I just got a look at SpendView, a financial site for young people. It will compete with Mint (launching tomorrow; hands-on review coming then too) and Wesabe (review) and it shares a core feature: When you let the product download your bank and credit card data so you can track it, it also uses that data to create an aggregate view of how people spend money. Then it lets you compare you outlay on, say, rent, gas, and food, to other people like you. It's social without being personal. (You can ignore the social info if you want, and … Read more

Market research firm eMarketer recently published a study about U.S. consumer spending on music since 1980. Most commenters have seized on the fact that the study shows a higher percentage of people are buying music today than ever, but that those users are spending much less, probably due to the rise of single-song downloads. (eMarketer calls these "MP3 downloads"--in fact, the #1 source of legal downloads, iTunes, offers them in the AAC format, and many other sites offer downloads in the Windows Media Audio format.)

But I also noticed that music spending per capita rose dramatically … Read more