The return of Citizens Against Government Waste

However, accroding to the 'Citizens Against Government Waste' it is NOT bad when these 'one set of technoligies' are Microsoft formats. (single vendor, does this smell like comunnism, or what?)

Here we have a reiteration of the usual FUD: non exclusive Microsoft solutions are bad.

This is definite proof that 'Citizens Against Government Waste' is just a propaganda machine.

There isn't "a competitive, transparent, and accountable bidding process." In government, there hardly ever is, even though it's designed that way. The system just gets gamed by the best, and Microsoft is one of the best when it comes to that sort of game.

Meh, Lame.

For example, my sister helps out with her church's accounts. She's a Windows user, and has Office installed on her home PC, so she duly set up an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of things, which she then emailed to her Church. Unfortunately, her church only had Works on their PC, and despite everything she tried, she could not get Works and Excel to talk. That's right, two proprietary products from the same company which do the same thing, can't talk to each other. How stupid/mean can you get? (Hilariously, Microsoft's own advice for this is to use a DBase format to exchange documents.)

She was all ready to tell her church to buy the cheapo version of Office, but just before she did, she asked me if there was a way to do what she wanted. Half an hour later, we'd downloaded and installed OpenOffice, read in the old Excel spreadsheet, saved it as a .sxc file and emailed it to her church. Half an hour more at church to install at the other end; job done. Hopefully, that's one less victim of a proprietary format lock-in...

Jonth

I'm not even going to bother looking at their web site this time. By now they've probably hidden their funders page.

Its clear that this "Consumer's interest" group has no interest in consumers at all. Slimebags, every one of them.

Tom Schatz and CAGW gave up any credible claim to being an impartial citizens' watchdog group years ago. Don't waste your time trying to point out to them the error of their ways; they already know perfectly well who underwrites their paychecks. Rather, if you are in a letter-writing mood, take a minute to inform the media of who these people are and who they work for.

The linked-to article does say at the end

According to the Times, family members crossed out the names and signed for them.

which suggests merely an out-dated mailing list rather than fraud on the part of CAGW. The article does mention “Tuscon, Utah” among an unspecified number/proportion of “invalid return addresses”, which is more suspicious (I'd have expected the signatory to have corrected the address), though these too are adequately explained by bad data and an inattentive etc. signatory rather than a ‘made up’ signatory.

The actions reported of ATL (deliberately giving the false impression that their letters were written individually) are deceitful and wrong; though I see no suggestion that CAGW were even knew of those actions, let alone were in any way responsible for them.

In the interest of LWN credibility, I suggest (and indeed request) either removing the claim about recruiting dead people (perhaps replacing with ‘funded in part by Microsoft’), or link to some better evidence.

And given that Office is the best office suite by far, this would then mean that MS gets to keep Massachusetts account and potentially other similar renegades. But maybe they think it's not worth the effort?