Why Microsoft is Australia's default buy

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 08 September 2009 07:40

Opinion and Analysis

iTWire: How much of this backwardness would you attribute to the efforts made by lobbying groups - open source lobbying groups, organisations, whatever - and do you think people have gone about it the wrong way?

CZ: One of the bigger issues that we had - and I can sympathise with government certainly - is that when they go to talk to the car industry, they talk to the car industry. There is a co-ordinated interface between the government and the car industry.

When they go talk to the IT industry, there's six different organisations, and 38 different pressure groups. They talk to the ACS, they talk to the AIIA, they talk to OSIA, they talk to the .NET developers in Queensland, and they talk to the local software consortia, and all these different entities often have fundamentally different requirements, different pressures. From the government's perspective, this is an issue.

I think and I guess what's at play here, what's at stake here, is a broader more fundamentally broken issue than just whether or not government adopts open source software. It is the Australian public sector outlook on industry development. We have across as far as I know, all the states - certainly the states that I've had dealings with - and at the federal government level, a fundamental barrier between industry development and procurement.

We seem to have a completely allergic stance, an allergic reaction to aligning government procurement with industry development. There are myriad stories of government departments not buying local product for fear that it won't be supported in the long term. Open source has answers - where do you go to when you have source code? You can go to anyone who can support PHP or C++ or what have you. All these things that are advantageous in deploying open source, the government has not as far as I can tell, pursued that.

There's a large combination of things. We don't want 'Choose Australian' for all these things - but the government is not above choosing Australian, you know, in some industries. Because if you go to departments, government agencies - state and federal - and you look at their car pool procurement policies, my understanding is that they almost always fundamentally buy local product. They would only ever buy Australian cars. But in software, it's almost always the opposite - they would almost never buy Australian product, Australian technology. Why is that? Can you imagine what would happen if we had a scenario where the public sector in this country, which is (spending) something like $30 billion a year, if some portion of it was earmarked for local IT products?

This was what was intended when the big outsourcing contracts were begun by the Federal Government in 1996-97, a certain portion was supposed to go to local companies. But nobody ever followed up on that. This meant that the local companies couldn't bid for the big projects anymore. They had to become underlings to all the big outsourcing companies, and that's just where the services were.

But very few offered development, and very few of the product purchasing deployments went to local companies either. You can have an industry where you can nourish local companies, if there's services companies. But generally you cannot have, and you cannot build enough of a layer of fat, in services companies, to allow them to grow big enough in this environment to be able to reach out globally. It won't happen. In a product company, you have a chance of that. Because if you hit the right kind of product, and you are successful at selling it, you can build up enough fat to take that product international. It's not at all easy to do that in technology, in the services sector.

That's why we have a fairly paltry services sector for technology as well, by comparison to many nearby countries - Singapore, certainly India, and I believe East Asian countries have a fairly big telecommunications services export industry as well, which we certainly don't have. It's a big complex area. It's not something you can simply point your finger at and say "presto x, y and z". But there certainly doesn't seem to be any onus, even with the Rudd government - they've been in power now for almost two years - I haven't seen any indication that there's any interest in pushing anything beyond the consumption of technology.

There's an old, possibly apocryphal, story about our satellite launch industry. We were, after the Americans and after the Russians, the third country in the world to launch a satellite. Most people don't know that. And the government, the Liberal government, said 'we're going to be digging stuff out of the ground and shearing sheep. We're not in the league of launching satellites, got nothing to do with us.' They completely missed the point about land management and remote sensing, and the possible export of such technologies to the region, you know, Southern Asia, and South-East Asia and New Zealand and the South Pacific. Not of interest.

They essentially scrapped and didn't really fund our space programme until the late '60s. Similar things happened with regard to our technology and computer industries in the '80s. Barry Jones has many stories about what happened when he was minister of technology. I don't think we've changed. I don't think we're fundamentally any different. That's part of the bleaker picture that you mentioned. But there's enough to sustain what's there. The hope always is that something will happen to accelerate the adoption of more local product, more local skill, and the adoption of open source product and skills as well.