MPs demand answers on Fujitsu's inclusion in lucrative frameworks

> IT projects that cost billions are incomprehensible to me, outside of frontier work

Getting a large bureaucracy to agree on a question where any answer will disadvantage some members of it is frontier work. No-one has a good general solution. Very few people even have approximate solutions for a few special cases.

> is there no space in the market for a good software consultancy? Or are they just outcompeted for getting the contract?

You can't grow big enough to bid on these big projects and stay good.

A little known but amusing fact:

Fujitsu (well, ICL, the UK company that was bought by Fujitsu and then became the UK branch of Fujitsu) is still the supplier of Microsoft software to the European institutions through a long-standing framework contract with DIGIT.

Why EU could not buy from Microsoft directly to spare the embarrassment is beyond my comprehension.

Why in the world is the ban self-imposed? People literally died because of this, others spent their lifetimes rotting in prison.

A software bug is perfectly fine, everthing has bugs. It was the years of gaslighting, lying and sending people to prison when you could've easily admitted the issue. Ridiculous.

Don’t forget to mention part of those players are the clients.

“Clients” usually are even worse offenders than these extractive scam companies, mostly because the “clients” are playing with someone else’s money, usually the taxpayer.

The people in charge assume that a large scale project requires lots of work to implement in all cases. That is not a given. Creating software that runs 10,000 separate instances is a lot easier than something that has to scale to one instance 10,000 times the size.. There is a bias to 1) assuming the former is what you need and 2) budgeting for the former and 3) preferring the former.

Governments are used to funding a lot of things like transport and the military etc. where costs roughly scale linearly if you are lucky. Usually worse because big projects are so hard to manage and require extra layers of management. If you are really lucky there will be economies of scale.

The people able to bid for big national contracts are also going to be big consultancies who are biased to big and complex projects. For one thing they also have to be able to deploy and support it. maybe if development was separated from deployment and support, it would be better?

There have been multiple examples of things such as smallish government websites (I mean small information sites - the sort of things a freelancer could do) costing millions because its done through a big consultancy.