1. Government shouldn't use anything proprietary and the US should follow its own rules (AMD exists because gov't rules requirements, why not Microsoft compatible-competitors?)
2. Vendor lock-in always leads to over-pricing and government waste (also, see #1)
3. Microsoft did a deal with the devil (US Government) and now wants to regain trust. Sorry Microsoft. Not going to work.
And did anyone miss the work facebook has been doing with government? Holy crap. Not only is their censorship completely to the left, they are conducting psych experiments at the request of the US government. I personally avoid the social networking sites and [almost] always have.
(I have used LinkedIn due in no small part to my previous employer reducing its staff by over 90% Oh yeah, now I can talk about it too! Turns out the Fukushima incident and subsequent lies, deception, inaccuracies and omissions run pretty deep and even found its way to my former employer, a Mitsubishi company. Anyway, LinkedIn... i was checking that from my mobile device and it made mobile pages unusable through CSS and insisted I use an app. I loaded the app and agreed to whatever and the next thing I knew LinkedIn grabbed my whole addressbook and pulled it into their servers. I can't say whether they used the data to spam others, but I can say they used it to "suggest links" to my profile. That's pretty dirty and disgusting.)
Trust is a difficult thing these days... a fragile thing. And I hope companies everywhere, large and small, learn that lesson. They can learn the hard way or they can be good and decent people asking themselves "would I want someone doing this to me?!" (Just like government gun confiscation -- the answer is NO. The government wouldn't allow the citizens to take their guns, so why should the citizens allow government to take theirs?) Of course, too few people care about golden rules of morality because the world is run by psychopaths. Psychopaths think they can just buy trust. That may have been true, but the pendulum has reached its furthest point and is about to swing back the other way. Microsoft and others are only now figuring that out.