That this is the best evidence so far that Microsoft's new carey, sharey nice image is basically what many people have assumed it to be, i.e. bullshit.

The scenario is nothing new. Bring in a friendly company, get them to slate the competition and then brag about how an "independent" analyst has found something meaningful. Similarly, as usual, the people who don't care still won't care, the whole thing will be forgotten and FOSS will continue to gain ground as those who know its true value will continue to use and propagate it.

The important thing is to remember that we're still dealing with the same selfish, power hungry, lying, money grabbing, unethical, amoral, shower of shites that we were 5 years ago.

Wrong attiude.

If your running a big company with multiple sites, a flat, uniform, corporate desktop is a good thing as it eases the admins job and makes it easy for staff travelling from one site to another to work without having to get their head around different setups.

Education wise, uniform setup across the whole country, managed from a central location is a truly crap idea. Managing the systems in house allows you to build a setup appropriate to the character of the school. I admin a grammar school and our requirements are totally different to those of an academy in a deprived area. To be honest, I think computers are a waste of space in pretty much every subject other than ICT and film studies, where pupils make their own films. Pen, paper and talented, capable teachers can teach to a higher standard than a poor teacher with an interactive whiteboard in a room full of computers.

League tables and the national curriculum are perfect demonstrations of the appalling effect that central management can have on education. On the other hand, if your happy with turning the subject of ICT into a bland, boring, sterile landscape aimed at the lowest common denominator, that's your choice.

...with one hand the government seeks to lock down the British Internet with an iron fist, while at the same time telling us it is boosting innovation and business online. It is quite clearly blind to the fact that one affects the other.

No shit Sherlock?

Most of the problems in UK governmental IT are down to the fact that while the government wants to be at the cutting edge of digital technology, they have little or no understanding of the things they do.

This leaves them as easy prey to the tens of thousands of consultants, many of whom are probably partners of the service providers, who will happily stand there with a straight face telling ministers that their latest hare-brained scheme is do-able within budget and will of course be delivered on-time despite the fact that such a result is as rare as rocking horse shit.

Ultimately, no matter what half arsed fiasco results, the government will keep praising the scheme and plugging its merits because (a) they don't understand it enough to see how fucked up it all is. (b) An admission reveals the fact that they don't know what they're doing and (c) An admission results in an open declaration of "Whoops, we just pissed £4,000,000,000 of tax-payer's money down the drain.

And at the end of the day, the only people to be affected will be the honest,law abiding types while the terrorists, paedo's and all will just go back to using the memory sticks, dead letter drops and the post.

Tragic, truly tragic.