Quaero gets off the ground to challenge Google
,----[ Quote ]
| Almost three years after then-President Jacques Chirac of France introduced
| Quaero to the world as the next Google-killer, the Internet search project
| has finally gotten its first funding.
|
| [...]
|
| "It's extremely important for the future for Europe to be present in this
| field," he said. "Since most of the large players are American, it makes
| sense. Either you're Google, Microsoft or Yahoo and you can do it in-house,
| or you're not, and so you have to collaborate with people."
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/21/technology/quaero24.php
It's the same with software. Simon Phipps raised this issue last week.
Related:
Open source: the key to sustainable savings in public sector IT
,----[ Quote ]
| Things could hardly be tougher in the Whitehall front line. Last year Gordon
| Brown made it clear in his budget speech just what he expects – 4% annual
| growth in spending on front line services financed out of just 2% overall
| budget growth.
|
| Enacting this latter day miracle of loaves and fishes is not going to be
| easy. But it will not happen at all unless Whitehall ends its chronic failure
| to use market power to deliver sustainable savings in the massive bill the
| public sector pays for software.
|
| Nowhere else would departments or their agencies tolerate a monopoly or a
| monoculture. Imagine if every department decided, as policy, to buy its
| hardware from the same supplier. Of course innovation wouldn’t stop –
| improvements in manufacturing and the fundamental laws of physics would see
| to that. But the pace would slow – what’s the incentive if the buyer is
| locked in? – and the price would rocket.
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http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=563&blogid=17
|
|