“It could be ‘Hasta la vista, baby’ to state agency purchases of Microsoft’s Windows Vista information technology under a proposed state budget provision,” Peggy Fikac reports for The San Antonio Express-News. “The ‘rider’ in the proposed two-year, $182.2 billion state budget — expected to be taken up Wednesday by the Texas Senate — would require state agencies to get written approval from the Legislative Budget Board before buying Vista technology related to an operating system, equipment or licenses.”

“Sen. Juan Hinojosa, D-McAllen, added the provision in committee and said it’s meant to block purchases of the technology, which has been targeted by criticism: “Don’t buy it, because it’s not worth it,” Fikac reports. “Hinojosa, Senate Finance Committee vice chairman, said, ‘We have a lot of problems with the Vista program. It had a lot of bugs. It takes up a lot of memory. It’s not compatible with other equipment, and it’s supposed to be an upgrade from the XP program that is being used by state agencies, and it’s not.’”

“Microsoft spokesperson Tonya Klause said in a statement, ‘Microsoft has long demonstrated a sustained commitment to Texas, which is why this development is disappointing. The company has more than 1,500 employees who work in Texas, and only last year we opened a new $500 million data center in San Antonio,” Fikac reports.

MacDailyNews Take: Typical. The number of employees and costs of data centers in the state have absolutely no relationship to the quality, or lack thereof, of Windows Vista or the ability of the state’s hardware to run that OS. It’s B.S.

This type of disconnect is why, for example, GM isn’t in bankruptcy today fixing their mess. The UAW doesn’t want it, because they’d lose that which greatly helped drive GM into the ground (along with mismanagement; they signed those union contracts, after all), therefore those politicians who are UAW-backed are beholden to try to prevent it by any means possible; including the needless waste of tens of billions of taxpayers money. Just as the amount of money that Microsoft pours into Texas does not make one iota Vista better, the amount of money that the UAW pours into politician’ pockets does not make GM any less bankrupt.

If you made better products, Microsoft, you wouldn’t have to resort to coercing people to buy them.

Fikac continues, “Higher education institutions would be exempt from Hinojosa’s rider.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take:

[Editor's note: The following excerpts are from SteveJack's Take to "Rivals, public interest groups want U.S. government to set Apple’s iPhone free from AT&T" (March 04, 2009) and apply equally well here.]

By SteveJack

When the government steps in, it almost always goes too far (see: promoting home ownership for people who cannot afford homes which helped lead us to today’s forked up economy). And, then, when government does go too far, it never seems to fix the mess it created until it blows up in everyone’s faces (see previous example; a few lonely voices long called for the mortgage mess to be fixed and they were ignored).

Government is full of people promoting ideas with good intentions whose ramifications are almost never fully considered. Elected officials usually aren’t really the best (or they’d be in the private sector) and brightest (just listen to the average U.S. congressperson) and they often seem to end up getting drunk on power. This goes for all political parties. Once you give the government control of something, have fun trying to wrest it back. It’s usually gone forever.

Be careful what you ask of the government, for most governments, and certainly the U.S. government in most matters (military excluded), have the uncanny ability to make Microsoft look nimble, efficient, and innovative… It’s a can of worms. As it almost always is. Unintended consequences pop up everywhere which usually require more regulations and, rather quickly, the whole thing goes from sounding like a nice idea to snowballing into a ridiculous, wasteful morass of red tape and lost productivity.

Let products succeed or fail on their own merits; not by requiring a removed, higher governmental body’s approval. The individual agencies almost certainly understand their needs and capabilities better than a bunch of elected officials hobnobbing it in the state capital.

We almost always favor less government than more; just as we favor more freedom than less.

Our Take above would be exactly the same if this news involved Apple’s Mac OS X, or another OS, or a different state or country.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it. – Thomas Jefferson