“Ronald D. Sugar, who was named to Apple’s board of directors Wednesday, was chairman and CEO of Northrop Grumman in 2005 when the Los Angeles-based aerospace giant beat out IBM (IBM) in a bid to rebuild the state of Virginia’s computer infrastructure from top to bottom,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“The contract — now valued at $2.4 billion, the largest in the state’s history — covered everything: mainframes, servers, desktops, laptops, voice and data networks, operating systems, e-mail, security, help desk and data center facilities,” P.E.D. reports. “For the people of Virginia, it’s been a nightmare, plagued with cost overruns, missed deadlines, security breaches and balky service.”
“The system, according to Marcella Williamson, a spokesperson for the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, is standardized on Hewlett-Packard hardware and Microsoft software. ‘We use the entire Microsoft stack,’ she told Fortune. ‘Exchange, SharePoint, Microsoft Office, SQL servers and .Net for development,” P.E.D. reports. “The big crash….hit last August, nearly nine months after Sugar’s retirement, when a data storage unit in Richmond warehouse failed and 26 of Virginia’s 89 departments lost computer service for as much as eight days. It was the worst computer disaster in the state’s history.”
P.E.D. reports, “They aren’t Apple computers,’ she says. ‘I can tell you that.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We could have told you they weren’t Apple computers, or even Macs, without having to ask. Virginia’s computer systems would work if they used quality hardware and software.
Hopefully, Sugar is bringing something of value to Apple’s BoD. God knows there’s some dead weight sitting there already – we won’t even get into the case of the finally eradicated mole.
John Gee, you said a mouthful.
This article thread was one of the best and most intelligent and thoughtful, from beginning to end, that I have read here in quite some time. This bad craziness has to stop now.
@iACQB
“And for those looking at this as an excuse at inserting some politcal diatribe toward any given party, please spare me. This has been going on before your grandparents were born.”
Exactly. Having had to deal with some government agencies myself, I’m familiar with what you mention.
Whenever I read those sort of comments I know the person is either young or naive. Which can be redundant. If they’re older and that naive, they’re just stupid. Too stupid to learn.
Whenever I’ve had political discussions with such people (and the older they are the more hardheaded they are, regardless of political affiliation), I’m been amazed at how otherwise intelligent people can be so blindly stupid.
I’ve often heard it said that there are two things you should never talk about at the dinner table, religion and politics.
Religious discussions are one thing because they really are metaphysical and involve the unknown, things that can’t be proved. People end up arguing about what they don’t really know.
However, when you get to politics then the laws of cause and effect, unintended consequences, and historical records become involved… and many people then choose to willfully ignore those in order to make a political point. Which usually turns out to be a party line of some sort.
They may as well be arguing religion.
“…we won’t even get into the case of the finally eradicated mole.”
Why not, MDN? I want to hear about the mole.
Well said, my friend, well said.
I feel so under-informed.
There’s obviously a whole group of people who are privvy to Apple’s board meeting records and have a verbatim understanding of what Al Gore does or doesn’t do on a monthly basis.
I wish I had access to those board minutes and recordings, because otherwise I might say something stupid and ill-informed based on my political prejudices.
Looks like a good strategic add to the BoD. He is someone who should be able to provide insight and guidance in how to win these big contracts in both government and enterprise businesses.