The IDA awarded a S$1.alot billion contract to HP/EDS under the Standard Operating Environment project. The entire project will be running on 100% proprietary, vendor locked-in, Redmond technology comprising everything Ballmer could make available. So when it is said that Singapore’s public sector is an arm of Microsoft, there is a lot of truth in it. Now contract that with how the US President Obama has correctly chosen no vendor lock-in and open standards and open source based solution Drupal for the recovery.gov portal. No additional commentary needed as it is very plain to see how wasteful Singapore is with my tax dollars in the SOE project.

Increasingly I am hearing that the SOE has major architectural flaws and the S$1.alot billion will definitely overrun although the people who originally “designed” it are no longer there running it. How convenient!