Comment by jiggawatts

To be fair, that’s a rare exception. Most government tenders are quite narrow in scope.

What I have found is that they’re written by people with zero knowledge of either the solution requirements or the technology! Combine that with zero profit motive and zero personal consequences, and you can end up with total nonsense even on projects with billion dollar budgets.

A state school department here put out a tender for wiring over two thousand schools with fibre, but the way the contract was stipulated only a single applicant could win the contract and most handle every single location across a thousand miles of territory. Hence, only the largest incumbent telco could possibly win… which they did… at 15x the cost of a bunch of local contractors doing the work. This cost something like a billion dollars to taxpayers.

The excuse of the guy writing the tender was “it’s easier for me to get one contract signed than fifty.”

He’s a public servant getting paid $50K. He’s got nothing else on, no other pressing needs or distractions, but he’s too busy, you see? So much easier to waste a billion dollars to save himself a few months of effort.