[USNetizen]

The problem with this isn't that the bidder wanted to do something noble, it's that it set a precedent that the government is going to expect on future bids moving forward. "Buying a contract" is nothing new - companies do it all the time (i.e. deliberately dramatically underbidding just to get the past performance). However, reverse auctions are a lose-lose for the government and commercial sector. This approach assumes that the only thing that separates vendors is price alone, which is incorrect. For commodities, perhaps it works, but for IT you get what you pay for. Just ask the other numerous agencies backing away from the reverse auction model due to disastrous lowest-bidder contractor performance.

I do, however, wholeheartedly embrace the pilot-model approach to IT procurement (i.e. MVP for government). It will help avoid those failure-prone $100M+ acquisitions that are doomed from the start, thus saving taxpayer money and allowing innovators to shine in practice, not through proposals.

[Johnny555]

"For commodities, perhaps it works, but for IT you get what you pay for"

Well, you don't, sometimes you just pay for overhead you don't need.

My wife works at a small 15 person non-profit - I was shocked when I heard how much they pay for IT support from a small support organization.

She asked what other choice they had, because they don't have anyone on-staff that can do it, and their old hardware needed a lot of support.

So I put together a proposal - for less than they were paying for a year of support services, they could replace all of their hardware with new hardware (including desktops, network and printer), plus move from hosted Exchange to Gmail (for another big cost savings).

I spent a weekend setting up the hardware, including automatic backups to a local fileserver plus crashplan for remote cloud backups (they had no backups at all before, just a bunch of flash drives with various bits of information).

They saved money after the first year, plus they had all new and reliable hardware. They bought a block of 40 hours of support from their IT support organization and haven't even used half of that over 2 years.

[ploxiln]

I have to agree, with digital technology, "you get what you pay for" breaks down completely. Sometimes the very best choice for one component is cost free, or very low cost, because reproducing that component 100% perfectly is pretty much free.

The big problem is identifying what is a good choice. If you don't know, you can't easily contract out the choice either, how do you know the contractor can or will make a good choice for you?

So the best outcome for non-technical organizations is to get lucky and know someone personally who knows what they're doing and has no ulterior motive - someone just like you. They don't really know if they know such a person. But if they get lucky and pick just the right helpful competent person to make IT decisions for them, modern technology can give them quite a lot for very little.

It's a perplexing situation.

[neogodless]

> but for IT you get what you pay for

> It will help avoid those failure-prone $100M+ acquisitions that are doomed from the start

Clearly, you don't always get what you pay for. The price is not always the value.

[USNetizen]

Hence why they call it "best value" which was my point. What this person did is called "LPTA" or, essentially, lowest bidder. Not sure if you want every lowest bidder making your mission critical applications.

[JumpCrisscross]

> For commodities, perhaps it works, but for IT you get what you pay for.

Is the government bound to accept the lowest bid? When bidding closes, it would make sense to review the lowest bids for noticeable differences in expected quality. If it isn't worth doing that, because expected quality is always high, and prices keep coming low one must consider that the task has become commoditised.

[Bedon292]

It would depend on the situation. This one, I believe, they were bound to accept the lowest bid. However if the lowest bidder failed to complete the work they could move up the ladder.

Most major contracts are, I think, 'Lowest bidder technically acceptable'. Which requires the bidder to meet minimum guidelines in their quality of work. So price is not the only factor, though it is a major one.

[tssva]

Most large federal contracts state the criteria for judgement in the RFP. It is usually some combination of technical solution, cost and past performance with the weight of each varying between RFPs.

Also for large contracts the government will have done some due diligence to determine a range which the contract should cost. If your bid is significantly below this range and your solution doesn't show some innovation to support the lower cost the government is likely to reject it as unrealistic.

[adrianN]

But sometimes you pay a lot and still get crap. I don't know any reliable mechanism that can predict project outcome. Past success is not a good indicator for future success in software projects, sadly.