[jcnnghm]

I should elaborate a little more about the e-mail contract. The government put together a list of specifications. They wanted all of the equipment guaranteed, and they wanted to pay only a per-email fee. The specification was mainly to make sure the bidders knew exactly what was expected, and what they needed to produce.

The idea was that it costs about $0.35 per piece including design, postage, etc., to send a direct mail advertisement, whereas they could get the entire electronic marketing infrastructure, and pay a fraction of that per-piece. The whole thing was basically a clever pricing structure to get away from direct mail to much cheaper electronic delivery with guaranteed cost savings to the taxpayer because if the system sucked, they just wouldn't use it to send messages. But if it was good, they'd use it instead of the regular marketing materials, saving substantial amounts of money.

Hence why the pricing is higher than it would need to be, because of the risk.

[timcash]

Why not put out a contract that says. We need to get this information (I) to these people (P) at below this cost (C). If a company designs a system that can do that same thing in a completely new way at 1/100th the cost who cares how they did it.

[gridspy]

Perhaps notes taped to bricks delivered by volunteers wasn't the sort of message they were trying to send.