In the latest installment of anti-trust drama in the upper echelons of technology industry giants, Google has filed suit against the United States Government. The complaint is that when the US was looking at options to improve their messaging functionality, they specifically looked for only Microsoft products, and didn’t once take into consideration a Google Apps solution. Google’s argument is that restricting the Request for Quotation to Microsoft Is “unduly restrictive of competition.” It happens to also be unduly restrictive to Google’s financial standing, but that probably wouldn’t fly in court.
The US defends its position by claiming that although Google could have been considered in the RFQ, Microsoft offered two things that Google couldn’t offer in their Google Apps platform: Unified Mail/Messaging, and “enhanced security.” That last security bit probably raised all kinds of hackles over at Google, and they are understandably fighting against that argument trying to convince Microsoft that Google, Apple could very well have been a possibility, and that it was unfair to exclude them from the outset. The official complaint, as provided by Techdirt, outlines a scenario, where, after Google tried to present themselves as a possible provider for the service, the CIO of the Department of the Interior informed them that a “path forward had already been chosen.”
On the off chance that this lawsuit actually goes anywhere in court, we could be seeing an interesting shift in power in the war on government tech contracts. Microsoft has been the de facto choice of the US government (and for most of the world) for quite some time, and if Google can really prove that they could offer a viable solution for government email/messaging, Microsoft may actually have a real fight on their hands.