techrecovery | Dealing with governments (Reply)

In a previous life I did some consulting for a Native American tribe. They had purchased a bunch of equipment from the GSA, and needed my partner and I to go through it all, refurbish it into as many working PCs as possible, and deliver it to various worksites.

They had a bunch of old PS/2 machines that didn't have the horsepower for some of their apps, and wanted us to give them a quote for upgrading them to their specs.

So, I drew up two quotes. At our standard markup, we could replace the motherboard with a PS/2 compatible aftermarket upgrade board and hard drive at a cost of $1,500 per machine; or, we could replace everything except the monitor, keyboard, and power cord for $750. I figured the first quote was nothing but a formality, they'd go with the obvious option.

They had approval from the tribal legislature to upgrade PCs; they did not have approval to buy new PCs, that would require going back to the legislature, which would take at least a month, probably two. So they went with the $1,500 option.

And three years later replaced all those machines because they couldn't be upgraded again.