portrman, something for you to mull over:
A few years back, Scott McNealy ordered Sun's business units to stop using Microsoft Office and to stop dealing with vendors and contractors who wanted to trade documents with Sun in Microsoft Office formats. Business at Sun quickly ground to a crawl, except for those units which refused to stop trading Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. files with vendors. McNealy's new policy was quietly forgotten.
It's really not always true that smart companies care about the methods used by their vendors and contractors. In fact, one of the most fundamental advantages of outsourcing is that you don't have to care about how a service is provided. The exceptions are when a customer is outsourcing a function that is regulated by government and/or restricted by another party, and when substantial staff and fixed assets are changing hands (e.g. the large "facilities management" style contracts serviced by EDS, Xerox, etc.). Customers who have some other reason to care about vendors' methods are either irrational or are foolishly outsourcing something that should not be outsourced.
Ever hear of SLAs (Service Level Agreements)? The whole point of SLAs is that a vendor is free to use any method to deliver the service levels promised. Even if Microsoft were to evaluate a vendor in the beginning based on their technology at that time, it would be rare that the vendor wouldn't be allowed to switch all their systems to Nintendo 64's the next day, and Macintoshes the day after that. As long as the vendor meets whatever criteria had been established for performance, security, and availability, they could use Commodore 64's if they wanted.
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