RSS

Who Does Obama's New CIO Love Most: Google, Microsoft, or Apple?

BY Danielle SacksMon Mar 9, 2009 at 4:10 PM

new cioEver since Vivek Kundra was appointed by Obama last week as the US's first Chief Information Officer, the blogosphere has been abuzz about what it will mean for tech juggernauts like Google, Microsoft, and Apple. The 34-year-old former CTO of Washington, D.C. will be the grand decider of the county's $71 billion IT budget, and you can bet Eric Schmidt, Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs' placeholder are angling this very minute for their piece of the billion dollar pie. 

The rumors swirling around are that the India-born Kundra is a Blackberry-addicted, Google-apps-maps-obsessed, cloud-computing, open source feinding, crowd sourcing, Apple zealot. (And this is the US government we're talking about?!). Last year Kundra reportedly had 38,000 D.C. staffers ditch Microsoft Office in favor of Google Apps and this video of Kundra ogling over Google has been making the rounds. It seems like Microsoft is once again culturally the odd man out.

Meanwhile, the elephant in the room is that Obama still hasn't managed to fill the Chief Technology Officer post. Google's Schmidt reportedly turned down the job. Who do you think should be Obama's tech czar and why do you think he's having such a tough time filling it?

Topics:

Innovation, Technology, Leadership, Management, Magazine, apple, google, obama, microsoft, government, CIO, Vivek Kundra, Google Inc., Vivek Kundra, Microsoft Corporation, Barack Obama, Productivity Software


Sign in or register to comment.
or

Recent Comments | 4 Total

March 9, 2009 at 9:25pm by Steve Ressler

We'll see - the DC rumors say the CTO will be Aneesh Chopra from Virginia. 5gb of Google email seems better than my 100mb work email limit.

Steve Ressler
Founder, GovLoop.com - "Facebook for Govies"

March 10, 2009 at 5:44am by Ash Sangamneheri

Its good to see governments starting to use off the self technology products instead of exotic and expensive custom solutions.

Though I dont understand why there is such a backlash against MS products. Technically you can do the same thing (and more) using MS SharePoint (and even IBM Lotus Notes?). We are using MS Sharepoint at work and I find it a bit more mature as a product than Google Apps.

I wonder if someone has done a comparitive review of these products.

March 12, 2009 at 7:47pm by Brangelina Smith

I think the question is now not "Who Does Obama's New CIO Love Most?" but "Who will be loving Obama's former CIO most".
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Source-Obama-official-on-apf-14623083.html