[Dat Mon]

"Gee, I wonder how long it will take the hyphenated groups to get out demanding that Lenovo be permitted to put their own people on contract to finish any defense contracts IBM has for their PC division."

IBM or some other outfit will have to have a secure American based facility to produce government PCs...which will fly in the face of the government trends towards COTS hardware and software. This is assuming that congress fulfills their responsibilities and mandates American goods for defense applications. Will they do that in the future?

If trends continue, electronics design and manufacturing in this country is going to consist largely of military and boutique industries, or selected industrial high end manufacturing, where the vendor is dominant.

Perhaps at some point the bar will be even lowered further and we will be buying more and more high tech defense electronics overseas, which I would find very distressing.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

RE: IBM or some other outfit will have to have a secure American based facility to produce government PCs. . . .

That's a good point.

If $800 toilet seats were bad I cannot imagine the cost of an office PC for government.

However there were news stories a year or two ago about efforts to limit foreigner contractors from working on certain federal contracts. The body shops that use H1B contractors and various advocacy groups raised so much hell that the plan was scraped or severely weakened.