Re: Gmail for students and IMAP

[Valdis Kletnieks <Valdis.Kletnieks () VT EDU>]

On Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:18:43 PDT, Greg Francis said:
> Actually, I believe that organizations do choose the wrong solution
> depending on who made the decision and how different constituencies
> within the organization have evaluated it.

Yes - but unless you have a *really* stupid decision maker, they chose what
looked like the best choice at the time, based on their criteria. You
right-source your mail service, you right-source your police coverage, you
right-source your building-and-grounds crew, you right-source your your
database vendor, you right-source your... you get the idea.

My complaint is with the *buzzword* "right-sourced", which doesn't actually
add any information over "out/in/open/closed-sourced".  There's two basic
cases:

1) It may not *matter* in the context of the discussion whether the decision
to outsource or not was, in hindsight, the best.  In that case, you can
just leave it as "we outsourced" and leave "right-sourced" out.

2) It *may* matter if it was a good idea (for instance, in this case, if
there was some relevant issue with subpoenas).  In this case, there's two
sub-cases:
a) It in fact worked. You can leave it as "we outsourced" and have an
implicit "and it worked" (see below).
b) It in fact failed, at which point (since the failure is pertinent),
you really owe the listener "we outsourced, and encountered XYZ".

Note that in no case does 'right-sourced' by itself add any pertinent
information to the discussion.

Another thing to think about -  if "right-sourced" is not merely a
content-free buzzword, why does nobody ever say "we wrong-sourced"?

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