In almost every country there is a number of well connected companies who make a living exclusively by specializing at navigating through the complicated layers of bureaucracy and swindling the taxpayer by selling overpriced and unnecessary proprietary products and services to a government who by cluelessness or corruption, has no idea or doesn't care about sensible technical solutions and just agrees with whatever those preferential suppliers offer.
It's hilarious when you look at the web pages of such companies and see that their only customers in the last decades are various government agencies and state enterprises which are their bread an butter as they would never be competitive on the free market. Working at such companies is even more toxic. Extremely outdated tech, poorly qualified staff, huge bureaucracy yet poor management and poor understanding of the work going on, and so many people doing nothing all day than keeping seats warm and answering a couple of emails per week.
This is especially true in Germany. I remember the story from a former colleague who worked at the German information security government office (BSI) which had a cipher calculator on their website and it turned out to have a flaw in the calculation, and since the guy who implemented it didn't work there anymore and nobody on the staff knew where the code was, so instead of fixing the calculator or removing it from the website, they instead put a warning on the webpage that this calculator is wrong and shouldn't be used and called it a day lol. Hilarious but also sad for the German taxpayer.
One big german company who has had a couple of scandals attached to their name and that has been 'disappearing' progressively from markets operated in similar ways (and the market cap going down progressively).
They end up cornered in markets where the expertise needed and moats are high and where they are slightly not too behind or ahead of the competition.
But anyway, the way to procure such "routers for secure networks" would be to add a contractual requirement of support for 20+ yrs.
I work at a company like this. From what I gather, it seems to have started out as a fine product-oriented business, but turned into what it is today due to the incentives involved. We sell our product primarily through public sector invitations to tender, where what matters is hitting a bunch of feature checkboxes on a list, with zero regard for the actual quality of the product.
>what matters is hitting a bunch of feature checkboxes on a list, with zero regard for the actual quality of the product.
This is true for most government contracts in most countries.
It gets worse with government contracts involving tech products and services as most governments don't have any skilled and knowledgeable tech people working for them, even in Germany, because why would they work for the toxic and underpaying public sector when they could earn more and get more respect in the private sector. This way, you only retain clueless people who only heard about the internet from a book, don't care about learning or improving things and are just there for a cushy job, ticking boxes and filing paperwork till retirement. If you want to hire skilled tech workers you gotta pay them well and give them freedom, which is not usually what government jobs are all about.
From what I've heard, Denmark is a great example of a well run, transparent government, which also employs skilled tech workers to develop high quality government software in house, instead of farming it all off to slimy companies who are gonna ship low quality trash at insane markups.
This is fucking brilliant XD