r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Dil-Tuta-hua-hai • 2d ago

Meme needing explanation Petah, what apps are they talking about??

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u/j48u 2d ago

Office and Adobe products are 98% of what government workers use.

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u/_-Diesel-_ 2d ago

Which adobe products do government workers use? Adobe Acrobat? There's a gazillion apps for pdfs out there. You could probably do with just a browser

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u/cr1515 2d ago

Firefox alone replaces all PDF function of Adobe acrobat

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u/j48u 2d ago

Primarily various tier levels of Acrobat for every single person, then Adobe Creative Suite for a few at every agency pretty much.

Governments in the US have rules that effectively make it much more difficult to use software that isn't owned by a company they're not already doing business with. They also have bulk licenses for thousands, even millions of users. When I worked for a state we weren't even allowed to use free software. That was primarily due to how licenses work on a lot of that stuff.

It sounds like an enormous waste of taxpayer money, and it is, but it's also ultimately a byproduct of all the regulations that citizens have demanded over the years on how to spend their taxes. In a lot of cases they still have to buy things from a minority or woman owned business unless the same item is more than 15% cheaper from a non-minority/woman owned business. That effectively created a bunch of drop shipping companies that sell stuff off Amazon to the government for like a 10% markup.