If I'm IBM—and I was there—and we get a large bid, and the bid's a 10-year bid worth $40 million to $50 million, we're going to bid on it. If we don't bid, we're out for 10 years. Then you look at the thing and ask if this bid makes any sense.
The vendors are really smart. They can't see all the requirements in this. We know there is a whole bunch of things they can't contractually get into this requirements document. So they go down to headquarters and say, “Here's the deal. This is a $40-million bid, but we know it's going to be $150 million. We either bid on it or we're out. But we can bid on it as a $150-million deal instead of a $50-million deal, which will allow us to bid at a lower rate.”
It's not that the vendors are evil. It's just that this is the environment you're giving them to respond to. If you ask them to respond to a national environment, they will.