Every now and then, some startup will complain that the specifications are very exclusive and that they favor large vendors and disqualify new startups.<\/p>\n
They’re right. When their pushback crosses a threshold in the public discourse, some ex-bureaucrat or the other will propose structural reforms to tender specifications.<\/p>\n
But nothing will change.<\/p>\n
That’s because the proposed reforms betray ignorance of how bureaucracy and the B2B technology business work.<\/p>\n
Let’s take an example of the changes proposed to tender specs in the op-ed entitled “Hit Ctrl + R on Gov Tech Shopping<\/a>” by Aruna Sharma in a recent edition of Economic Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n In my experience of selling B2B technology for four decades, I find the article to be full of noble thoughts but highly impractical suggestions. Let’s look at some of them.<\/p>\n 1. As policymakers grapple with implications of AI, much of the debate has focused on ensuring that regulation keeps pace with innovation. <\/em><\/p>\n Compliance is “staying in the box”. Innovation is “going out of the box”. By definition, they’re pointed in opposite directions. “Compliant Innovation” is an oxymoron. If something were fully clear to everyone and totally conformed with extant business practices, it wouldn’t be an innovation in the first place.<\/p>\n It’s in the nature of technology, especially if it’s backed by venture capital, to move fast. We’ve all heard Silicon Valley credos like “Iterate rapidly”, “Move fast and break everything”, etc. In sharp contrast, regulation goes through a slow grind of public consultations and cannot break anything.<\/p>\n So regulation cannot, in theory and in practice, keep pace with technology – unless it’s EU-style ex ante<\/em> regulation, which is notorious for inviting the jibe “EU regulates everything and invents nothing”.<\/p>\n 2. Procurement of emerging tech must promote efficiency and competition by avoiding unnecessary dependence on any single tech or vendor. <\/em><\/p>\n As they say \u201cAn Indian marriage is between two families, not just two individuals.\u201d Likewise, procurement of B2B technology is like marrying into an ecosystem, not just a product (everywhere in the world). For reasons that will become clear in a bit, very little of the dependence is “unnecessary” and most of it is caused by factors that are outside the control of the buyer.<\/p>\n 3. By the time specifications are drafted, vetted and finalised, they may be outdated.<\/em><\/p>\n Agreed. I’m reminded of a government agency that floated a tender for IBM-compatible PC with Intel 80386 CPU. Eighteen months elapsed by the time the contract was awarded. By that time, 80386 became obsolete and 80486 had gone mainstream. My company kindly offered to supply 486-based PCs at no extra cost.<\/p>\n I thought the customer would be delighted with the free upgrade.<\/p>\n I was sadly mistaken. When I told my counterparty at the customer organization that we’d be happy to supply 486 PCs instead of 386 PCs at no extra cost, he nearly threw a fit and warned me that, the tender specs said 386, the purchase order said 386, so the delivery challan, invoice, and hardware installation report must also say 386 and nothing else. There was no way they’d accept 486 in lieu of 386.<\/p>\n Under normal circumstances, we’d have regretted this order. But, in this specific case, failure to accept and execute the order could have led to dire consequences for my company like getting blacklisted by an entire industry. Long story short, two people from our materials department flew to Taiwan and went shopping for obsolete 386 CPUs in the streets of Taipei.<\/p>\n 4. The way forward is not fewer specifications but less prescriptive ones that remain flexible enough to accommodate technological change.<\/em><\/p>\n B2B technology products are rarely in an island and often belong to a larger ecosystem. Therefore, the choice of a B2B tech product is shaped not just by the specs of the product per se<\/em> but also by the characteristics of the larger ecosystem such as software, labor, peripherals and spare parts.<\/p>\n Therein lies the rub:<\/p>\n Nobody buys a computer for the sake of a computer but to run software. Customers need people who can implement and support the software. They also connect printers, scanners, and other peripherals to a computer. Computers conk out, so customers need people and spare parts to fix them. Therefore, even if Linux can do the job – or even do it better than Windows – a vast majority of buyers will spec Windows. Very few customers have the heft to make an entire ecosystem tow their line.<\/p>\n 5. Procurement specs should become outcome-based<\/em><\/p>\n It has become fashionable for everyone to throw around the “outcome” word these days. Most often, when they say “outcome”, people actually mean “output”. (Click here<\/strong> <\/a>\u00a0to see an example that illustrates the difference between the two concepts.)<\/p>\n It’s difficult to write specs by outcomes for many reasons:<\/p>\n tl;dr: It’s not too practical to spec tenders by outcome since outcome-washing<\/em><\/a> has become very rampant.<\/p>\n I’m not saying reforms should not be attempted because they’re hard.<\/p>\n I’m only saying they need to stand a chance of working. And the ones proposed in the above article don’t.<\/p>\n The tried-and-tested playbook for driving change in a private sector company comprises the following steps: The big boss asks his or her team to present pros and cons of the proposed change, facilitates debate, and finally takes a decision – and the buck stops there.<\/p>\n But civil servants are rewarded for avoiding mistakes, not taking risks.\u00a0As M Muneer highlights in his recent op-ed entitled “End dependence days: What India should and should not build<\/a>” in Economic Times<\/em>:\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Therefore, it’s naive to expect bureaucrats to make structural changes to tender specifications.<\/p>\n Startups shouldn’t get disheartened by this. While public sector is a big buyer of B2B technology, the purchasing, acceptance and payment process is so long winding that it could suck out the energy of resource-constrained startups. To a certain extent, it’s a smart move for most startups to eschew government business in their early stages. As Muneer points out,<\/p>\n Not marketing advice but private sector is often the best ICP for a B2B technology vendor in its early stages.<\/p>\n A condensed version of the above post was published in Economic Times<\/em> dated 21 August 2026.<\/p>\n Specifications in government tenders define functional, technical, performance and corporate requirements of the product being procured. Examples of specs for a B2B technology product include: Vendor must have at least three customers who use the product The product must run on Oracle database Response time of the product should not exceed 3 seconds Vendor must … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":14660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,8,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b1-integrated-marketing","category-it-marketing","category-mandatory-category"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14627"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14784,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14627\/revisions\/14784"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ET-OPED-20AUG2026-TENDER-SPECS-GOVT-PROCUREMENT-fi.jpg\")
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