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There’s that name again: Fujitsu, winner of hundreds of government IT contracts over the past thirty years.

I first encountered them twenty years ago when I was employed to support a project manager rolling out elements of a national programme for IT locally.

Fujitsu, a major supplier for the programme, went big with the freebies. Branded mouse mats. Branded mugs. Branded pens. Their name was found everywhere in the office — and in every involved organisation nationwide.

Ultimately, of course, that IT programme was a £10 billion write-off. Most suppliers exited contracts embroiled in litigation proceedings. Indeed, my brother, whose law firm had overseen many of the contracts, reported that a whole arm of the business was now devoted to suing the suppliers.

But litigation is no deterrent to these behemoths of global tech. No number of costly failures ever seem capable of deterring either party — supplier or commissioner — from setting out to give each other one more chance. Fujitsu has won over £6 billion worth of contracts since then, controversy incapable of discouraging it.

In any case, Fujitsu would argue that the failures weren’t theirs, but rather a poorly scoped specification, constantly moving goal posts, political interference, naive and wishful thinking, ambition unmatched to capacity, multi-sourcing from too many suppliers, and a complete lack of buy-in from those expected to use the systems.

Whatever the controversy of the moment, the company will calculate that it will soon blow over, as it has done so many times before. Bad press goes with the territory. IT projects are expected to fail in the march of progress. Usually, the human cost of failure is not measured. Normally, all that matters is the bottom line of profit or loss.

I think I still have a Fujitsu mousepad somewhere. Our employers were throwing them at us. And mostly for one very embarrassing reason: few of us had optical mice back then, and because the mat was made of a rigid, glossy plastic, it didn’t actually work with ball mice. That simple failure might have been a sign of things to come.

No, but the mug cupboard in the staffroom is still filled with branded cups gifted by numerous suppliers of technical services. Each sip of tea tells a story of its own. Although we’re not allowed to talk about any of those.