
Microsoft’s $10bn Jedi cloud contract “sets dangerous precedent”, says AWS - wlscr
https://tech.newstatesman.com/cloud/microsoft-jedi-contract-precedent-aws
======
ciarannolan
Wondering if anyone in these comments actually read the post.

They are making a legitimate point about an unfair public procurement process
that the president interfered in for personal reasons.

> There is a recurring pattern to the way President Trump behaves when he’s
> called out for doing something egregious: first he denies doing it, then he
> looks for ways to push it off to the side, to distract attention from it and
> delay efforts to investigate it (so people get bored and forget about it).
> And then he ends up doubling down on the egregious act anyway. On JEDI,
> President Trump reportedly ordered former Secretary Mattis to “screw’”
> Amazon, blatantly interfered in an active procurement, directed his
> subordinate to conduct an unorthodox “review” prior to a contract award
> announcement and then stonewalled an investigation into his own political
> interference. “Corrective action” was used as a way to halt our litigation,
> delay further investigations and incorrectly give the appearance that only
> one issue needed to be fixed while giving the impression that the DoD was
> actually going to fix something. While corrective action can be used to
> efficiently resolve protests, in reality, this corrective action changed
> nothing, wasted five months that could have been spent getting to the bottom
> of these serious concerns, and was designed solely to distract from our
> broader concerns and reaffirm a decision that was corrupted by the
> President’s self-interest

~~~
acruns
I didn't read it, and won't. Amazon got out played by msft. Bezos is an
amateur compared to the likes of the DOD team at msft, buying a mansion in DC
to host parties, come on Bezos, such an amateur move. Getting into a public
pissing match with the POTUS, stupid. Crying foul for months and months and
then writing a story about your slippery slope theory, amateur, and locks you
out of more cloud business with .gov. I have personally been through this
process, albeit not a $10B contract but very very large, and it comes down to
relationships. Jeff should be doing everything he can to steal away that msft
sales team that came in and made them look like fools so they can win the next
bid. He isn't playing against Barnes and Nobles, this is a corporation that
will spend tens of millions developing a competing product and give it away
for free for years to bankrupt it's competitors, they don't play fair.

~~~
paganel
You’re being downvoted for no good reason, fact is MS has a long history of
winning government contracts using all available means, Amazon looks to me
like the nerd who got into a street fight with only his glasses on, no gloves,
no knives, no anything.

------
bigcorp-slave
Can someone tell me if I’ve summed this up right?

\- Amazon colludes behind the scenes to get a contract proposal that on paper
only Amazon can fill (e.g. memory sizing options exactly matching things only
AWS provides)

\- There is a competitive bidding process without prices revealed and
Microsoft wins

\- Amazon cries no fair and demands to be allowed to bid again now that they
know how much Microsoft bid

\- Government re-evaluates the deal and picks Microsoft again

\- Amazon decides to make whiny posts about how aggrieved they, as a >1.5T
company, are

~~~
actuator
I wonder why Amazon is so bothered about this deal. If I remember the time
period correctly, this is a $1B/year deal. That is a low single digit
percentage of AWS revenue, do they really want to anger the government and let
themselves be exposed to antitrust investigations.

~~~
Analemma_
I wonder if it's less about the revenue and more about the credibility boost
that Azure will get if everyone sees the Pentagon going all-in on it.

------
briga
Would the precedent be less dangerous if the contract had been awarded to
Amazon?

~~~
echelon
Clearly. Bezos and top brass must be infuriated given that Amazon was involved
in crafting the proposal.

It's good for everybody that there is diversity in cloud. We need multiple
leaders in the space to keep costs low.

~~~
christkv
They got out corrupted on their own setup. Amazon cry me a River.

------
chrisco255
I don't know how many tens of thousands of small retail businesses are
struggling and being hampered by arbitrary government action right now,
benefitting Amazon, but it's really hard to feel bad for the $1.5 trillion
monopoly right now.

Amazon should probably be broken up and it's whining about losing out on a
multi billion dollar government contract.

~~~
ryanmarsh
In fed contracting, ironically, small businesses (especially those owned by
women, minorities, disabled veterans, etc) are given preferential treatment
sometimes to the detriment of thrift.

Regarding this contract, I don’t care who wins so long as it’s one of the
hyper scale vendors. The status quo for DevOps, infra, and managed services in
DoD is pure hell.

------
DudeInBasement
That other guy is dangerous \- _competition_

------
cryptica
>> Amazon called the single-supplier framework award “politically corrupted”

I wonder when corporations will start taking the place of governments, when
they will wage war against each other and kidnap each other's executives? This
is the world we're heading towards. There can only be one winner.

If they keep asking for more legal privileges for corporations, this is what
we're going to get.

The government should completely cut corporations out of all contracts before
it's too late.

~~~
jmnicolas
If we have to live in this kind of world can we at least go the full Shadowrun
way pretty please. I could see myself mutated in a giant troll wielding a
massive minigun ... and I want to see a dragon fly too!

------
manishsharan
I don't care about the contract one way or the other way.

What I do object to is the use of the word Jedi in this context. Somehow it
feels like defiling of a favorite memory.

~~~
Bedon292
JEDI is an acronym, but HN appears to like not capitalizing it. And to me at
least, it feels less bad when its all caps.

------
geofft
AWS blog post: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/jedi-why-we-
will-c...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/jedi-why-we-will-
continue-protest-politically-corrupted-contract-award/)

Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24379304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24379304)

------
maerF0x0
I think the "dangerous" precedent being set is now we can stop assuming AWS is
the only "cloud" out there. It always amazes me how 1) so many small companies
assume AWS must be the only way to go and 2) once there they are so terrified
to run work loads on other services. *

* worth noting this is my anecdotal experience, would love to hear stories of which companies do the contrary.

------
cryptica
The $10 billion was printed out of thin air by the Federal Reserve Bank and
given to the government in exchange for some bonds which they also created out
of thin air... And then that money was given to Microsoft as part of this
phony contract.

The real story here is that Microsoft is getting $10 billion of free money
from the government and Amazon is upset about it.

------
jumelles
Wow. Amazon’s blog post about this comes off as remarkably petty and
emotional. Very strange look for a massive corporation.

------
nguyenkien
I through it was 10 billion

~~~
lkbm
Wikipedia agrees[0]. Looks like the article and headline have now been
updated.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Enterprise_Defense_Infra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Enterprise_Defense_Infrastructure)

~~~
nguyenkien
Yes, they updated

------
signal11
The history of the JEDI contract is interesting[2018]. It was contested by
Oracle and also by IBM, and was widely seen as a last-gasp attempt by two
entrenched 'enterprise tech' vendors to remain relevant in the cloud
marketplace.

But as [2018] notes, Oracle complained.

> In the complaint, Oracle dives into deep detail about two DOD officials whom
> it alleges had ties to Amazon Web Services, the cloud company thought to be
> in the frontrunning for JEDI. Oracle believes those two officials influenced
> the JEDI strategy to be tailor-fit for an AWS win.

The interesting thing here is that both Oracle and IBM had an initial strategy
of painting the JEDI requirements as exceeding DOD's needs, an interesting
tactic given their relative lack of scale -- they are in capex terms also-rans
in the cloud market.

After a review, in April 2019, the Pentagon said that the employee's actions
did not affect the process and further ruled IBM and Oracle out of the
process[2019], while retaining Amazon's and Microsoft's bids.

Microsoft was finally awarded the contract in late October, which prompted
Amazon to claim "political influence" because of Trump's statements re the
contract, and led to a further legal challenge[2020].

[2018] [https://www.fedscoop.com/ibms-protest-10b-jedi-cloud-
contrac...](https://www.fedscoop.com/ibms-protest-10b-jedi-cloud-contract-
dismissed/)

[2019] [https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/12/after-
two-y...](https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/12/after-two-years-
jedi-finally-underway/162005/)

[2020] [https://tech.newstatesman.com/cloud/amazon-pentagon-
contract...](https://tech.newstatesman.com/cloud/amazon-pentagon-contract-
appeal-us-judge)

------
Cheyana
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n-86ax7TYNM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n-86ax7TYNM)

------
stedaniels
From the AWS blog post [0].

> This time, AWS offered a lower cost by several tens of millions of dollars.

On a contract worth $10bn does tens of millions really make a difference?

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/jedi-why-we-
will-c...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/jedi-why-we-will-
continue-protest-politically-corrupted-contract-award/)

~~~
dragonwriter
> On a contract worth $10bn does tens of millions really make a difference?

In government contracting, if cost is supposedly the formal deciding criteria,
yes.

The allegation isn't that the cost amount was significant as a value amount,
but that it's one of many examples raised of the DoD allegedly making
decisions for which pretexts are offered that are inconsistent with the facts.

The laws of government contracting don't allow the kind of arbitrarily moving
goalposts that Amazon’s description of the DoD behavior would indicate, and
the reason it doesn't is as a safeguard against corrupt political favoritism
with contracts as patronage.

Focussing on whether the cost _qua_ cost is significant in isolation is
focussing is missing the forest for the trees.

~~~
chrisco255
The laws of government contracting? What laws do you speak of? By the way
there is corrupt political favoritism going on at all levels of government and
it is naive to assume otherwise.

------
tehjoker
You've set a truly dangerous precedent of not giving me billions of dollars. I
wasn't aware that AWS executives were whiny babies.

I know HN doesn't like a non-serious tone, but do these clearly massively
self-interested guys really deserve more than mockery? They're not trying to
alert the public to the horrors of a bloated military-industrial complex.
They're trying to get their beak wet and crying when they didn't get any.

