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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

I checked but is there any reason why the totals are pretty low? for example looking for Microsoft I found a total of 33M http://openbeta-contracts-explorer.usaspending.gov/#!/year/A...

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Probably because of the way government contracting works with (value added) resellers. One such is "Carahsoft" (see http://openbeta-contracts-explorer.usaspending.gov/#!/year/A...). If you dig into the details of the transactions you'll see that many are for technology companies' software and services. One example link that includes Salesforce, HP, VMWare, Symantec, etc.: http://openbeta-contracts-explorer.usaspending.gov/#!/year/A...

And for those companies providing services (i.e. people doing work, rather than just SaaS) there's a lot of subcontracting that doesn't show up in this data.

I don't know much about this new explorer tool, but it's based off of USASpending.gov which is a bit fickle...which is to be expected given the messiness of the data involved (companies have varied names, subsidiaries etc., among other real-life complexities).

But you can do an "advanced search" by registered company name, and this is what comes up for "Microsoft" -- probably doesn't include all of its subsidiaries that don't have "Microsoft" in the name: ~$1.4 billion in awarded contracts

https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/AdvancedSearch.aspx?sub=y&...

edit: Oh I know the reason for the discrepancy...the homepage of the beta app says it's only partial data:

> Added more years of contract data to now include 2011 - 2015

You really have to have a groomed database to get reasonably accurate data. At a former employer (federal market research) we maintained a separate database of contractors mapping the relationship between companies based on DUNS number, which enabled rolling up totals for subsidiaries. Of course that doesn't account for JVs or subcontracting.

Government requires competition for purchases. So vendors like Dell, SHI, CDW, Carahsoft, etc are all wholesalers who compete over the pennies for fulfillment to sell Microsoft (and most other) software.

Two reasons:

1. Agencies often buy from distributors and integrators, not publishers. In this case, original manufacturers may appear in the variable `descriptionofcontractrequirement`.

2. Spelling may differ. Variable `dunsnumber` is be a better indicator for uniqueness.

And DUNS number is also pretty useless as it is based on location (not organization).

A search on sam.gov for "lockheed" results in 207 records (all probably the same company).

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