Google Drops Out of Pentagon's $10B Cloud Competition
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having lived in Northern Virginia aka NOVA which is where a lot of businesses have offices and would be the potential area of HQ2, Research Triangle park is a tech hub for North Carolina that also afford lower wages compares to NOVA or other urbanized areas and I would consider 'in the area' of DC. Maryland is also an overlooked option which also has many datacenters.
NOVA is much more likely due to it meeting travel requirements much easier.
NOVA also already has many giant datacenters and already houses complexes for companies like VISA in addition to being one of the major backbones in the USA of the internet.
I would prefer the HQ be closer to NY, Boston or Toronto but that is a long shot I think unless the political climate forces them to make an unpredictable decision.
While anywhere east of the Mississippi is going to be a rude awakening compared to Washington, Oregon, California, Colorad, Utah, Wyoming &c., New York, Massachusetts, Canada or Maryland would be far worse than Virginia, due to sclerotic governance. Virginia’s bad compared to the western half of the country, but those places are even worse.
The eastern seaboard has over 400 years of accumulated regulations, rent-seeking and 'we've always done it that way!'; Virginia is relatively better than the alternatives. If there's not a better argument for automatically-sunsetting laws than the East Coast, I don't know what it is.
Give it a few years and CA will blow the east coast out of the water.
Having lived in Northern VA for 7 years I do not think NOVA is any different than > New York, Massachusetts, Canada or Maryland
in fact - out of that group....Maryland is far better than Northern VA in regards to governance... which is the only place in VA I could possible imagine.... especially with the location of international airports being a requirement. In Maryland...the BWI airport in my opinion has poor transportation options in my opinion unless Amazon is okay with employees driving instead of using trains/buses.
In any case... what we say does not impact what HQ2 will choose... I hope... unless the decision makers are reading this, in which case -- its time to get real and build your own island in international waters and stop this bs with choosing somewhere in NA :-)
The only reason I know about the area is that lots of banks I have worked for have "Near Shore" tech centres there - Deutsche, Credit Suisse, etc.
I recommend watching the actual talk, but there are a few sections of it summarized (including a bit about Amazon HQ2) in this article: https://www.recode.net/2018/9/19/17878766/scott-galloway-pre...
How many orders or strategy doctrines are delivered via e-mail/spreadsheets?
At least once every couple of months someone emails me something pretty sensitive looking, but so far nothing super exciting.
More boring stuff, such as travel itineraries and boarding passes for a defense minister show up almost weekly.
"Why, Sally, you know what to do - claim this is a decision entirely based on ethics!"
"Hey, we'll just back out ourselves and claim it's because of ethics"
A while back an article surfaced here [0] about how the JEDI competition is basically tailored to AWS, and how Amazon had lobbyists stipulate the exact conditions.
[0]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/has-bezos-become-mor...
In other words, they couldn't meet the requirements for the RFP, so they decided it was advantageous to score some morality points by dropping out...
Google's management are more than happy to help the government engage in illegal assassination abroad via drone, but it's employees are not. For Google's executives, this is less to gain morality points with the public, but to retain employees who would leave otherwise.
Though another aspect is, they may have already gotten an indication from the DoD that dropping out of Maven would be held against them when evaluating the proposals. RFPs aren't just about the dollar value, and they'd certainly take into account the possibility of Googlers refusing to do the work needed to fulfill the contract.
Corporations are not people. Judge them by their actions, in the end, what matters is what happened, not intent. Almost every public institution's actions are always ascribed by some as driven by money or power, or others by high minded values.
The employees at a company can have high minded values. Even the company culture can have high minded values. But in the end, financial decisions made by companies are amoral, and what matters is, what the decisions actually were, not whether the executives were pressured into it, because ultimately, there is pressure on all sides from all stakeholders.
Giving up on $10 billion, no matter how you slice it, is a huge hit. They could have fought for it, but decided not to, based on whatever pressures they were reacting too. That's a win.
Oh nonsense, corporations are run by people. People who make deliberate decisions on behalf of the company. And implicit trust is bestowed upon these stewards of the company by the company's employees. I think theres a tacit understanding that these people will balance both shareholder value and ethical concerns. A such intent very much matters.
Look, I'm a Google employee, I really like Sundar, he comes off as a pretty authentic, caring person. But what he says in "official statements", even internal communications, like every company, is very much authored by committee, by corporate messaging, by legal, it is not his voice alone.
So if Sundar says he's doing something because it's morally right, should I believe that's the reason, because in less 'official' statements, in his own words, he comes off as a genuine person? Or, should I disbelieve it, because in more official communications, it comes off as overly parsed and triangulated?
You face the same issue with politicians. Politicians say they truly believe one thing, they announce their intent, and then when they get into office, you find their voting records quite a bit different than what you believed them to be for. I think you should judge these politicians by their actions, not their campaign speeches, not their heartfelt fireside chats, but what -- when the rubber meets the road -- they vote for. The votes don't lie, protestations of piety can.
The "intent" was to win the Pentagon contract, it is not some subjective thing here. I think when a project has an internal codename and team devoted to it it's safe to assume the pursuit and desire for Pentagon business was quite certain.
The rest of your comment reads like false equivalency and rationalizing.
Of course they wanted to win the Pentagon contract, and there's nothing wrong with that, if it is just providing G-Suite, uncustomized, or lightly customized GCP computing facilities, the same as any other Enterprise organization could purchase. What Googlers objected to in Project Maven wasn't working with the Pentagon at all, but specifically helping them to design AI imaging stuff. Sell them Google Docs or Google Compute Engine? Sure.
Some people in this thread have suggested Google dropped out because they couldn't meet specifications to get certifications, that's the cynical interpretation. The non-cynical interpretation is that the contract would require them to do things their employees object to, and make them look like hypocrites given their "AI principles" document. The idea that someone would drop a $10 billion contract bid purely over getting some bureaucratic certification doesn't make sense, because for a $10 billion contract (likely the low end giving DoD budgets), you'll spend $1 billion CAPEX if you need to get it, or more likely, go through providing the documentation and audits needed (besides, I highly doubt the competitors on the contract have anything approaching Google data center security levels)
No we are talking about the same "intent." Your response was to the point being articulated in the two parent posts.
>"Some people in this thread have suggested Google dropped out because they couldn't meet specifications to get certifications, that's the cynical interpretation"
No the cynical interpretation is that your company dropped out of this Pentagon business due to some moral considerations.
Believing Google dropped out due to moral considerations is by definition, the idealistic interpretation. At this point, I'm not sure we're even speaking the same language anymore, so lets end it here.
Authentic? Perhaps to you he comes across that way. Far from it he feels to me. He seems just... well, thoughtful, I guess. To the point that he clearly insults the intelligence of the company’s employees.
Well said. When it became clear that the pentagon wanted AI imaging for AI-assisted drone strikes, instead of just Google cloud, Google Docs and other benign services, many Googlers started to speak up for what they believed was right. This wouldn’t be more than an afterthought at many other less idealistic companies.
I don't think that's all ethics related stuffs. The Pentagon's something different for me. I'm a Chinese and I definitely know that the Pentagon WILL use technology to fight against us. Should I write code for them? Or I should trust them not abusing?
If your country is on the other side of NATO, what do you think?
You would have to be unemployed, receive food and water through non-sales-tax-included methods (like living in New Hampshire or going to a local soup kitchen or boiling grass), and never own a home or rent even.
Well come to think of it, you could probably eat sleep and drink at a casino all day, if it's on native land.
And native american land by it's definition is not taxed.
Besides that, if you complete work for the US government just assume the chinese government is going to have access to it eventually ;)
Their "moral" concerns are driven by the noisy section of their workforce that reflexively opposes the US military. These people aren't outspoken about the behavior of the Chinese government, in fact they probably don't think about it much.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/technology/google-employe... * https://www.foxnews.com/tech/google-employees-quit-over-cont...
I don't know who told you that, but you shouldn't trust them.
Guess who Google actually listens to, though.
On the flip side It was painless to use both GCP and AWS and even second tier cloud providers like Digital Ocean or Packet.net are simpler to use then Azure. My standing advice for anyone is only use Azure if you are 100% in the Microsoft ecosystem using .NET and Visual Studio to develop your applications, and you plan on using their professional services to help you out when you hit problems
Azure is mainly for .NET though, but they also have first class support for Node.js, which integrates directly with stuff like application insights.
I use Azure professionally, but I use a range of things personally, and I think I’d never pick anything but Azure for enterprise if my shop was mainly Microsoft. If you aren’t primarily Microsoft, I’d pick AWS.
> At the most basic level performance is way below what I have seen with AWS. It was taking about 20 times longer to load data into a database cluster in Azure then into AWS.
Eh okay. I have a VM running IN Azure which is much faster than one running in AWS.
Google on the other hand are still in the legal grey area, and they’re even more automated than AWS.
I say “won”, because there isn’t a clear monopoly in Europe, and AWS allied themselves with a bunch of lobbying powerhouses like Deloitte and EY, but I’d say Azure is still far ahead.
But that strength is also a weakness. They have at least 3 US Office 365 offerings (Commercial, "Government Community", and Federal). It's harder for them to hit compliance targets, because their customer scope is so huge. The security needs for XBox are different than the Army. I think AWS and in many cases GCP has a better story there.
The support equation is irrelevant.
We don't know what the Pentagon will use the raw compute/storage resources for. I'm sure they are not telling MS/AWS/GOOG either.
I do know that the US Military invests heavily to make weapons better at killing, but also better at killing the right targets. Let's assume the due to US politics war is unavoidable. But, because of investments in technology (smarter drones, AI, guidance systems) in systems powered by the JEDI project we are now able to reduce civilian casualties by 90% in a military conflict. Hell even 10% is a huge win. Is this now a morally just cause?
It's obviously true, but says nothing about anything outside itself.
Google doesn't care about any possible humility of not getting a DOJ contract. Because nobody would notice, and those who do are more likely to see it as a positive, considering the DOJ's reputation in procurement.
It also doesn't cost anything relevant to stay in. And even if the probability may be small small, the magnitude is enormous.
Leaving us with no clear motive BUT something that may have to do with morality. Of course this may be motivated by worries about their reputation among current and potential employees, but then we're getting into the whole "what's true altruism" debate which is rarely as productive as even fake altruism.
Tough.
Even though issues regarding big techs nowadays are all high politicized, but Google stands in the centre of the current political radicalization in US. Their means are extremely restricted.
IIRC, the current administration has less goodwill towards Amazon because its CEO owns the Washington Post. I don't think that was a factor.
Two publicly documented big opportunities missed so far - the Pentagon missile deal and to an extent this. Maybe the China search engine opportunity is also at risk. Time for Wall Street to sell Google, and let their opinion be known!
If you want a stock that soaks up DOD contracts, pick up Raytheon. I have a friend that works there and he can’t tell anyone what he does there.
The spying on citizens part is pretty entrenched, I don’t see any candidate running on a platform of not doing that.
“If someone’s going to do it, it might as well be us” is about the extent of corporate ethics.
It's easy to throw around ethics but many people don't think that far ahead and saying "we shouldn't make weapons" is naive and dangerous when the rest of the world already has them pointed at us.
I think the potential negatives with this technology outweigh the positives.
AI isn't only used for drone strikes, and more accuracy in means a better outcome in actually hitting the target while preserving the lives of innocents (and thereby ending the conflict quickly and reducing the chance of eventual retaliation by other groups). We can always launch more attacks if we have more targets to destroy, not just hope the drone randomly blows things up during its mission.
There is also no offense or defense, they are the same thing when talking about weapons. Having the best weapons and never using them is far better than being unprepared when someone else comes along with more capabilities.