Jeff Bezos warns US military it risks losing tech supremacy
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Military production and procurement is also 10 times as costly per unitof weaponry compared to China or Russia.
This is due to the want-of-a-nail POV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail
So much attention is placed at the nail level that costs can climb to 100 times as much as what a civilian pays for the same thing. Modern electronic parts are made robotically and have very very good reliability - yet the MIL-SPEC procurement process often demands xrays for each part = $$$. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Military_Standar...
Have you ever wondered why Russia was able to maintain it's place in line as to space matters, to get the first satellite etc? People in the USA wanted to make and launch satellites well before Russia, and even conceived the geostationary communications nets. The same old farts sat on it. Those same old farts pushed Amazon off-the-puck for the AWS contract. We have all seen the mess Microsoft has made of the cloud services they launched, now the US military will suffer through that same waste of time, money and performance due to that same old boy network. So get used to it. China is going on top and will stay on top, Russia will carry on being robbed by it's own milpols, but will still hit waaay above it's weight due to the US Milpols..
Do you have any source on China's missile defense?
You seem to suggest that MS is poor at Cloud game, which is not exactly true. They are cost effective compared to AWS and catching up.
Maybe military wanted to save money. May be this is all about a better deal after all.
The cost effective argument doesn’t mean much - there’s something here that makes AWS competitive, including cost, or everyone would just use their competitors.
Disclaimer: I have about equal investments (greater than 1MM) in both companies, so I’m personally not biased for one vs the other.
I’ve been reading Jeff’s letters to the shareholders since the early 2000s. He basically says - we don’t care about optimizing for today. We’re in it for the marathon. Agree with him or not, but I doubt Amazon tried to give expensive pricing to the US government. I would wager they might even offer services at a loss - the profit would come from the long term lock in, not to mention all the government contractors who’d have to follow and use AWS.
> The biggest one is the top down ossification in the US military where aged milpols (military politicians) with old ideas and low mental capacity are in charge of all R&D as well as purchasing.
...I've been enjoying a little window into this sort of debate by reading https://acquisitiontalk.com/
Jeff is sour AWS lost to Microsoft for the DoD contract.