It bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over on JEDI?
blogs.microsoft.com
blogs.microsoft.com
Did you actually deliver on time and on budget?
It should be no surprise that he's pissed that that amount of investment isn't starting to pay dividends.
In contrast, Amazon's protest resulted in an injunction because the judge determined it was likely Amazon would prevail in trial.
DoD couldn't care less about Bezos' mansion or HQ2's impact on the city's economy.
And running a newspaper that continuously annoys a President doesn't really fit the apparently popular idea that Bezos is spending money to get favourable treatment from politicians.
Especially when that politician you're annoying is known to have a somewhat vindictive streak and doesn't quite grok the difference between being entrusted money and power to use on behalf of a country and owning money and spending it in his own interest
How do you know that?
At least from outward appearances, most of the ruling class and permanent government isn't particularly fond of the current President.
Try continuously. Every problem is someone else's fault, and every success is solely because of him.
Also the swine flu was much less of a problem for the US: the CDC reported less than 13,000 deaths in the US over a one year period vs stats today of over 34,000 for COVID-19 in just a few months — despite the extra precautions taken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...
Still, it seems to me that the Trump administration originally clearly wanted to go for a 'herd immunity' strategy and changed it due to political rather than practical considerations. I'm quite sure that if it had the relationship with the fifth estate that, say, the Biden campaign enjoys, there would have been very little political fallout as a result. The press has managed the truth far more aggressively for other administrations.
It seems he had a mix of reasons, he says. No doubt now that it's a functioning entity he has an added bonus. I remember at the time though most people thought he was throwing good money after bad.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniedenning/2018/09/19/why...
If he bought it to gain political influence, which seems to me the only reason that makes any sense whatsoever, or for any other reason that would put him in a bad light, he would not in a million years come out and say that openly.
Amazons share price has grown 136,000% in the past 23 years or 36.8% per year. That is far above S&P 500 returns and the exact case for when you want a company reinvesting in themself instead of paying out dividends.
Leaders like Bezos don't have to write down a memo to make sure people carry out their will.
You're wildly underestimating how rebellious newspaper editors are. If someone was messing with the reporting, everyone in DC would know, and you'd see remarkably detailed reporting on it throughout other parts of the press.
There is a mindset that dominates academia and carries on into the media.
It is reflected in the political donations of journalists.
And the distribution of the story bias.
It perhaps one should say "stunning lack of anything resembling a distribution".
All news has bias, but some are more biased than others, and that bias varies from personal and ingrained to organizational and intentional. It's important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
Project Veritas is a right-wing, extremely partisan organization with a shady history. They are not an organization that I would trust.
My awareness of him is from several "stunts" where he "went undercover" and interviewed his targets surreptitiously and then dishonestly edited the results to support his ideological narrative.
I associate cable news with general incompetence, corporate shilling and whatnot, but generally a "noisy" signal. PV, on the other hand, is driven purely by right-wing ideological goals.
Maybe if he bought and renovated an apartment building. Held events in a top floor space. Transformed the lobby into a community business and tech center.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/24/pentagon-...
https://theintercept.com/2019/06/03/amazon-defense-departmen...
https://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/252467312/D...
I also wonder to a certain extent why additional ceiling was not added under the current vehicle to do this if AWS was the preferred solution. MOUs signed, dollars routed, etc seems to be the easiest route rather than a massive procurement for something like this. It doesn't make any sense unless they're awarding an entirely new data center.
It also sounds like there's a disagreement about a core requirement / availability definitions which significantly impact storage costs, which obviously would change one's bid? https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252480585/AWS-hits-out-a...
DoD IG Report on the process: https://www.scribd.com/document/456555063/Report-on-the-Join...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...
... and AWS GovCloud [0].
---
[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/government/
I'm not picking on you as an individual, but there's great justice in Microsoft suffering this.
playing dumb and conflating what Microsoft did with "every dominant giant company ever" only serves to whitewash a (well-deserved) reputation that they themselves have had to work to disavow (both in word, publically, and in deed) for years. incidentally, this feels quite similar to how the Bill Gates Foundation whitewashes its eponymous benefactor's legacy having been the driving force behind said ruthlessness.*
* please don't make me put in a disclaimer about how people / companies can change, etc.-- we all know-- this is about preserving the past, not casting aspersions on these entities in the present
That's only because as times changed so did the US mostly lost interest in punishing or even investigating its own companies (that's subjectively understandable, nobody wants to hit their own). Voices say they're trying to change this, we'll just have to wait and see.
On the other hand I'm sure you agree that "U.S. federal court" is not the global standard in justice. And since the EU has no "home player" bias their courts did not shy away from investigating and fining big-tech monopolies like Google or Facebook.
"Playing dumb" and conflating Microsoft with exclusivity in the abuse of market position doesn't do this discussion any service. Your comment is strongly undermined by this clear bias.
- fair enough point, i agree that it is debatable whether Microsoft was "particularly deserving" of this reputation because of the limited scope and interest of the justice dept., etc., though on balance i still _personally_ find it most likely that they stood out in their bad-actor-ness in some way
- wtf is a "global standard in justice"? the existence of that is news to me. unless it is rather just "whatever court makes the kinds of judgments i agree with"? if the EU judicial process (to determine whether the EU should fine some exogenous bag of money an enormous amount of money) is so impartial, then why was their biggest upshot to put Margrethe Vestager, a maximally-ambitious politician, on the map? i know you're just trying to suggest an alternate judicial authority, but come on: you picked one that is even less likely to have been a "global standard in justice", whatever that is. and that all is to apparently exonerate Microsoft because a couple other companies, that grew up in Microsoft's shadow, used the same playbook later on?
- though i appreciate the argumentative tone / parallelism thing going on here, i think it's a biit of a stretch in this case-- i don't really feel like i'm conflating them at all. the valence of my comment is definitely that "Microsoft deserves to stand out here", not that they are uniquely guilty of this by any measure.
and, re bias: ultimately, insofar as i am "biased" (an affliction that actually affects everyone, regardless of opinion :^) it is because they (Microsoft) hurt my feelings by doing a bunch of mean things to technologically-related stuff that i loved during my techno-formative years. so, yeah--their abuses of market power stood out more to me than they may have to others, and are clearly grounded in a personal, subjective value judgment. the world still revolved then, and still continues to revolve-- there are more important abuses of power to be truly exercised about in the world, etc., etc.
They even destroyed companies they weren't even competing with, but thought they _might_ want to later! All MS needed to do was issue a vague press release that they were working on a competitor to [some successful software product] and all the customers would hold off on purchases until the original (successful) company went bankrupt. Many times MS never ever released anything, leaving everyone worse off.
So yeah. They seem nicer now, but they climbed over a lot of dead companies to get here.
Which also points to why we are in today’s predicament, having abandoned antitrust entirely.
Google didn't release the first version of Chrome until 2008, 10 years later.
Cutting all the politics and legalities, is n't AWS superior to Azure? I guess Azure's major revenue is still from MS-office subscriptions, but AWS is more battled hardened, more reliable and has more variety of services than Azure. At least, that's my perception.
Even assuming the accusations against Amazon are true as well: what's worse? (a) A vendor gaining unfair advantage and overcharging by 10%? Or, (b), the President using the power of the federal government to punish journalists for criticising him?
The Washington Post was, by the way, the newspaper that uncovered that the Trump Foundation had spent their complete budget at Trump properties or for personal expenditures such as the famous painting.
This was several million $, all donated by members of the public, ostensibly intended to help veterans. These accusations lead to a court case, which the foundation lost, requiring it to be shut down and his children being barred from serving on non-profit boards in the future.
So, to answer the choice from the beginning: if you choose (b) and allow the WashPo and other media to be pressured into silence, you'll lose the free press and still get the corruption.
IBM and Oracle made early protests that were dismissed, but Amazon's was sustained. Note, Oracle is appealing the dismissal of its protest.
This is regarding the injunction that is in place now:
In the ruling, the judge said Amazon was likely to show that Microsoft offered a “noncompliant storage solution” to reduce the costs of its JEDI bid and that the Pentagon “erred” by not issuing a “deficiency” to Microsoft’s proposal. The judge concluded that Amazon’s “chances of receiving the award would have increased absent [the Pentagon’s] evaluation error.”
https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2020/03/amazon-quit...
> The Pentagon’s inspector general “could not definitively determine” whether the White House influenced the procurement process for a major cloud computing contract because senior Defense Department officials were barred from answering questions on the subject during interviews, according to a 313-page report released on Wednesday.
> the IG said "we believe the evidence we received showed that the DoD personnel who evaluated proposals and made the source-selection awarding Microsoft the JEDI Cloud contract were not pressured about their decision on the award of the contract by any DoD leaders more senior to them, who may have communicated with the White House."
As with most articles, the juicy, salacious lines are at the beginning but the real details are 10 paragraphs in.
Based on the following paragraphs, the IG did find evidence of ethical misconduct by Amazon as they hired the DOD guy who helped form the JEDI program.
It doesn't hold the legal consequences of screwing up an FBI interview but can be devastating professionally.
So unless you can show that the questions they were barred from answering on the subject during their interviews were, in fact, responded to in writing later (which I haven't heard of happening)... then the distinction you're drawing doesn't seem to be relevant here, right?
The article asserts no answer; that they were forbidden to answer those questions. Written or otherwise.
There's no indication they answered the questions in a written form; it appears quite clear the White House asserted privilege, which would apply to any form of questioning.
>barred from answering questions on the subject during interviews.
vs
>barred from answering questions on the subject when asked questions on the subject.
vs
>barred from answering questions on the subject.
It's a limiting modifier phrase, so the default is to assume it was meant to modify the meaning.
It indicates the WH claimed privilege. Privilege applies to the questions/answers, not the medium in which they’re asked.
Senior Defense Department officials were barred from answering questions on the subject during interviews
IG Report PDF https://media.defense.gov/2020/Apr/15/2002281438/-1/-1/1/REP...
It means the "DoD personnel who evaluated proposals" were not pressured by senior DoD leaders, but by White House officials directly.
Or why would the statement explicitly mention "DoD leaders more senior to them"? If they were not pressured, why not simply say "DoD personnel were not pressured to award..."? And why would they be barred from testifying?
"We sought to review whether there was any White House influence on the JEDI cloud procurement. We could not review this matter fully because of the assertion of a “presidential communications privilege,” which resulted in several DoD witnesses being instructed by the DoD Office of General Counsel not to answer our questions about potential communications between White House and DoD officials about JEDI. Therefore, we could not definitively determine the full extent or nature of interactions that administration officials had, or may have had, with senior DoD officials regarding the JEDI Cloud procurement.
We provided the DoD Office of General Counsel with a list of questions, separated specific to each witness, and requested that they convey these questions to the White House Counsel’s Office for review and determination as to whether the White House would in fact invoke the presidential communications privilege. The DoD Office of General Counsel told us they then asked White House Counsel to review the list of questions and identify the subject areas, or specific questions, over which the President would assert the presidential communications privilege.
After our repeated requests for a response, on February 25, 2020, the DoD Office of General Counsel stated that White House Counsel was only willing to allow witnesses to provide written answers to our questions where the presidential communications privilege was invoked; however, it stated that no representation could be made as to the number or extent of questions that could be answered, and that any written responses would require further review by White House Counsel on the issue of maintaining the privilege. We carefully considered this response and concluded it would not be an appropriate and practical way to conduct our review, because there was no assurance as to which questions would be answered, it would unduly delay the report, it would not allow for an interview and inevitable follow up questions, and it would not assure that we would be receiving full information from the witnesses. We therefore declined to proceed in this manner. We further discuss the details regarding this matter in Section III below.
However, we believe the evidence we received showed that the DoD personnel who evaluated the contract proposals and awarded Microsoft the JEDI Cloud contract were not pressured regarding their decision on the award of the contract by any DoD leaders more senior to them, who may have communicated with the White House. We interviewed the personnel involved in the factor evaluation and source selection processes, including factor and selection board chairs, the Source Selection Authority, and the Procuring Contracting Officer. Most of their identities and involvement in the procurement award were unknown to White House staff and even to the senior DoD officials. None of these witnesses told us they felt any outside influence or pressure for or against a particular competitor as they made their decisions on the award of the contract. These witnesses also told us that public statements from the President and “media swirl” about the contract did not directly or indirectly influence the integrity of the procurement process or the outcome of the JEDI Cloud source selection.
Yet, these media reports, and the reports of President Trump’s statements about Amazon, ongoing bid protests and “lobbying” by JEDI Cloud competitors, as well as inaccurate media reports about the JEDI Cloud procurement process, may have created the appearance or perception that the contract award process was not fair or unbiased."
[1] https://media.defense.gov/2020/Apr/15/2002281438/-1/-1/1/REP...
So probably yes.
Nothing is solved by believing that the administration is somehow different than the dozen or so near identical leaders in other countries: that somehow this one uniquely is not pressuring companies hostile to it (in spite of the fact it has already publicly done so[2][3]).
And while a deferential Amazon might be bad, it's really something you'd want to nip in the bud before Google or Facebook become too terrified of the white house.
[1]https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/15/pentagon-amazon-tru...
[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/07/06/w...
[3]https://www.wsj.com/articles/snag-in-media-merger-stirs-tens...
That's like saying pleading the 5th is a confession...
What the White House is saying by claiming presidential privileged is 1) the president did indeed discuss it, which in itself is problematic and 2) that discussion is on par with a national security issue, which is an additional abuse of power.
As an aside, the 5th exists to prevent coerced confessions. In court, it is not to be taken as a sign of guilt because if it were, the point of the law would be moot. Where no court (or police) are involved, there is no possibility of coerced confession. Which is why everyone correctly views refusing to answer questions to friends, parents or reporters as very much a sign of guilt. And why confessions signed in police stations are very suspicious in many people's eyes. It certainly does not allow a government to refuse to answer to its people.
Perhaps true, and relevant how, when talking about American companies bidding for work for the American govt?
But when the head of government intervenes in the process for no clear reasons and then refuses to explain what that intervention was or why it happened or allow anyone else to comment; and when this is defended as remaining silent because speaking "may tend to incriminate" ala the 5th amendment, then it is clear there was grossly inappropriate intervention.
The issue is not whether Amazon or Microsoft win the contract. The issue is whether contract awards are going to be used to force companies to support and obey the party in power. That and the causally related "it can't happen here" mind set.
No, it doesn't. This is known as a first-price sealed bid auction. It guarantees they will roughly speaking offer the government the highest price they think they will win at, not their lowest price. For a more detailed analysis see the wikipedia aritcle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_auction
The "standard" (mathematical) answer to getting this property would be to run a second-price sealed bid auction, where the winner is the player with the lowest bid, but they get paid the amount of the second lowest bid, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction
I'm not sure how you would best adjust this system for non-identical goods.
I've spent a lot of time around government contracting and this whole bid process was mind-boggling badly handled by the government. The number of conflicts-of-interests involved throughout the process are absurd.
I remember when Boeing first was awarded the US Air Force tanker contract. It was soon rescinded for, among other things, fraud. They won the project again the second time around.
Recently, the US Air Force has refused delivery of the tankers because of manufacturing flaws.
Comparatively the A330 MRRT, which the first round winning bid was based on entered service June 2011.
I'm not trying to be a fanboy for MS, but I've found Azure much easier to adopt personally, and their tooling especially around databases can work really well. With AWS I feel like with every service I have to try out 3 or 4 third party tools for development which causes a ton of overhead and risk of using a tool that changes direction or stops meaningful development. Whenever I try to challenge the status quo people at work react like I'm an idiot. Although, I'm not suggesting to a heavily-invested org that they should switch clouds, but just asking questions like why we are heavily using RDS SQL Server when Azure SQL-whatever-version-you-want would work even better and often cheaper.
And how many companies don't use Office at all?
Is MSFT actually ahead?
Disclaimer: Thoughts and opinions my own, not that of any employer past, current, or future.
AzureAD is not Active Directory, and unless something has changed a lot in the last year (maybe it has?), Azure does not offer anything that looks, smells, and feels like on-prem AD in the cloud.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory-doma...
AWS has straight up guides for do's/dont's, and various ways to integrate their AD service with yours, including multiple scenarios such as running them as the masters of the forest, with read-only's on-site, and vice-versa.
But, maybe that was the intention without giving any details.
We’ll never know until office is separated out in MSFT reporting I guess.
> More than 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies run Microsoft Azure.
For example, I worked at a large media company and we had a couple Azure services spun up related to our email service.
But the bulk was on AWS, which handled our business workloads — eg, serving video.
Is Microsoft counting my former employer among that 95%?
disclaimer: former aws, and always oss, and actually used aws/azure/gcp in anger
Umm.. what? Are they mentally impaired?
I recently tried doing something very simple - use the QnA Maker. You should check it out for yourself - the number of clicks needed to do something as simple as this makes me question all the comments I see these days that say "Azure is as good as AWS".
No, it is not. It is a lot more complex for simple tasks, and looks like it has been assembled together by a bunch of monkeys.
Actually, I don't really see the problem. There are two hypothetical models:
1. Everyone gets to bid for the work once, and if they get it wrong, too bad for them. What's right and what's wrong? Depends on your point of view. What matters is that everyone got the same single chance to bid for a government contract.
2. Everyone bids for the contract. If their bid isn't being accepted, they're free to adjust it. What matters is what the terms ultimately are, not what they were at the start of bidding.
You may recognize that second model as the normal way everything is sold everywhere. What's supposed to be wrong with Amazon quoting a price for something, not getting a sale, and then lowering the price? We should hope they do, and that Microsoft responds by lowering their price even more.
What? #2 is a process, not a point event.
Also, "we delivered new innovations including native edge devices that can withstand the challenging environments in which the DoD operates." What the heck is a "native edge device"? Is it a server hosted on the back of a drone? Is it fortified compute hosted in a storage container in a forward operating base? Is it just Azure Stack HCI on a warship? Really interested in that one.
Having worked with the OIG (office inspector general), more than one of them, they are as much a political animal as any other office in DC, more so in lots of ways, so getting a report from them that says what you want is just a matter of phone calls and dinners with the right ppl.
AWS got played, plain and simple. They thought they were going to win and probably didn't do as mush as they should have to make sure they could win, and at the same time underestimated Microsoft. Just bc Azure was new to the DOD doesn't mean its new to the feds, I worked on several projects in AZ with the feds, and MSFT is not new to DC, they have been playing in DC politics for decades, and doing so very successfully. Which I am guessing from my outside view was AWS / Jeff's mistake. Buying a mansion and hosting partys in DC and a amateur move. There are a lot of very powerful ppl in DC that are former MSFT employees. It is very common practice to move from MSFT's fed teams to a fairly high position in a fed agency for your 20 years to get you retirement plan completed.
Instead, they made a contract that is too big to lose.
One rule for the rulers and another for the ruled.
Bezos is a Democrat and owner of the Washington Post, a paper which has been openly critical of Trump's administration.
- In house is the way to go!
- No the pervious administration was wrong - outsourcing is the way to go
Lather, rinse, repeat
You would think there is a loophole for classified documents, but it is not mentioned there. They may be a perverse incentive to contract out so it can be secret-ish.
The best example I can think of is Ghidra from the NSA, which was formally classified. See https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/blob/master..., parts of it are not the work of the government and not public domain.
They seem to be ignoring the massive elephant in the room, where there was political intrigue and a personal vendetta interfering in what's supposed to be an apolitical process[1].
> "I'm getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon; they're saying it wasn't competitively bid," Trump told reporters on July 18. "I will be asking them to take a look at it very closely to see what's going on because I have had very few things where there's been such complaining."
The fact that DoD officials were gagged from providing truthful testimony should automatically result in the results being thrown out. They wouldn't be gagged if they were going to say something helpful to Microsoft.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/08/01/747374991/pentagon-pauses-10-...