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Comment by bigcorp-slave | Hacker News Reader

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

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Worth noting that Oracle sued on your first point, and the courts did not agree that there was any actual issues with the RFP. [1]

Also worth noting that their argument is that the President illegally interfered in the bidding process. And that a Judge agreed earlier this year that there was enough issues with the award that they halted the work on the contract. [2]

I want to see Microsoft in the space so there is more competition, but at the same time, there is definitely some issues to be addressed.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/03/oracle-loses-10b-jedi-clou... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/13/judge-halts-microsoft-work...

FWIW: This is why people hire lobbyists, to make sure any procurement is written in such a way so that only the client qualifies. Same with tax credits, and government funding.

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.

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.

Maybe this bring lots of other business as well.

If you were to provide for example some data analysis services for DoD, it would certainly make sense to run on same cloud where the data is.

Did you read the AWS blog post? [1]

You are missing a massive part of the story. They are accusing the president of interfering in a public procurement process because of his personal dislike of Bezos/Amazon.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/jedi-why-we-will-c...

Did you read his post? Amazon rigged the selection criteria in their favor.

> Did you read his post? Amazon rigged the selection criteria in their favor.

Which may, legal or not, be a legitimate basis for complaint, but even if so it wouldn't mitigate the utterly indefensible and clearly corrupt (if true) conduct by the government Amazon describes after the selection criteria was set.

Contracting officials corruptly collaborating with Amazon to set the criteria doesn't excuse the DoD subsequently corruptly ignoring the selection criteria to hand the contract to Microsoft as political retribution based on the President’s animus toward Jeff Bezos.

I read it just now.

It seems that the massive part missed is that AWS claims Trump screwed with AWS.

That's what I was referring to. I added it to my comment to make it less snarky.

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