This is 10x what Facebook paid for Oculus.
I wonder what MSFT showed to them in the demos. I imagine it must have been mindblowing.
Facebook/Occulus likely may not have been technically eligible- Holo lens and Occulus Rift are quite different platforms[1], or less likely Facebook was not interested in the deal[2].
[1] Typical for enterprise contracts, vendors make sure the specs are custom fit for their products before the requirement becomes public, dictating the specs is most desirable way to win a deal as vendor.
[2] Given the size of deal unlikely FB was not interested, perhaps their B2G/B2M sales is not as strong as Microsoft to be able to win a deal this size.
could be worth up to
I suspect those words are doing a lot of heavy lifting
The open ended wording is more likely due to some variability in the services being rendered, for example there could be agreed rate for services with minimum and expected and cap on spends, however the actual value would change during the course of the project, with the quoted value being a reasonable estimate .
They still get to actually sell services after that, though. If you just divide Amazon's original $600 million contract for 10 years for C2S, that's $5 million a month. I can tell you when I was working for a single large program that hadn't even gone into ops yet last year, we were paying over $5 million a month per environment, and we had three environments. That's just a single tenant.
In contrast, this contract for AR HUDs is much more likely just a straightforward charge once, build once order. There's no additional money to be made on the backend selling in app purchases to platoons or add-on services. For JEDI, after building the cloud, Microsoft still gets to actually sell its IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services on top of that.
They pivoted to building their device for commercial use and had a bunch of military personnel images on their site before.
-- Just did a search and found this Bloomberg article from 2018 about it and it mentions MSFT bidding on the contract as well, so it looks like they tried but MSFT won it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-21/magic-lea...