Just speculation, but I'm thinking, just like with New York, Bezos and Amazon are happy to be rid of JEDI. Too much politics for 10 bill in revenue easily made up elsewhere in the world.

They just seemed to let go of New York and JEDI wayyy too easily for being one of the wealthiest companies in the world. When someone like that bows out of such large projects so easily, something's off. And I have to take it at face value that they maybe just want revenue and not politics. Because no other reasons seem to present themselves here.

10 Billion is quite a lot. And government contract is very stable income.

But I got your point on politics, that is something pretty unpredictable.

It is for sure a lot. AWS wants it. Everyone wants it.

But, it is a maximum of $10Billion ...over 10 years. Th at is the key thing to focus on. I'm sure both companies have private sector customers right now that pay a quarter to half-billion a year right now.

I think the greater damage is optics vs financial..and optics can cost a lot.

Let's say AWS makes $30-Billion this year. So, losing $1-billion this year is 3.33%? (Though I'm sure the contract starts not this year?)...How much will AWS be making in 10 years?

It's not only about the $10 billion. Microsoft has essentially cemented being the cloud provider for the Pentagon for the foreseeable future.

Once all of the pentagon is integrated with Azure, after the 10 years are up, it will be very unlikely for Pentagon to want to switch, not only due to costs, but everyone will have been trained specifically for handling Azure.

This gives Microsoft a massive lead in terms of government infrastructure and all but guarantees we'll be seeing more and more contracts handed to Azure.

Hopefully both sides learn from the long-term downward spiral of HP's contract with the Navy.

https://www.wired.com/2010/08/hp-holds-navy-network-hostage/

Yeah, but if MS wants that headache, why not let them have it?

Politics nowadays are just way too unpredictable and destructive. Just best not to be anywhere near it when, say, cost overruns on this project happen and you still haven't delivered anything the DoD is actually using.

> Microsoft has essentially cemented being the cloud provider for the Pentagon for the foreseeable future.

How? AWS already has 3 entire regions dedicated to the US government and those aren't going away anytime soon.

AWS certainly has numerous US government contracts; however, none of those are from the Pentagon. With the awarding of the contract, the Pentagon specifically has chosen Microsoft over AWS.

Note: Pentagon != all US govt agencies

  it is a maximum of $10Billion ...over 10 years

... because government contracts never go over original estimates?

I'm not sure if there is a "law" around this, but, I assume nearly all contracts go over budget. Private or .gov.

But, government contracts are pretty beholden to a tight, static budget. Once the money is gone, it's gone. You can't necessarily go ask for additional taxes and budget for the year. Many times, you literally cannot go over budget no matter what. The pay-as-you go, variable pricing you get in the cloud, is actually a challenge in government budget.

In the private sector, when you go over budget..funds can be found elsewhere in the company, etc.

Politics? Amazon already serves the CIA so that probably wouldn’t be a con. 10B is a massive contract.

Ask Frank Underwood says: When the tits are that big, everybody gets in line.

The CIA is not politics though. Politics require highlighting. You'd be surprised how little the CIA highlights of what it's doing, and what that costs. Contrasted against the military, which tends to highlight almost everything of what it's doing, and what that costs.

And 10 billion over 10 years is what? Maybe 3 to 5% of Amazon's yearly revenue? You really want to be at the epicenter of the shitstorm that will happen if the project goes over budget and you still haven't delivered anything anyone in the DoD actually uses? (Maybe I shouldn't have said "if the project goes over" but "when"?) Especially being a big tech firm nowadays?

And you're gonna step into all that unnecessary drama for access to a 10 year / 10 billion project?

I don't think so. Not for a billion a year in revenue when you're already sitting at over 230 billion a year in revenue. (Or even just the over 30 billion a year that AWS alone is sitting at.)

Admit it man, politics being what they are these days, particularly for big tech firms, it's just not worth it.

You must contend with politics working for USG at any level for any department/agency. There are plenty of very nasty, bitter politics within each of the intelligence agencies, as well as, across the larger intelligence community (IC). These are massive organizations with very large budgets. Because these battles occur in classified settings, they are not visible to the public. I highly doubt that AWS hasn't had to content with a myriad of political battles within CIA, not the least of which being, groups within the CIA who remain skeptical about "cloud" and trusting a third-party with their data.

But they don't care about any political battle invisible to the market.

That's the point.

It's the shitstorms that generate the tweetstorms that impact their larger bottom line.

Of course they care about those battles. Not only could they impact their renewal and/or trigger large penalties, but they can (and often do with large contracts) percolate up to Congressional oversight committees. Unless you have experienced intensity of political battles within the IC, it is impossible to understand their stakes (in terms of both money and reputation) for $100 million+ programs of record.

I’m not sure, a lot of people think HQ2 is being built in the capital region just to support JEDI, and as others have mentioned the knock on effects in the ecosystem are much larger.

$10B in this bid, once you win one, others are easier the thinking goes. This is for Department Of Defense, USA has a lot of other departments. Not to mention state and local. "If we were good enough for DOD, surely your county /state can trust us..."

They made a lot of noise about building a new hq in Arlington. I can’t imagine they’re going to build it out at any scale now.

US East is in NoVA I think? Basically, the defacto HQ for AWS. Why would Amazon have a second HQ anyplace else was always the real question?

(They seemed to like the idea of New York a little bit. Probably because of multimodal transport connections to NoVA and the Europe/Africa side of the world. But even that fell through. And as far as I can understand, that too was because of politics.)

I live about 2 miles away. I can tell you that not only have they been building it out at a prodigious pace (they had people were working in Crystal City by the end of 1Q2019). They have signed construction contracts, leases, extended offers to employees, etc. They are committed to it now.

Also, Amazon has a tremendous footprint here already. Their largest region is located in Ashburn (~25 miles east), CIA is roughly 5 miles for Crystal City, Herndon and Ballston have large AWS sales/engineering offices, and Richmond (roughly 1.5 hours south) hosts one of their largest distribution centers on the east coast. In short, they were committed to this area long before HQ2, let alone JEDI. They cannot be happy about losing the contract award, but it was only one of many things Amazon/AWS are going in NoVA.

What about the Post is related to this, specifically?

10s of millions of people in US think that Wash Post is colluding with coup orchestrators, trying to overthrow constitutionally elected US president.

With the above sentiment, giving Wash Post owner a 10 bln dollar Gov contract for work with military -- would have be borderline absurd. It is difficult to separate these types of discussion from political bias of commenters, but you would have to create your own views (if you do not have them already)

For pro-president, anti-Coup views on the topic, search for:

To find some examples of Wash Post collusion with the coup crowd, just use:

- "Washington Post forced to correct"

- "Washington Post fabricated" in non-Google non-Yahoo search engines.

- "Washington post Covington no apology"

- "Washington post sandbagged"

It's a lot more absurd to make government contract decisions based on newspaper coverage the president doesn't like.

I agree that Bezos's/ Wash Post disposition relative to the anti-President coup, likely had to be important consideration.

As I noted, 10s of millions of tax payers consider Washington Post is not a newspaper, but a propaganda agent actively involved in to the coup attempt against a constitutionally elected President of US.

Just chucking it of to 'president does not like a news paper' -- is diluting the tremendous affects these things have on the well-being of the country and its citizens, and, (given US position in the world stage) , on the rest of the world.

Additionally, anti-president spying and evidence manufacturing was, in part, orchestrated by leaking to these 'newspapers' and then referencing the generated articles as 'potential evidence' that warrants the investigation.

(eg, leaking the dossier [1] and other fabrications through news organizations )

Some think the anti-president coup attempt in US, is good for the country and for the world.

Some do not.

That probably, defines a big part of person's view, where they stand on awarding contract to AWS vs MS.

(Unless there is tremendous technical evidence that MSs offer will not be competent compared to AWS, or that financial burden on tax budget will be enormously different)

[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/fisa-memo-scarier-wat...

Well, tens of millions of tax payers consider Fox News not a News network at all, but a propaganda agent actively involved in to the coup attempt of a loosely coupled conglomerate of foreign-nation stakeholders and private domestic stakeholders (of which one of them happened to become elevated into presidential office by a minority of the countrys' voters) against the Constitution of the United States.

You should look up the definition of a coup before making statements like that.

Could not modify to add to bullet points above, but Washington Posts' obituary notice to ISIS head Al-Baghdadi, seems to prove the point...

Washington Post referred to the now dead head of the terrorist organization as: 'austere religions scholar'.

I guess, for Washington Post, Hitler was a dog loving vegan and a self-taught artist.

(they have changed the article by now).

Giving Pentagon business contracts to owner of this 'esteemed news publication', hosting these 'journalists' would, definitely would be absurd.

The White House basically ordered this contract to not go to Amazon because Trump doesn't like how the Washington Post covers him.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted when this is the top news of the day

>> And he considers Post political stance against him a directive from Bezos himself.

Which, to be fair, it very likely is. I just can't see Jeff _not_ exercising any editorial control. Post also doesn't shit on Amazon ever since he bought it, even when it's deserved.

The Post runs the same stories seen in essentially all papers in the world. A lot of them implicate the president negatively. But how does precluding the pentagon from it's first choice on these grounds good for the country?

In a free and uncorrupt country, you don't allow leaders to intervene in national security issues because they are embarrassed by a paper's coverage. Thus few people are directly saying that amazon should loose the bid because their CEO has a paper the president doesn't like.

More common and to be consistent with the notion of a corruption free democracy, the defense for this is the claim that, despite significant pressure, this surprising turn of events would have happened anyway. This is the story being promoted more but it does require a improbably interpretation of events that only supporters could really ever internalize. Especially since Trump's own secretary of defense flatly said the goal was to screw Amazon over the Post.

There's no such thing as "corruption free" country. The US is very, very far from corruption-free, both in the government and outside it. It's less corrupt than, say, Zimbabwe, but that's not saying much. Basically one has to ask themselves a question: given that the mainstream press is wildly unprofitable (with very few exceptions), might there be a reason why its owners sinks hundreds of millions of dollars into keeping it afloat? I think you know what that reason is, Chomsky has been railing against it for several decades now. They're instruments of propaganda. They manufacture consent. They are literally no better than Pravda nowadays, although instead of being government controlled, they're controlled by five rich men. It's better than government control, but not by much.

In my reading, your post implies that everyone is exclusively motivated by short term self interest. I do not think this is true, neither for myself nor for others, and I suspect you do not either for yourself and people you know.

The problem in general with negative fatalistic views like this one is that it is non falsifiable: there is not a single positive / selfless action to which you could not ascribe base motives.

That's the problem with assuming you can read people's minds, which seems quite frequent nowadays. The key "tell" for this is saying: "so what you're saying is" followed by the opposite of what the person is really saying.

No, your reading is incorrect.

> Chomsky has been railing against it ... they're controlled by five rich men

That is a real problem, certainly in normal times. And likely decades of derailing reforms in the interest of consumers and employees is what led to the frustration that created the current catastrophe. I note even now broadcast media certainly dwells on the trade war far more than other more pressing problems.

So stories should be confirmed by looking at serious publicly owned and overseas news sources. And if a particular series of stories is in the WaPo and NPR and BBC and the Guardian and Der Spiegel and FAZ and NHK and Le Monde and El Pais then we know it is not a rich man's plot. And if privately owned media has a pro-wealth bent, maybe an autocratic kletopcray is a bit much for some of them. Especially for non-hereditary billionaires many of whom really do want to make the world better (within certain economic constraints of course)

I really doubt that, because any journalist with integrity would quit and make a stink about it, which would tank the Post's reputation. I would cancel my subscription the same day, and I imagine so would a lot of other people.

Also, I've seen plenty of negative stories about Amazon in the past months. I remember them because they always have a disclaimer about Bezos owning the post in the article. Here's one from just yesterday: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/24/amazon-.... Can you point to any specific negative story on Amazon that the Post has noticeably not covered?

"journalist with integrity"

Is there such a thing? Media landscape in the US is a sad view these days.

Do you have any specific reasons to cite for this belief? It sounds like a minority of the population find certain facts inconvenient when they conflict with their world view. This doesn't mean that the way news is being reported is changing, unless you prefer "alternate facts".

I am not from US, so I don't count for minority or majority. Specific reasons... Just watch 5 min of CNN, MSNBC, 30 seconds of Maddow or Don Lemon. Staggering amounts of venom and obsession. This is not news anymore. This is an alternative reality.

I like how you left out Fox News which is far worse. E.g The bogus Seth Rich story. There is nothing comparable. Maddow and Don are opinion.

Serious question: how do you know it's "bogus"? There's no evidence either way. For all we know the guy could have been Assange's source, which would explain the raging hard-on the current administration has for extraditing Assange.

It was bogus because they quoted an FBI source saying evidence was found on Seth Rich's laptop indicated that he sent DNC emails to Wikileaks. They retracted the story after an outcry, and IIRC FBI denied it. That didn't stop Hannity from hammering the false story for a week till Seth's parents begged him. Two and half years later there is no link whatsoever. They literally just made it up to fool their low information audience, and apparently it worked so well that I am seeing HN'ers regurgitate this bullshit with zero indication that Seth even had access to all DNC emails.

Maddow and Don are opinion. Fox is propaganda. Do not wait for an answer.

I did answer with proof. Sad to see purveyors and believers of actual fake news on this site.

Yes, you answered. Hannity has been beating dead horse for one week. Progressive media are peddling Russia collusion for years. Walls are still closing in. Tulsi is a Russian asset with no proof whatsoever! All networks are biased, but some are way more biased to the point of insanity.

There is a difference between being biased and outright making up falsehoods with fake facts like the Seth Rich story. Both are bad but the latter is much worse.

I was talking about newspaper journalism though, which seems to be as solid as ever. TV journalism, on the other hand, appears to have become more polarized, though there's still good programs out there. I'd definitely avoid opinion hosts like Maddow, Tucker Carlson, Hannity etc, since they aren't even real journalists.

Here is the latest from WaPo that changed the headline on its Al-Baghdadi obituary from "Islamic State's terrorist-in-Chief" to "austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State". Religious scholar, my ass. So much for solid journalism.