7 ms·

My take on this whole thing, is the Amazon basically wrote the entire scope...so they just thought they were going to win because only they would meet it (this

My take on this whole thing, is the Amazon basically wrote the entire scope...so they just thought they were going to win because only they would meet it (this was a bit of a scandal just a few months back.) They bid high, and then they lost. Now they are mad that their lobbying wasn't a 100% success, so they are suing. It's all so very Amazon.

sterlind 7y ago
I work for MS but don't know anything about the bidding process. I was a little surprised we won, but now it makes sense. I feel like even if they can't get the DoD to let them re-bid now that they have proprietary information on us and our bid, they'll tie us up in court as long as they can to keep us from successfully delivering. They want to maintain the head start they made with GovCloud as long as possible and keep other companies out. Icky.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  > They want to maintain the head start they made with GovCloud as long as possible and keep other companies out. Icky. I'm not picking on you as an individual, but there's great justice in Microsoft suffering this.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  I agree, it’s terribly unfair when companies use their dominant market position to crowd out would-be entrants.
  - sharemywin 7y ago
    I'm confused which company are you referring to? oh, wait every dominant giant company ever...
    - keeganpoppen 7y ago
      oh, ^please^... not "every dominant giant company ever" has been found by U.S. federal court to have engaged in monopolistic / anti-competitive behavior. legality aside, that's to say nothing of all their no-walter-its-not-illegal-youre-just-an-asshole shenanigans contemporaneous with, and preceding, the lawsuit. 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
      - mrkramer 7y ago
        What Microsoft did with Internet Explorer maybe looked dirty back in the day but ironically enough United States v. Microsoft Corp. suit started in 1998, the same year when Google was founded and quickly after conquered the internet with its search engine and internet browser. Innovations will always displace dominant products and the cycle goes on and on.
        CPLX 7y ago
        There’s a strong argument to be made that putting MS on the defensive about antitrust in the late 90’s is the reason so many other dominant tech companies were able to get a foothold in the 5-10 years following. Which also points to why we are in today’s predicament, having abandoned antitrust entirely.
        jamessb 7y ago
        > founded and quickly after conquered the internet with its search engine and internet browser Google didn't release the first version of Chrome until 2008, 10 years later.
        erpellan 7y ago
        That is nowhere close to how ruthlessly they crushed competitors well before that. Microsoft are why you've probably never heard of Supercalc, Lotus/123 and WordPerfect. All superior products in the 80s and 90s, all crushed by MS strong-arm tactics of forcing PC manufacturers to sell machines with Windows and Office pre-installed. 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.
ross2990 7y ago
When JEDI was first proposed, AWS had already been the vast majority of cloud services for the Intelligence community. This led to them having a distinct advantage because they already had the certified infrastructure to handle US Secret and Top Secret information. This was (in my own thoughts) why that immediate capability was stressed so much in the initial request for proposal.
- sailfast 7y ago
  First off - I don't know that it's normal for a competing company in a protest to post a press release like this. I know things have gotten nuts recently and people protest for giggles these days, but this seems... weird. 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-at-narrow-scope-of-DoDs-planned-re-evaluation-of-JEDI-cloud-contract 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-Joint-Enterprise-Defense-Infrastructure-Jedi-Cloud-Procurement-Dodig-2020-079#from_embed https://www.scribd.com/document/456555063/Report-on-the-Join...
- partiallypro 7y ago
  More likely the Amazon lobbied hard to make requirements a barrier to entry: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/24/pentagon-review-amazon-employees-influence-over-billion-government-contract/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/24/pentagon-... https://theintercept.com/2019/06/03/amazon-defense-department-jedi-contract/ https://theintercept.com/2019/06/03/amazon-defense-departmen... https://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/252467312/DoDs-JEDI-cloud-contract-favors-AWS-with-Microsoft-on-deck https://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/252467312/D...
- blackflame7000 7y ago
roel_v 7y ago
Having been on the winning side of a contract once for a bid that was clearly 100% written by a competitor, the Big Dog in our industry, in such a way that they absolutely thought only they could ever be meeting the terms - and then winning that bid by offering a better product at a lower price, and faster, I can a little bit imagine how satisfying this win must have been for the Microsoft bid manager or whatever they'd be called. And my project was only 6 digits.
- wahern 7y ago
  > then winning that bid by offering a better product at a lower price, and faster, Did you actually deliver on time and on budget?
  - 23B1 7y ago
    crickets heh
  - roel_v 7y ago
    Just a little over time, and it was fixed budget. Timing wise still much better than the norm in our industry.
caseysoftware 7y ago
More precisely, it looks like Amazon hired the DOD guy who helped write the scope. Being involved in those pre-RFP discussions, understanding the reasoning, and secondary undocumented concerns would be immensely valuable.
- partiallypro 7y ago
  And Bezos sits on the Pentagon defense innovation advisory board. Eric Schmidt is the chairman, but he's no longer with Google, and GCS is probably too young for the Pentagon for this sort of use case.
koheripbal 7y ago
Amazon has put a LOT of money into DC. From setting up an HQ2 in DC to Bezos personally purchasing the largest mansion in the city to host event for political power brokers. It should be no surprise that he's pissed that that amount of investment isn't starting to pay dividends.
- GCSAQCMIYI 7y ago
  Not to mention the newspaper.
  - smitty1e 7y ago
    It's worth not mentioning.
    - GCSAQCMIYI 7y ago
      Do you think he bought it because he really likes journalism?
      - chadcmulligan 7y ago
        Here's an interview with him here about it [1] 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-jeff-bezos-bought-the-washington-post/#3335b1163aab https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniedenning/2018/09/19/why...
        GCSAQCMIYI 7y ago
        The reasons he gives for buying it don't tell us anything. His net worth is in the 12 figures. Everything he says publicly is crafted by a well paid and highly competent PR team. 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.
IAmEveryone 7y ago
There's considerable evidence that Amazon lost this because the President doesn't like The Washington Post. 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.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  Mind linking to or sharing some of the evidence for b? I had heard rumors about that on reddit, but hadn't seen anything concrete.
guru4consulting 7y ago
Btw, this is a widely known practice (not sure if it's legally accepted though). Government contractors often play a big role in shaping the RFI/RFP requirements. This is a multi-year process that involves socializing, discovering the legacy/obsolete systems in client environment, learning about their business side, identifying pain points in the gov customer side, etc. Big contractors like Raytheon, CACI, SAIC have a well-defined and stream-lined process for this. This is where smaller contractors or startups find it very difficult to get into gov contracting because they don't have the kind of access that Raytheon/CACI has. So, I don't see any surprise in AWS giving inputs for shaping DoD requirements. 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.
lstroud 7y ago
That said, from a citizens standpoint, if the government is going to only pick one, I can’t imagine it not being AWS. The difference in capability and capacity isn’t within an order of magnitude.

sterlind 7y ago

I work for MS but don't know anything about the bidding process. I was a little surprised we won, but now it makes sense. I feel like even if they can't get the DoD to let them re-bid now that they have proprietary information on us and our bid, they'll tie us up in court as long as they can to keep us from successfully delivering. They want to maintain the head start they made with GovCloud as long as possible and keep other companies out. Icky.

DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
> They want to maintain the head start they made with GovCloud as long as possible and keep other companies out. Icky. I'm not picking on you as an individual, but there's great justice in Microsoft suffering this.
alasdair_ 7y ago
I agree, it’s terribly unfair when companies use their dominant market position to crowd out would-be entrants.
- sharemywin 7y ago
  I'm confused which company are you referring to? oh, wait every dominant giant company ever...
  - keeganpoppen 7y ago
    oh, ^please^... not "every dominant giant company ever" has been found by U.S. federal court to have engaged in monopolistic / anti-competitive behavior. legality aside, that's to say nothing of all their no-walter-its-not-illegal-youre-just-an-asshole shenanigans contemporaneous with, and preceding, the lawsuit. 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
    - mrkramer 7y ago
      What Microsoft did with Internet Explorer maybe looked dirty back in the day but ironically enough United States v. Microsoft Corp. suit started in 1998, the same year when Google was founded and quickly after conquered the internet with its search engine and internet browser. Innovations will always displace dominant products and the cycle goes on and on.
      - CPLX 7y ago
        There’s a strong argument to be made that putting MS on the defensive about antitrust in the late 90’s is the reason so many other dominant tech companies were able to get a foothold in the 5-10 years following. Which also points to why we are in today’s predicament, having abandoned antitrust entirely.
      - jamessb 7y ago
        > founded and quickly after conquered the internet with its search engine and internet browser Google didn't release the first version of Chrome until 2008, 10 years later.
      - erpellan 7y ago
        That is nowhere close to how ruthlessly they crushed competitors well before that. Microsoft are why you've probably never heard of Supercalc, Lotus/123 and WordPerfect. All superior products in the 80s and 90s, all crushed by MS strong-arm tactics of forcing PC manufacturers to sell machines with Windows and Office pre-installed. 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.

ross2990 7y ago

When JEDI was first proposed, AWS had already been the vast majority of cloud services for the Intelligence community. This led to them having a distinct advantage because they already had the certified infrastructure to handle US Secret and Top Secret information. This was (in my own thoughts) why that immediate capability was stressed so much in the initial request for proposal.

sailfast 7y ago
First off - I don't know that it's normal for a competing company in a protest to post a press release like this. I know things have gotten nuts recently and people protest for giggles these days, but this seems... weird. 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-at-narrow-scope-of-DoDs-planned-re-evaluation-of-JEDI-cloud-contract 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-Joint-Enterprise-Defense-Infrastructure-Jedi-Cloud-Procurement-Dodig-2020-079#from_embed https://www.scribd.com/document/456555063/Report-on-the-Join...
partiallypro 7y ago
More likely the Amazon lobbied hard to make requirements a barrier to entry: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/24/pentagon-review-amazon-employees-influence-over-billion-government-contract/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/24/pentagon-... https://theintercept.com/2019/06/03/amazon-defense-department-jedi-contract/ https://theintercept.com/2019/06/03/amazon-defense-departmen... https://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/252467312/DoDs-JEDI-cloud-contract-favors-AWS-with-Microsoft-on-deck https://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/news/252467312/D...
blackflame7000 7y ago

roel_v 7y ago

Having been on the winning side of a contract once for a bid that was clearly 100% written by a competitor, the Big Dog in our industry, in such a way that they absolutely thought only they could ever be meeting the terms - and then winning that bid by offering a better product at a lower price, and faster, I can a little bit imagine how satisfying this win must have been for the Microsoft bid manager or whatever they'd be called. And my project was only 6 digits.

wahern 7y ago
> then winning that bid by offering a better product at a lower price, and faster, Did you actually deliver on time and on budget?
- 23B1 7y ago
  crickets heh
- roel_v 7y ago
  Just a little over time, and it was fixed budget. Timing wise still much better than the norm in our industry.

caseysoftware 7y ago

More precisely, it looks like Amazon hired the DOD guy who helped write the scope. Being involved in those pre-RFP discussions, understanding the reasoning, and secondary undocumented concerns would be immensely valuable.

partiallypro 7y ago
And Bezos sits on the Pentagon defense innovation advisory board. Eric Schmidt is the chairman, but he's no longer with Google, and GCS is probably too young for the Pentagon for this sort of use case.

koheripbal 7y ago

Amazon has put a LOT of money into DC. From setting up an HQ2 in DC to Bezos personally purchasing the largest mansion in the city to host event for political power brokers. It should be no surprise that he's pissed that that amount of investment isn't starting to pay dividends.

GCSAQCMIYI 7y ago
Not to mention the newspaper.
- smitty1e 7y ago
  It's worth not mentioning.
  - GCSAQCMIYI 7y ago
    Do you think he bought it because he really likes journalism?
    - chadcmulligan 7y ago
      Here's an interview with him here about it [1] 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-jeff-bezos-bought-the-washington-post/#3335b1163aab https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniedenning/2018/09/19/why...
      - GCSAQCMIYI 7y ago
        The reasons he gives for buying it don't tell us anything. His net worth is in the 12 figures. Everything he says publicly is crafted by a well paid and highly competent PR team. 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.

IAmEveryone 7y ago

There's considerable evidence that Amazon lost this because the President doesn't like The Washington Post. 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.

JamesBarney 7y ago
Mind linking to or sharing some of the evidence for b? I had heard rumors about that on reddit, but hadn't seen anything concrete.

guru4consulting 7y ago

Btw, this is a widely known practice (not sure if it's legally accepted though). Government contractors often play a big role in shaping the RFI/RFP requirements. This is a multi-year process that involves socializing, discovering the legacy/obsolete systems in client environment, learning about their business side, identifying pain points in the gov customer side, etc. Big contractors like Raytheon, CACI, SAIC have a well-defined and stream-lined process for this. This is where smaller contractors or startups find it very difficult to get into gov contracting because they don't have the kind of access that Raytheon/CACI has. So, I don't see any surprise in AWS giving inputs for shaping DoD requirements. 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.

lstroud 7y ago

That said, from a citizens standpoint, if the government is going to only pick one, I can’t imagine it not being AWS. The difference in capability and capacity isn’t within an order of magnitude.