3 ms·

The JEDI RFP was seemingly written specifically for Amazon to win. (And there are accusations that they actually did influence it, since a former employee wrote

The JEDI RFP was seemingly written specifically for Amazon to win. (And there are accusations that they actually did influence it, since a former employee wrote parts of it [1]) It appeared that they were the only company that could possibly meet the technical requirements of it. The whole process looked like a formality to 'fairly' award them a new contract. And then Microsoft won the bid. Its about cloud computing infrastructure, and Amazon is the leader in that sector still. Amazon already provides two government cloud services, GovCloud and C2S, and the government has invested billions of dollars in them too. So its not like they aren't already in the space, are inexperienced, and trying to 'steal' this contract away. They actually have more experience than Microsoft, when it comes to cloud services for restricted government environments. A judge already agreed that there was enough issues in the winning proposal that Amazon's case had enough to pause the work on the contract. So I don't think its nothing at all. Using the political angle happens to be the most headline producing legal argument they have right now. No matter who won the $10B contract, someone was going to contest it. If Amazon had won, Microsoft and Oracle would be contesting. However, I do think there needs to be competition in the space, and I am not at all upset that Microsoft won. It is a good thing to not have everything locked into AWS. Its not the outcome I expected, but it seems like a good thing. And I think that wanting competition in the space, may well have actually been a real reason to award Microsoft with the contract, even if they didn't have the best proposal. [1] Oracle was also fighting against this contract too, because they want it. https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/03/oracle-loses-10b-jedi-cloud-contract-appeal-yet-again/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/03/oracle-loses-10b-jedi-clou...

i386 6y ago
Writing the requirements of a tender so that it can be won by a specific vendor is called “single sourcing” and it’s extremely common if you’ve ever sold to the government
- Bedon292 6y ago
  Sole sourcing requires very strict guidelines though. You have to justify why that specific vendor is the exclusive one that can meet your needs and that the end result of the bid process would end up leading to them. A sole source contract for JEDI would never have been acceptable. Its way too large, you have to compete it.
  - nsajko 6y ago
    I think there is some misunderstanding here in your comment and parent: I think that the parent wasn't referring to "official" sole sourcing, but rather to the (common?) phenomenon of government issuing a RFP or similar with unnecessary requirements/specifications that purposefully exclude certain possible suppliers, or are even tailored specifically to a certain product, while ostensibly allowing for a bidding process. An example from my country in the EU: the government decided to provide schools with prototyping boards for electronics for kids to play with and maybe learn something, with a formally open procurement process. Turns out the procurement requirements were written quite tightly around the specifications of the BBC Micro Bit board, so as to disqualify other possible products (down to board width and length). To be honest, this specific example wouldn't cause me to worry one bit, except that after learning about it I suspect that the same procurement fixing method is used for other, more important projects.
    - i386 6y ago
      > but rather to the (common?) phenomenon of government issuing a RFP or similar with unnecessary requirements/specifications that purposefully exclude certain possible suppliers, or are even tailored specifically to a certain product, while ostensibly allowing for a bidding process. Correct. Also incredibly common. By the time they are discovered the money is already spent and the system is implemented. Not much can be done then.

i386 6y ago

Writing the requirements of a tender so that it can be won by a specific vendor is called “single sourcing” and it’s extremely common if you’ve ever sold to the government

Bedon292 6y ago
Sole sourcing requires very strict guidelines though. You have to justify why that specific vendor is the exclusive one that can meet your needs and that the end result of the bid process would end up leading to them. A sole source contract for JEDI would never have been acceptable. Its way too large, you have to compete it.
- nsajko 6y ago
  I think there is some misunderstanding here in your comment and parent: I think that the parent wasn't referring to "official" sole sourcing, but rather to the (common?) phenomenon of government issuing a RFP or similar with unnecessary requirements/specifications that purposefully exclude certain possible suppliers, or are even tailored specifically to a certain product, while ostensibly allowing for a bidding process. An example from my country in the EU: the government decided to provide schools with prototyping boards for electronics for kids to play with and maybe learn something, with a formally open procurement process. Turns out the procurement requirements were written quite tightly around the specifications of the BBC Micro Bit board, so as to disqualify other possible products (down to board width and length). To be honest, this specific example wouldn't cause me to worry one bit, except that after learning about it I suspect that the same procurement fixing method is used for other, more important projects.
  - i386 6y ago
    > but rather to the (common?) phenomenon of government issuing a RFP or similar with unnecessary requirements/specifications that purposefully exclude certain possible suppliers, or are even tailored specifically to a certain product, while ostensibly allowing for a bidding process. Correct. Also incredibly common. By the time they are discovered the money is already spent and the system is implemented. Not much can be done then.