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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday November 17 2019, @01:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the Use-The-Courts-Jeff dept.

Amazon is headed for court to contest the surprise decision to hand Microsoft the $10bn US Department of Defense IT supply contract.

Jeff Bezos' retail-cum-cloud empire alleges that Microsoft won because of "political influence" and "unmistakable bias". The company has also accused the US defence department of failing to run a fair procurement contest for the 10-year single-supplier deal.

Amazon's cloud biz, AWS, was perceived for a long time as the frontrunner in the race to win the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, ahead of Microsoft and Oracle. However, US president Donald Trump's long list of supposed enemies includes the Amazon CEO, mainly because he objects to coverage of the presidency by the Bezos-owned Washington Post.

The cloud giant has not yet filed papers in court, but has informed the US government and Microsoft of its intention to do so.

[...] Microsoft declined to comment.

One question still to be answered is: what will last longer and prove the most expensive? The 10-year, $10bn JEDI contract or the associated court action?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 17 2019, @03:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 17 2019, @03:12AM (#921162)

    From what I've heard, what is somewhat unusual is that this contract has no provision to wait, e.g., 90 days to allow protests to be addressed. I'm told that M$ has already starting working overtime with DoD to make it impractical for a challenge to the process to roll back and start over again with a different vendor. I'm suspicious, but have no facts either way, that M$ heavily leveraged their existing entrenchment in DoD desktop/server software to support their cloud services bid (wouldn't it be a shame if your Windows 10 license fees doubled when you need to add-on "connect to services on third-party cloud CALs").