Hmmm, this is going to be interesting .... tech and politics. Oh well -> "Trump's personal dislike for Jeff Bezos influenced the Pentagon decision to award the $10 billion cloud contract to Microsoft, says new book" - ibtimes.sg/screw-amazon-o…
However, setting aside any accusations of personal politics which should not be involved in such Gov decisions, the choice of Gov to pick the 2nd player in a consolidating market is the responsible one to try and create a future market.
And MSFT is a good 2nd player to AWS from IaaS to the more future focused space of Serverless. Purely from an economic point of view at a nation state policy level, it's not a bad choice. A bad choice would have been some numpty going 'we can build our own'
A utility market with one major player, a smaller 2nd player and a pond of tiny fish is manageable from a nation state perspective. It'll certainly put back those awkward questions on nationalisation for a decade or two and we can't afford to break up AWS because of China.
So, overall ... the "JEDI" contract award is not a bad choice. I can imagine it must be galling for some inside various agencies to be used in this manner given the importance of what they do.
