"Google dropped out last October without submitting a formal bid, saying the military work conflicted with its corporate principles, which preclude the use of artificial intelligence in weaponry." <3
Microsoft: hold my beer.
Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
311–320 of 466 posts
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#312Since the early 2000s, Microsoft has done a significant amount of work for the NSA. AWS has had GovCloud, and it is true the CIA uses AWS, but MSFT has built out quite well some of the more exotic requests of the NSA. The crown jewel of the NSA’s MSFT partnership is the San Antonio, Texas data center. The “5150 Rogers Road” data center was chosen because Texas has cheap electricity, which is an enormous cost outlay f…
> Texas has a separate electrical grid from the rest of the US. This is interesting. The Wikipedia article has this gem: "The Texas Interconnection is maintained as a separate grid for political, rather than technical reasons" https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2003/08/why-texas-has-it...
Well, one big reason is that Texas cannot be forced to sell electricity to another state since it is not connected. The politics of electricity generation are rather odd in the US.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#313I'll bite: do you think this was on merits alone? On one hand, if there was pressure whistle-blowers would be whistling by now but still, I think Amazon was hurt by WaPost (Bezos owns WP and Trump is not happy with them). Maybe "they" tilted the process in such a way that one can't really complain. After all Microsoft is no slouch.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#314It’s embarrassing that something as vital as the military is running on Windows. Boggles the mind
Snowden's "Permanent record" has some stories on this.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#315Owning Post seems to cost Bezos quite a fortune.
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…
$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..."
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#316Assuming "you-are-what-you-eat" dynamics, what sort of impact on msft do >10,000 workers on mother-of-all-enterprise projects have.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#317Never mind AWS vs. Azure: I'm thinking that this is very bad news for IBM. If there was one customer they could get, this would be it..
let the blight be purged from this world
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Company growth is almost always compared on a percentage basis as individuals don’t own the entire company making that number meaningless to them. What they care about is if they own X$ in some stock today what’s it going to be worth at some point in the future.
I think that's a self-centered PoV (not meant as a criticism) which focuses on the wrong things when trying to understand the state of the cloud market. What really matters long-term is who is acquiring the new-to-public-cloud customers as they move away from on-prem and who is attracting the new high-value workloads (AI). These are not growth of existing customer base which is why I think raw numbers are more useful…
Revenue growth comes from both new customers and existing customers. As Assure includes many large companies like Walmart and where AWS has more startups that’s likely important. Let’s suppose Assure increases revenue from existing customers by 4% (inflation + growth) 18 * .04 = .7B and AWS increases by 8% (inflation + growth) = 36.1 * .08 = 2.9B. Which would mean 10.6 - .7 = $9.9B revenue from new customers for Assure and 12.6 - 2.9B = 9.7B revenue growth for AWS from new customers. The difference in customer bases may also be important in a downturn as Walmart is far less likely to fail than Imgur.
Granted, I chose those numbers to arbitrarily get that result. But, it also demonstrates the other reason to use percentage growth, inflation on a large customer bases implies growth where none exists.
PS: I realize they both have large and small customers, my point was not about AWS vs Assure but % vs $.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hoping it also ups Microsoft's game on Azure Functions, monitoring, etc. AWS needs a reason to be scared.
Azure Functions are pretty nice, hope they continue evolving the service.
As long as they fix the blasted runtime.
Azure Functions has it's own dll loader, and other complexities that means it doesn't place nice with .net or the larger ecosystem. Currently it does not support .net 3, and I can't even use the most recent version of System.Data.SqlClient.
I like functions it was a good move, but the 'not-quite-.net' keeps getting in the way.
Re: Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
#320Since the early 2000s, Microsoft has done a significant amount of work for the NSA. AWS has had GovCloud, and it is true the CIA uses AWS, but MSFT has built out quite well some of the more exotic requests of the NSA. The crown jewel of the NSA’s MSFT partnership is the San Antonio, Texas data center. The “5150 Rogers Road” data center was chosen because Texas has cheap electricity, which is an enormous cost outlay f…
Can you provide proof of this somehow?