- Microsoft president Brad Smith said that the company’s work on the federal government’s JEDI deal is moving faster despite the pushback from Amazon
On October 25, 2019, the federal government awarded Microsoft with the Department of Defense’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) deal. This deal is potentially valued at up to $10 billion over 10 years.
Amazon protested the government’s decision to award Microsoft with the deal citing bias. President Donald Trump has been very critical of Amazon Jeff Bezos largely due to his ownership of The Washington Post — which is a publication that closely fact checks him.
But Amazon’s protesting of the cloud computing contract has not been preventing Microsoft from advancing on the project. In fact, Microsoft has been moving faster ever since the deal was awarded.
“We were working every day before we won that contract to make the product better,” said Microsoft President Brad Smith in an interview with CNBC at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California. “We have if anything been moving even faster since that contract was awarded.”
Amazon had filed a notice in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims saying it is planning to protest the Pentagon’s award to Microsoft. Amazon alleges that several aspects of the JEDI evaluation process contained “clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable bias.” And Amazon AWS head Andy Jassy told that the cloud contract was not adjudicated fairly.
President Trump also criticized Amazon for not paying a fair share of taxes and for being unfair towards the U.S. Post Office. And President Trump said in July that companies were conveying that the specifications of the JEDI cloud contract were favoring Amazon. So President Trump said that they are planning to consider looking at the Pentagon contract. And now Amazon is calling for a reevaluation of the proposals that were submitted to the Pentagon.
“When you have a sitting president who’s willing to be very vocal that they dislike a company and the CEO of that company, it makes it difficult for government agencies, including the DoD to make objective decisions without fear of reprisal. And I think that’s dangerous and risky for our country,” explained Jassy in a CNBC interview.
Smith responded to Jassy’s comments by saying that being overly confident in a technology race could lead to consequences. And Microsoft had learned that “time and time again.” But Smith pointed out that another good lesson is to never conclude that you cannot catch up if you work harder than your competitor. This is why Microsoft put more engineers working “pretty much 7 days a week for 13 months to constantly create a better product.”
