Microsoft Is the Surprise Winner of a $10B Pentagon Contract

The corporate war to provide cloud computing for US warfighters is over. Late Friday, the Department of Defense announced that Microsoft has won the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, known as JEDI. The decision was the culmination of a two-year process that also included Google, IBM, and Oracle, and where Amazon was long seen as the favorite. JEDI, potentially worth $10 billion over 10 years, has been positioned by the Pentagon as crucial to modernizing its use of technology--and making the US military more deadly. "We must improve the speed and effectiveness with which we develop and deploy modernized technical capabilities to our women and men in uniform," DoD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said in a statement.