No brainer
MS sucks but Oracle is the devil incarnate.
Oracle isn't saving anyone, anything.
Oracle and Microsoft – two companies receiving most of the US government's off-the-shelf software spending over the last decade – get at least 25 percent and 30 percent of their respective government revenue through purchase processes which are not competitive. According to an analysis from IT procurement consultant Michael …
The JEDI contract was about controlling costs for IBM/Oracle contracts where the DoD was practically paying them to create their cloud infrastructure.
Some may argue that AWS would have been just as bad as Oracle but even if it adopted a similar pricing strategy, at least it would have been charging the DoD for things that existed rather than paying hundreds of millions to get Oracle's data centres modernised/expanded and more of Larry's evil island lair built...
The UK has the National Audit Office (NAO), a permanent institution to audit government and public administration for, amongst other things, value for money in government expenditure.
Do the US have something equivalent? It seems more like a media circus, with investigations (audits) initiated ad hoc and only at the whim of political representatives - presumably when it promises some popular votes (feeling cynical today).
>The UK has the National Audit Office (NAO), a permanent institution to audit government and public administration for, amongst other things, value for money in government expenditure.
Or more often to issue a report saying "giving the contract to G4S/Serco with no clear deliverables was a bad idea", about 9months after the same conclusion appears in Private Eye
I'm sure there is something like that, but it has long since been captured by commercial interests. We like to talk a big game on this side of the Atlantic, but really most of our institutions are held together with a combination of string, duct tape, bubble gum, and a lot of wishful thinking as we continually kick the can down the road rather than make the difficult decisions that need to be made ever more desperately as time passes. Of our two major political parties, one of them has given up even the pretense of having any sort of plan for how to govern and just spends the time ginning up social outrage over nonsense topics when they aren't actively opposing anything proposed by the other party for no other reason than it was proposed by the other party. Look at the shitshow over the debt ceiling, which is already one of the dumbest self-inflicted wounds any nation has come up with... putting a self-imposed limit on your ability to pay for things you've already bought... and one party is refusing to allow the US government to pay its bills, demanding cuts in spending, but then saying all the major cost centers are off limits and raising taxes is out too. It doesn't exactly inspire hope that any government auditor would be all that effective even if the people in that position weren't likely recommended for the job by the very people they were meant to be a watchdog over.
Sometimes it's just cheaper and easier to have a single preferred vendor. If all of these contracts were up for bidding, whoever lost would probably sue, and then if they won the previous winner would sue, and so on until the project has languished for years as the court cases drag on and by the time the dust has settled the needs have changed and the bidding process has to start all over again. Having a consistent vendor also allows for the development of some institutional knowledge where people can learn the ins and outs of a particular system instead of having to start over every so many years.