This makes me suspect Amazon's HQ2 is almost certainly going to be Washington D.C. Furthermore, gives me impression the reason it took so long to commit to a date to announce HQ2 is because they were waiting on whether or not this type of contact might be elicited. Having a massive government contract is a prime reason for having a large physical presence near by.
having lived in Northern Virginia aka NOVA which is where a lot of businesses have offices and would be the potential area of HQ2, Research Triangle park is a tech hub for North Carolina that also afford lower wages compares to NOVA or other urbanized areas and I would consider 'in the area' of DC. Maryland is also an overlooked option which also has many datacenters.
NOVA is much more likely due to it meeting travel requirements much easier.
NOVA also already has many giant datacenters and already houses complexes for companies like VISA in addition to being one of the major backbones in the USA of the internet.
I would prefer the HQ be closer to NY, Boston or Toronto but that is a long shot I think unless the political climate forces them to make an unpredictable decision.
> I would prefer the HQ be closer to NY, Boston or Toronto
While anywhere east of the Mississippi is going to be a rude awakening compared to Washington, Oregon, California, Colorad, Utah, Wyoming &c., New York, Massachusetts, Canada or Maryland would be far worse than Virginia, due to sclerotic governance. Virginia’s bad compared to the western half of the country, but those places are even worse.
The eastern seaboard has over 400 years of accumulated regulations, rent-seeking and 'we've always done it that way!'; Virginia is relatively better than the alternatives. If there's not a better argument for automatically-sunsetting laws than the East Coast, I don't know what it is.
>Virginia is relatively better than the alternatives.
Having lived in Northern VA for 7 years I do not think NOVA is any different than
> New York, Massachusetts, Canada or Maryland
in fact - out of that group....Maryland is far better than Northern VA in regards to governance... which is the only place in VA I could possible imagine.... especially with the location of international airports being a requirement. In Maryland...the BWI airport in my opinion has poor transportation options in my opinion unless Amazon is okay with employees driving instead of using trains/buses.
In any case... what we say does not impact what HQ2 will choose... I hope... unless the decision makers are reading this, in which case -- its time to get real and build your own island in international waters and stop this bs with choosing somewhere in NA :-)
Right, if they are willing to pursue project dragonfly, despite its issues, then it’s also likely they would proceed with the DoD contract, if they could.
Not buying their moral arguments at all, given that they are about to enter the Chinese market again, after backing out of it, supposedly because of moral concerns.
A while back an article surfaced here [0] about how the JEDI competition is basically tailored to AWS, and how Amazon had lobbyists stipulate the exact conditions.
Pretty telling how the money quote in the article is "And second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications.”
In other words, they couldn't meet the requirements for the RFP, so they decided it was advantageous to score some morality points by dropping out...
I'm pretty sure that for $10 billion, they could have gotten whatever certifications they needed by plowing resources into it. Elon Musk went through the same to get government contracts that certification requirements tailor made for Boeing/Lockheed.
Corporations are not people. Judge them by their actions, in the end, what matters is what happened, not intent. Almost every public institution's actions are always ascribed by some as driven by money or power, or others by high minded values.
The employees at a company can have high minded values. Even the company culture can have high minded values. But in the end, financial decisions made by companies are amoral, and what matters is, what the decisions actually were, not whether the executives were pressured into it, because ultimately, there is pressure on all sides from all stakeholders.
Giving up on $10 billion, no matter how you slice it, is a huge hit. They could have fought for it, but decided not to, based on whatever pressures they were reacting too. That's a win.
>"Corporations are not people. Judge them by their actions, in the end, what matters is what happened, not intent."
Oh nonsense, corporations are run by people. People who make deliberate decisions on behalf of the company. And implicit trust is bestowed upon these stewards of the company by the company's employees. I think theres a tacit understanding that these people will balance both shareholder value and ethical concerns. A such intent very much matters.
Intent is imputed, you can't know it for certain, or even very well. As an outside observer, employee, or shareholder, you can assign intent all you want, but at the end of the day, the only real evidence you have is action.
Look, I'm a Google employee, I really like Sundar, he comes off as a pretty authentic, caring person. But what he says in "official statements", even internal communications, like every company, is very much authored by committee, by corporate messaging, by legal, it is not his voice alone.
So if Sundar says he's doing something because it's morally right, should I believe that's the reason, because in less 'official' statements, in his own words, he comes off as a genuine person? Or, should I disbelieve it, because in more official communications, it comes off as overly parsed and triangulated?
You face the same issue with politicians. Politicians say they truly believe one thing, they announce their intent, and then when they get into office, you find their voting records quite a bit different than what you believed them to be for. I think you should judge these politicians by their actions, not their campaign speeches, not their heartfelt fireside chats, but what -- when the rubber meets the road -- they vote for. The votes don't lie, protestations of piety can.
> I really like Sundar, he comes off as a pretty authentic
Authentic? Perhaps to you he comes across that way. Far from it he feels to me. He seems just... well, thoughtful, I guess. To the point that he clearly insults the intelligence of the company’s employees.
> I think you should judge these politicians by their actions, not their campaign speeches, not their heartfelt fireside chats, but what -- when the rubber meets the road -- they vote for. The votes don't lie, protestations of piety can.
Well said. When it became clear that the pentagon wanted AI imaging for AI-assisted drone strikes, instead of just Google cloud, Google Docs and other benign services, many Googlers started to speak up for what they believed was right. This wouldn’t be more than an afterthought at many other less idealistic companies.
>"Intent is imputed, you can't know it for certain, or even very well."
The "intent" was to win the Pentagon contract, it is not some subjective thing here. I think when a project has an internal codename and team devoted to it it's safe to assume the pursuit and desire for Pentagon business was quite certain.
The rest of your comment reads like false equivalency and rationalizing.
We're talking about different things, the 'intent' I'm talking about, and is the subject matter of this thread, was what was the real reason behind dropping out of the contract bidding. Google gave multiple reasons for it.
Of course they wanted to win the Pentagon contract, and there's nothing wrong with that, if it is just providing G-Suite, uncustomized, or lightly customized GCP computing facilities, the same as any other Enterprise organization could purchase. What Googlers objected to in Project Maven wasn't working with the Pentagon at all, but specifically helping them to design AI imaging stuff. Sell them Google Docs or Google Compute Engine? Sure.
Some people in this thread have suggested Google dropped out because they couldn't meet specifications to get certifications, that's the cynical interpretation. The non-cynical interpretation is that the contract would require them to do things their employees object to, and make them look like hypocrites given their "AI principles" document. The idea that someone would drop a $10 billion contract bid purely over getting some bureaucratic certification doesn't make sense, because for a $10 billion contract (likely the low end giving DoD budgets), you'll spend $1 billion CAPEX if you need to get it, or more likely, go through providing the documentation and audits needed (besides, I highly doubt the competitors on the contract have anything approaching Google data center security levels)
>"We're talking about different things, the 'intent' I'm talking about, and is the subject matter of this thread,..."
No we are talking about the same "intent." Your response was to the point being articulated in the two parent posts.
>"Some people in this thread have suggested Google dropped out because they couldn't meet specifications to get certifications, that's the cynical interpretation"
No the cynical interpretation is that your company dropped out of this Pentagon business due to some moral considerations.
"cynical": "believing that people are motivated by self-interest; distrustful of human sincerity or integrity."
Believing Google dropped out due to moral considerations is by definition, the idealistic interpretation. At this point, I'm not sure we're even speaking the same language anymore, so lets end it here.
Bear in mind, the "morality points" aren't on Google: They're on Google's employees. The commitment Google made for AI Principles only exists because their employees demanded it, and forced Google to end it's participation in the Pentagon's drone warfare project.
Google's management are more than happy to help the government engage in illegal assassination abroad via drone, but it's employees are not. For Google's executives, this is less to gain morality points with the public, but to retain employees who would leave otherwise.
Though another aspect is, they may have already gotten an indication from the DoD that dropping out of Maven would be held against them when evaluating the proposals. RFPs aren't just about the dollar value, and they'd certainly take into account the possibility of Googlers refusing to do the work needed to fulfill the contract.
I think you are right. The direction of Google are selling their soul to government in order to protect and develop the company. But a majority of the employees are still dedicated to their old motto: "Don't be evil".
I think its less of tailoring for AWS and more that AWS is worlds ahead of Google and Microsoft in their commercial offerings, and especially their government offerings. For instance Google Cloud does not have a High certification from FedRAMP which would rule it out being used for any workload that involved weapons systems which generally are FISMA High. I think what was dome was less writing it for AWS and more just writing it to have the requirements you would want out of any public cloud offering. The problem is most companies have been providing a "good enough for government work" solution and now they can't fulfill the RFP. ( Amazon is in this boat too, there are tons of services that haven't been cleared yet, and GovCloud is expensive and only exists in one region, in that respect Microsoft has been ahead, but they have their own problems)
At the most basic level performance is way below what I have seen with AWS. It was taking about 20 times longer to load data into a database cluster in Azure then into AWS. Additionally Azure is _just_ getting Availability zones online. Previously if you wanted high availability you needed to use multiple regions. I have yet to be able to create a kubernetes cluster using the UI, and I am not even sure how Users work since they have this odd hybrid Active Directory setup that may or may not be users.
On the flip side It was painless to use both GCP and AWS and even second tier cloud providers like Digital Ocean or Packet.net are simpler to use then Azure. My standing advice for anyone is only use Azure if you are 100% in the Microsoft ecosystem using .NET and Visual Studio to develop your applications, and you plan on using their professional services to help you out when you hit problems
I use digital ocean, aws , heroku, azure almost weekly. For ... I can’t remember. Years. I think your opinion is bias and I don’t share the same sentitiment. But like you it’s just my opinion.
Cloud providers bounce back and forth on features. Not everyone is right at that given point for the client. But I have seen the converge over the years, with each service having plus and minuses.
The ability to extend you own AD to parts of Azure, and call Microsoft directly when something is broken, is immensely valuable compared to AWS.
Azure is mainly for .NET though, but they also have first class support for Node.js, which integrates directly with stuff like application insights.
I use Azure professionally, but I use a range of things personally, and I think I’d never pick anything but Azure for enterprise if my shop was mainly Microsoft. If you aren’t primarily Microsoft, I’d pick AWS.
> At the most basic level performance is way below what I have seen with AWS. It was taking about 20 times longer to load data into a database cluster in Azure then into AWS.
Eh okay. I have a VM running IN Azure which is much faster than one running in AWS.
Microsoft “won” the European market though, by being extremely quick to adopt European policies and offering really, really great support. I took AWS a while to get out of the legal grey area, and their support is still pretty mediocre because they rely too much on automation, which may be more efficient, but being able to call Seattle directly is a tremendous selling point for governments. Also having office365 helped Microsoft sell Azure quite a bit.
Google on the other hand are still in the legal grey area, and they’re even more automated than AWS.
I say “won”, because there isn’t a clear monopoly in Europe, and AWS allied themselves with a bunch of lobbying powerhouses like Deloitte and EY, but I’d say Azure is still far ahead.
AWS is still by far the largest cloud provider in Europe so I think its a bit early to say Microsoft "won". Microsoft has a bunch of gains mainly on the back of their strong non cloud product portfolio ( Office365 ) and their well established sales team, but even with those advantages they are still very far behind in terms of market share
Microsoft's great strength is the integration with the business (the Microsoft EA and Cloud Services agreements are powerful weapons to drive business) and technology (they can scale those offerings). They can make the first hit of Azure free by "discounting" something else. Everyone who is a potential customer of Azure has a contract already.
But that strength is also a weakness. They have at least 3 US Office 365 offerings (Commercial, "Government Community", and Federal). It's harder for them to hit compliance targets, because their customer scope is so huge. The security needs for XBox are different than the Army. I think AWS and in many cases GCP has a better story there.
There might actually be a continuous spectrum of both morality and profitability of different actions...
Google doesn't care about any possible humility of not getting a DOJ contract. Because nobody would notice, and those who do are more likely to see it as a positive, considering the DOJ's reputation in procurement.
It also doesn't cost anything relevant to stay in. And even if the probability may be small small, the magnitude is enormous.
Leaving us with no clear motive BUT something that may have to do with morality. Of course this may be motivated by worries about their reputation among current and potential employees, but then we're getting into the whole "what's true altruism" debate which is rarely as productive as even fake altruism.
I don't think that's all ethics related stuffs. The Pentagon's something different for me. I'm a Chinese and I definitely know that the Pentagon WILL use technology to fight against us. Should I write code for them? Or I should trust them not abusing?
If your country is on the other side of NATO, what do you think?
Though extremely difficult, it's possible to exist in the USA without paying any tax to any entity.
You would have to be unemployed, receive food and water through non-sales-tax-included methods (like living in New Hampshire or going to a local soup kitchen or boiling grass), and never own a home or rent even.
Well come to think of it, you could probably eat sleep and drink at a casino all day, if it's on native land.
I mean, that's why I said it would be extremely difficult. This is a thought experiment, similar to thinking about what happens when you cross the event horizon-- death obviously, but other interesting things too.
We don't know what the Pentagon will use the raw compute/storage resources for. I'm sure they are not telling MS/AWS/GOOG either.
I do know that the US Military invests heavily to make weapons better at killing, but also better at killing the right targets. Let's assume the due to US politics war is unavoidable. But, because of investments in technology (smarter drones, AI, guidance systems) in systems powered by the JEDI project we are now able to reduce civilian casualties by 90% in a military conflict. Hell even 10% is a huge win. Is this now a morally just cause?
I am not buying it either. Corporations do not have moral. The board might have some political considerations but we know that entering the Chinese market mean that Google had to accept things that are amoral.
The problem with China is that government isn’t magically going to remove sensorship and Google had zero impact on their policy by staying out. It seems right move to me that Google will provide slightly more open search and other apps and may be able to instigate bit more openness. So going in seems like right strategy then staying out even if there was no money involved.
> Not buying their moral arguments at all, given that they are about to enter the Chinese market again
Their "moral" concerns are driven by the noisy section of their workforce that reflexively opposes the US military. These people aren't outspoken about the behavior of the Chinese government, in fact they probably don't think about it much.
When I was at google people were against building a censored search engine for China, this caused a lot of arguing before they pulled out the first time.
not only technically-wise. From what i see and hear Google has significant impedance mismatch between internal "googliness" and the "enterprise" style required to do business in the enterprise/gov/mil space. Just imagine a Google's $1M+/year AI PhD doing a support call with a bodyshop consultant maintaining a laundry services accounts payable application for some small Army base.
TBH, I don't think Google stand a solid chance winning it either. Their offering is not the best, and there isn't good wills from the current administration either.
Even though issues regarding big techs nowadays are all high politicized, but Google stands in the centre of the current political radicalization in US. Their means are extremely restricted.
> TBH, I don't think Google stand a solid chance winning it either. Their offering is not the best, and there isn't good wills from the current administration either.
IIRC, the current administration has less goodwill towards Amazon because its CEO owns the Washington Post. I don't think that was a factor.
These things are ruled by likely 10,000 laws passed by Congress to minimize corruption by allowing the executive branch to hand out favors. The people with actual power to corrupt are Senators and Reps who can add pork to spending bills.
What's wall street doing about Google's hostage situation - held hostage by their own outraged employees.
Two publicly documented big opportunities missed so far - the Pentagon missile deal and to an extent this. Maybe the China search engine opportunity is also at risk. Time for Wall Street to sell Google, and let their opinion be known!
I own many voting shares in Google and I support them whenever they decide to choose whichever side they think benefits humanity more. They have good heads on their shoulders and I trust their decision making. Google oftentimes is just trying to make the world a better place and fill missing needs. Say what negativity you want but the world would sorely miss them if they weren’t around.
If you want a stock that soaks up DOD contracts, pick up Raytheon. I have a friend that works there and he can’t tell anyone what he does there.
The article says it was for two reasons, values and inability to meet certain requirements. If it had really been values that caused them to back out, they wouldn't have mentioned the second point. They only mentioned values to try to get something out of their loss.
It isn't. The military should be equipped with the best talent and tech we have to offer, for the best defense of the nation. We don't live in a vacuum and there are now lifetime dictators like Putin and Jinping with major military power and constant cold-war and cyberware tactics being deployed.
It's easy to throw around ethics but many people don't think that far ahead and saying "we shouldn't make weapons" is naive and dangerous when the rest of the world already has them pointed at us.
What value is AI assisted drone strikes going to provide? If another country, China, Russia, etc sent drones for targeted drone strikes, we could send ours over with untargeted drone strikes that also cause collateral damage. This is also considered offensive technology, not defensive technology.
I think the potential negatives with this technology outweigh the positives.
You're arguing that collateral damage is a good thing in a comment seemingly about why advanced weapons tech is a bad thing? How is this ethical or cogent?
AI isn't only used for drone strikes, and more accuracy in means a better outcome in actually hitting the target while preserving the lives of innocents (and thereby ending the conflict quickly and reducing the chance of eventual retaliation by other groups). We can always launch more attacks if we have more targets to destroy, not just hope the drone randomly blows things up during its mission.
There is also no offense or defense, they are the same thing when talking about weapons. Having the best weapons and never using them is far better than being unprepared when someone else comes along with more capabilities.
Lets me really honest, they pulled out because they couldn't compete with Amazons offering. Google is driven by profits and growth just like any other company.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment, but shouldn't you fix this at the source i.e. the government? If the American people don't want their government to spy on people .. vote for another government?
For any given US government, we’re basically always voting for people that we don’t trust very far, except to be marginally less of an asshole than the person we didn’t vote for.
The spying on citizens part is pretty entrenched, I don’t see any candidate running on a platform of not doing that.
The government is made up of normal people. They get voted in by the rest of us. You can definitely change things if you dont like them, but you have to get enough other people to see it your way.
The whole concept of ethics is about systematizing what's wrong and what's right. Obviously it's not a solved problem, but it's very far from just being a free-for-all.
I don't understand what is so moral about not selling stuff to the army, as if google are not enjoying the protection this army provides them. I would say it is even less moral, you let other people do the dirty work for you. They should give a discount to the army as a thank you for the sacrifice the people in the army are sacrificing for a fraction of the salary someone in google is earning. I mean, I know googlers still have PTSD from the Damore thingy and that they are still recovering from the trauma in a safe space designed for that, but still, fighting in a remote country for half an year is at least as hard?
