JEDI mind tricks: Google said Pentagon contract didn't align with company values. Now it's chasing another defence gig

Don't Be Evil... unless...

Google has changed its mind about dealing with the US Department of Defense and is chasing a juicy chunk of the Pentagon's new Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract.

Remember when Google's motto was "Don't be Evil"? The Reg speculated about when it'd quietly drop that way back in 2013, and sure enough, by 2018 it was banished to the very end of the code of conduct. Called it.

There must have been some lingering memories of the slogan when Google dropped out of the bidding for the Pentagon's $10bn JEDI contract, saying that it wouldn't align with the company's values.

The deal went to Microsoft in 2019, and then the Pentagon scrapped the contract earlier this year amid legal challenges from rivals scorned.

Within a month, the US National Security Agency signed a different $10bn deal with Amazon's AWS instead, and as we reported earlier this week, Microsoft complained about that.

One of the tougher bits of gristle in the JEDI deal was that the Pentagon wanted a single supplier, which Oracle felt wasn't fair, among others muscling in for a bite.

The JWCC is obviously something totally different as this three-year deal will be a multi-vendor contract, although with only two vendors deemed "capable of meeting the department's requirements," (Microsoft and AWS, as per the DoD), Google will have its work cut out for it. ®