Welcome back and Happy New Year.

What if the Pentagon’s decision wasn’t political? And what if it wasn’t a fluke?

As cloud network strategies continue to go mainstream, and in the wake of a controversial decision by The Pentagon to award a $10 billion contract to Microsoft instead of market leader Amazon Web Services, it’s clear where the biggest tech battleground in 2020 will be.

Amazon and Microsoft have very different priorities for their cloud infrastructure — and several signs are pointing to Microsoft’s security-focused hybrid approach as the cloud of choice.

And Wall Street is noticing…

(UPDATE 1/7:) CNBC today reports that Goldman Sachs’ most recent poll of 100 IT executives at Global 2000 companies found a majority (56) using Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure (versus 48 using Amazon’s). Goldman also says Microsoft’s lead has been increasing since December 2017, and that more respondents expect their company to use Microsoft’s cloud than any other within three years.

Deep Tech:

Media & Telecom:

This is the first smartphone made entirely in Africa. And it’s super affordable.
Something is fundamentally different in platform m&a. TikTok was clearly the new Instagram/Snapchat. Facebook (Instagram, WhatsApp) or Amazon (Twitch) should have acquired it by now. Especially with developments like this. (Ignore the ByteDance protests. TikTok is for sale.)

Healthcare Tech:

The real news in Google’s parade of diagnosis algorithms: The company refuses to submit them to the FDA for approval. In fact, they’re finding increasingly creative ways to dodge the agency. The problem? The FDA protects patient safety. (Related: the company’s rap sheet of misusing patient data continues to grow — a whistleblower even came forward in the final days of 2019.)
(Update 1/7:) In related news, longtime tech watcher Tiernan Ray joins a growing chorus of those questioning Google’s fundamental claims
Hospital mergers harm patients says a former FTC official (who’s also a rock-star economist) in the New England Journal of Medicine. Here’s the former chief of the agency’s economics bureau:

Martin Gaynor @MartinSGaynor

1. Careful new study on the effects of hospital mergers on quality. The authors look (using hundreds of mergers) and can’t find anything (& some stuff gets worse). Reinforces what most other studies have found. See rest of thread by @JMichaelMcW.

Michael McWilliams @JMichaelMcW

Kicking off the decade with a paper on hospital mergers in @NEJM https://t.co/cE7GvA1E20 We know mergers increase prices. What do we get in return? We find no evidence of quality improvement & worsening in patient experiences. Put that together: mergers=bad for patients on avg https://t.co/r6t1G6eRbD

Finance:

BREAKING: SoftBank’s pullback is accelerating and Dan Primack has the receipts
Tell us again how you can't find qualified women to be on your board of directors

Public Policy:

When airport shutdowns, public utility failures and now stock exchange outages are blamed on a “software hiccup”, this is what’s really going on
The U.S. government’s veracity about unemployment data and other bellwether metrics is now being openly questioned
A growing body of evidence says major states and cities no longer need to offer multi-billion-dollar bribes to corporations shopping business expansions

2020 Upset: Why Microsoft will continue to…