Amazon, in the habit of winning, has suffered some humbling defeats lately

Amazon.com Inc. is a company that is accustomed to winning, but the $869 billion e-commerce giant has spent the last few weeks suffering through humbling defeats. On Oct. 25, the Pentagon announced it was awarding a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft Corp. Amazon had been seen as such a prohibitive favorite for the contract, called JEDI, that the Department of Defense was actually facing a lawsuit for setting up a process that only the company could win. Then Amazon’s preferred candidates failed to capture control of the Seattle City Council in local elections less than two weeks later, even after the company had spent $1.5 million on the campaign.