Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech? The U.S. government, through their executive orders and dissolving of the separations of powers, has demonstrated its ability to unilaterally disrupt or shut down private technology services at will. How can any business justify depending on U.S.-based tech infrastructure when its access could vanish overnight on a political whim by an unstable president?
If there is no rule of law, capital, talent and trust are flowing out of that country - for good reason.
> Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech?
Because it's pretty refined since it was funded with resources so great that it was intended to serve global level audience?
I don't believe that EU will have comparable quality "tech" without restricting US market access in EU. Unfortunately, refined high quality software requires considerable resources and no one will invest those considerable resources when the US companies can just offer better software at lower price thanks to their lead and deep pockets until the EU companies go out of business. Sure, EU doesn't need to discover everything again but they will need to pay top talent world class money for years until their products become refined.
> I don't believe that EU will have comparable quality "tech" without restricting US market access in EU.
> Sure, EU doesn't need to discover everything again but they will need to pay top talent world class money for years until their products become refined.
Just like the US didn't need to rediscover the inventions of cars, submarines, the web, the printed press and more to be able to build better iterations on those, wouldn't the exact same apply the other way?
It feels like whatever you're saying today could be said the other way in the past, so why does it really matter?
The fact on the ground is that people don't trust the US overall as much, even less the leadership of the US, so whatever dependency has been built up over the years, has to be fixed, no matter if the "local" technology is shittier at the moment.
I'm sure Americans felt the same about printing presses back in the day, where some things you just have to be able to do without needing the permission of others far away.
When you do something in a mature industry, you skip quite a lot of losing bets that those involved in maturing it couldn't.
That's why Google, Samsung and others were able to create smartphones comparable to iPhone without having a Steve Jobs and a Johny Ive right after Apple made one.
Once you know the way forward, the rest is an engineering task and it's matter of working towards it. Very low risk compared to the initial work done by the pioneers.
Apple did exactly what you're accusing others of, re 'smart phones', skipping lost bets and combining existing technologies, that did exist in smartphone form pre iphone.
Sure, that's called progress. Apple skipped Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung Skipped Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson and Apple. The next entrants skip Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson, Apple, Samsung.
You get the point. When you are getting into an established industry see what works, skip investing billions in directions that go nowhere.
This sounds like good advice for EU tech companies stepping up to deliver to customers that want to avoid dependance upon existing US companies (and their associated demonstrably capricious government).
> Just like the US didn't need to rediscover the inventions of cars, submarines, the web, the printed press and more to be able to build better iterations on those, wouldn't the exact same apply the other way?
Running a software business in Europe is not against the laws of physics or anything, but it is also worth considering why Europe doesn’t already have a thriving software sector. The US shooting itself in the foot might help a little, but there are still lots of internal barriers, like those outlined in the Draghi report.
> but it is also worth considering why Europe doesn’t already have a thriving software sector
Why is that your impression of the software sector in Europe? Just because there isn't a "Eat the whole world Google/Amazon/Microsoft" company that ends up in American business-news, doesn't mean the it isn't one of the most well-paid and comfortable sectors in the continent, just like everywhere else, compared to other sectors.
I think as a whole it seems like Europe in general and particularly the EU has a lot more focuses than just "Tech Innovation", although it's still one part needing improvement. Even the report you referenced mentions the energy sector as a top priority, and slow steps are taken to upgrade infrastructure at all sorts of levels and sectors.
Software is but one part of life, but of course many of us here get lost in focusing a lot on software itself, I'm guilty of it myself too.
I'm not making any normative judgements, just descriptive ones. Maybe the way Europe is right now is perfect, far be it from me to say otherwise, I don't even live there.
But in the context of "digital sovereignty," it seems to me that so many giant pillars of tech (desktop OSes, mobile OSes, cloud platforms, enterprise crap like Salesforce, and so on) are managed by American firms. So if Europe wanted to take all of those things in house, that would require a significant expansion of the European software sector. And that wouldn't be super straightforward due to the many obstacles to things like venture capital funding outlined in the Draghi report.
Now I'm more than a little skeptical of the whole "digital sovereignty" concept. There's a reason every country doesn't it make it's own airplanes, cars, wine, espresso machines, and medical devices; those reasons apply more or less equally to software development. The cost of “sovereignty” is very, very high. But, if we do buy into the idea that countries need to diversify away from American software, I think that necessarily entails a large increase in the software sector of places like Europe.
Governments can nudge. If they swear off American tech, they will be using something else, and have influence on how that goes. They can put money into getting what they want, and open sourcing it.
The more they invest, the more corporations will be able to switch.
Who cares about fine details of quality if you are at permanent risk of on/off, and a very real one.
Not every company needs, wants or has room to become google scale. Stability long term is something we hold dearly in Europe, not everybody runs in 10 seconds attention span.
OK sure, some people care if you really need to play with the words. But only absolute fool would ignore those massive risks.
We have fools in many places, but not that much and that bad. Look at defense - every single country in Europe is ramping defense budget big time, most of those money goes to European companies. Doesn't matter much how good US tech currently is, if it has electronics that can be tweaked or switched off remotely its a massive risk. F16 case was really enough for whole world to wake up and reevaluate.
Why should any other industry including what we discuss react differently? Private companies can risk as much as they want, its up to governments to sweeten the deal for local stuff or let it be, sure there market forces can play as hard as wanted.
Acknowledging a risk doesn't always mean eliminating it. We've seen a lot of this dynamic in the rare earths space recently - for most countries, the known and widely discussed risks of depending on China for critical military inputs haven't been worth the cost of establishing domestic production.
A lot of AAA+ games are European, Linux is European and a lot of other software and services are European, a lot of industrial software is European. The platforms are not European, that's what's lacking.
It's not matter of talent, its matter of investing a few tens billions into it and its not going to happen if US companies can just undercut and wait it out.
But isn't it a matter of talent? While Americans obsess over tech and high paying jobs, Europeans seem to emphasize other subjects, not to mention have a lot more vacation days. What is to be made of that?
Nope, it's not. Some of the big names in the current AI boom are also European but they go do it in USA because the money is in USA and they can just access the EU markets from there.
I don't know if you are familiar with coding or engineering but it's nor really a kind of a profession where you work all the time and the more hours you put in it the output increases linearly.
It's not like Europeans couldn't code Facebook because they were taking too many vacations, unlike Russians and Chinese that did. It's that Chinese and Russian markets had restriction and local clones or alternatives were able to flourish but EU had completely open market for US "tech".
Cut off Meta, double the vacations in EU and in a year there will be European social media. As it was demonstrated by Elon Musk, you don't need that many people to work in those "tech" companies anyway.
A very small number of government agencies in a few countries have moved away from reliance on the US, but very few businesses have. We still have governments and businesses encouraging the use of US tech by, for example, encouraging use of mobile apps. AWS, Azure and Google dominate cloud services in most of the world. Microsoft dominates the desktop. Businesses and individuals are increasingly reliant on cloud apps that are mostly American.
Here in the UK my daughter's school (a large sixth for college) relies in MS cloud versions of Office and on Teams, you need (at least in my area) to use an mobile app, or a web app hosted on AWS to make an appointment with a GP (and if you are prescribed medication the pharmacy are informed via an API running in AWS). Most SMEs that do run anything of their own use AWS. One of the biggest banks (Lloyds) had issues during the recent AWS outage, and I know they are not the only one to use AWS.
A lot of European governments are pushing ID and age verification mobile apps.
In general a lot of governments are regulating in ways that favour the incumbents.
I think it’s important to focus on the momentum. It’s not easy to redesign and re-engineer systems that have taken years and decades to develop and span many layers of integrations. There is also the issue of retraining as everyone is happily used to whatever system they currently have.
It’s unfortunate the US decided to go back in time rather than look to the future but eventually, very few (if any) services would rely on US corps.
But to change these things within the past 7 or 8 months would have been impossible. I get what you guys are saying but there's so much of this stuff that is very entrenched and there's decades of inertia to push against, it can't just happen overnight. The story isn't that no one uses American services anymore, it's that fewer and fewer of us feel comfortable doing so and are open to or actively seeking alternatives in a way we never expected to be.
Trump, of course, is an unstable person, but why does everyone see the other side as any different? To many of us, they are sides of the same coin - and this, by the way, is more or less reflected in the similar lifestyles they lead. Elite politicians attend elite schools, democrat republican or otherwise. So it puzzles me that only now it's common to be skeptical of the US. Better now than never I guess, but I don't think it's true that Trump is somehow worse than his predecessor. The predecessors are just outwardly nicer. Nice vs kind, etc.
Believe it or not, it’s partly because of regulation.
If you’re on Azure for example as a bank you know that most of the (eg DORA) requirements are met, because regulators have directly talked to Microsoft.
There are high compliance and migration cost for switching with no immediate gain for the business.
> capital, talent and trust are flowing out of that country
Is there non-anecdotal evidence of this that you can share with us?
My understanding is that people make this claim but I haven't seen evidence of it beyond one-off articles about individual professors leaving the country.
There is none. Despite the less stable environment if you are Talent by far the best place to be is the US. If you are an ambitious entrepreneur by far the best place to be is the US.
For the same reason why you choose "Made in China" over something that's made in your country. Often times it's the best (or even the only) tech for the best price.
I wish, but for a corporation morale grounds are not enough, and the facts speak for the contrary. Even with all the insanity, the US would not touch something as insanely profitable as this, and the government is very protective of the top tech firms. Also on the technical level, EU companies are simply not in the same ballpark.
It’s Europe. They couldn’t even drop Russian oil imports despite them being an existential threat. They’re doing this because anti-US moves are trendy right now and that’s it.
Some of us in Europe are ready to drop Russian oil imports whatever the cost. It's just russian backed populists are ready to rile the crowds for any price increase whatsoever and governments have to tread lightly all the time in order not to let power go to all those far right parties who would just buy the cheapest oil coming from anywhere as long as it allows them to remain in power.
>Some of us in Europe are ready to drop Russian oil imports whatever the cost.
Translation: "Some of us in Europe are ready to drop drop bread in favor of eating cake, whatever the cost."
Easy for you to write cheques that others have to cash. Be careful with such suicidal empathy, as that has second order effects that back-fire in spectacular fashion. That's why you're supposed to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others.
>It's just russian backed populists are ready to rile the crowds for any price increase whatsoever..
TIL that if you aren't gonna sacrifice yourself for Ukraine and prioritize your family's survival, wanting to have a job, a roof over your head and food on the table, somehow makes you a "Russian populist" now. Interesting logic.
You'd think much differently if you or your family would face unemployment, homelessness or malnourishment due to the economic damages caused by a surge in energy costs across the board. Half my immediate friend circle have lost their jobs in the last ~2 years due to the economic situation, my grandma can't afford her bills from her pension without financial support from us, while access public services like healthcare and childcare has only gotten worse, despite us paying more for everything. Not exactly the environment people feel like gutting themselves even further for a foreign country, whichever that may be.
Building an energy system dependent on Russian gas is, and always was an idiotic thing to do. I live in Finland, and our energy costs are pretty back to more or less what they used ot be, even though we live next to Russia.
I don't know where you're from, but at least Germany's problems run way deeper than their idiotic energy policies. Lack of investment in infrastructure, lack of innovation and all that. Even with cheap energy there's no way German car makers would compete, when Chinese make better EV's for less money. Laziness and lack of innovation is the problem, just like in European IT sector, which just buys everything from America.
Also, let's not forget the huge impact Covid spending had on inflation, and in turn interest rates & people's purchasing power. Ukraine war and sanctions against Russia are completely insignificant compared to that blunder. We're living the recession that was supposed to happen in 2020.
Surprisingly, when you depend on Russia oil and gas for your refineries and industry for decades, you can't always turn it off instantly, it sometimes takes many years due to infrastructure and for come countries, pro-Putin politics.
Being anti US isn't 'trendy', it is a response to the US being anti-EU at the moment, and justifiably being seen as unreliable, mercurial and even dangerous.
> Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech?
First and foremost, because it takes time to switch.
Secondly, because there are a lot of things that just don't have realistic alternatives.
For a large agency, especially one that has statutory or regulatory requirements on how they decide on and deploy hardware and software, even if they can legally choose to switch to open-source options, if they made that decision the day after the election last year, it might have been too late to get major proposals in for the 2025 fiscal year, so they'd have to wait until 2026 to do more than start planning. (This is, fairly obviously, a near-worst-case scenario; other agencies will have much more freedom to change as they please.)
Even if they're less encumbered, the more users you have within an organization, the longer it takes to execute a migration like this, and it can be really really hard to operate for any length of time with a partial migration completed, especially for the support team. I could easily believe that some such migrations are already in the planning stage, but will take months to actually happen.
And finally, because This Is How We've Always Done It is a very, very powerful force. For some organizations, unfortunately, it will take some kind of catastrophic event to realize that they really shouldn't be relying on a foreign and possibly hostile power for all their major enterprise IT vendors.
I have also met the attitude that using hyperscalers is the right way to do it, and running anything of your own that you could outsource to them is weird and unprofessional.
Time well invested. If you are a publicly-traded company, the executive level is financially irresponsible to the stakeholders if they leave the company's data at perpetual risk of just vanishing.
EU is the entity with fascist Hungary and Slovakia having veto powers, isn't it? The one where "free" countries like Denmark push for encryption backdoors?
> The one where "free" countries like Denmark push for encryption backdoors?
In a free political system, anybody is able to push any agenda. What matters is what gets adopted. I agree that the EU is not perfect, but you cannot just take a government’s pet project and claim that it is a failure of the political system.
Lmao, westoids having hard takes on Slovakia after reading headlines on reddit is the funniest thing ever, if only you knew how wrong you are
Quick example, people who stop at headlines keep talking about Fico yapping about stopping aids to Ukraine, yet they give more as a percentage of their gdp than Germany, France, the UK, &c. Fico's a piece of shit but don't stop at what he says, half of his bs doesn't make it further than headlines in western medias
While there are fascist leaders in those countries (especially Trump modelled is remodelling of the country after Orban's autocratic and corrupt Hungary), those are just 2 of 27 - so far far from the majority.
And many decisions in the EU do not allow for their veto votes anyhow - Orban's Hungary has been withhold now for years Billions of EU investments because of how the countries institutions were hollowed out by him.
That's an unfair characterisation of EU. Hungary and Slovakia didn't join under their current fascist governments. They weren't fascist when they joined in 2004.
Kicking them out isn't easy unless there is unanimity. Unfortunately EU requires this kind of quorum for the big decisions, which is kind of a safeguard to precisely avoid going full fascist for the whole EU due to a minority of countries.
Literally no other country or market with the perhaps exception of China has anything close to its own tech stack. Europe literally had Linus Torvalds and couldn't keep him. He now lives in Portland, 3 hours from where windows is made and 10 hours away from OS X. Literally the entire tech industry is the west coast of the United States.
The disparity in capability is orders of magnitude. Europe is basically hopeless at this point
I won’t go that far…yes, the West Coast of the US is dominant, but it’s not “literally the entire tech industry” or even figuratively. We’d have a hard time buying new hardware without Chinese and Taiwanese companies. South Korea is a powerhouse in consumer tech; think Samsung and LG. Japan doesn’t have the dominance in tech it once did, but Japan is still a major player with many large tech companies like Fujitsu, Hitachi, Sony, NEC, and many more. Plus, if “tech” isn’t limited to software, then there are plenty of players worldwide in biotechnology and automobiles.
And let’s not count out Europe. I’m actually typing this in a BMW dealership’s waiting room in the Bay Area as I get my brake pads updated. BMW definitely qualifies as technology, even if it’s not a software company.
No Korean government services rely on US hyperscalers (which is the subject of this post). I'm 99% sure the same goes for financial institutions. Those are the key infra and they're sovereign. A lot of big companies do have some things on US hyperscalers, but even that is a relatively small percentage. Overwhelmingly things are on prem.
And now someone will link "but there was just a fire that resulted in many online gov services being down for weeks!!!". Yes. And having that happen once in a decade, after which measures will be taken so that from now on it happens once in 3 decades, is absolutely 100x preferable to depending on US hyperscalers like EU governments do. As we just saw, it's not like AWS and Azure don't go down.
Sure, they don't have their own OS. But even much of China still runs on Windows. China might manage to get entirely rid of it at some point but not yet.
Doesn't Intel depend on ASML when their chip machines break? I don't think there exists a single country in the world that can currently produce a significant amount of full-stack, modern compute. If there is one, it's definitely China rather than the US.
>Europe literally had Linus Torvalds and couldn't keep him
The great thing about Linux is we don't need to care where Linus lives. We obviously have — in principle — the tech, the workforce and the money to build an alternative tech stack. Most of it is open source at this point.
It's just political will. If we had the commitment and sense of urgency to unwind from America we could. Just like in military affairs we don't do it because we have a mental blockade to break with the existing global order.
> The disparity in capability is orders of magnitude.
But then again it's increasingly being made by Indian migrants, right?
How far away the critical state is, who knows. Could it be in this presidential term? Would it happen within ten years of the coming imperial takeover of the presidency? Perhaps.
But when the valley loses its dominance it will likely happen pretty quickly: huge numbers of the people who make it happen will go home, go back to their home states, or just go to live somewhere cheaper. The US is not educating people fast enough or deeply enough to replace them, and there's no sign that AI really can replace the ones that matter.
Just because nobody can see exactly when this will happen doesn't mean you don't start planning for it to happen. Because it will happen, and when it happens it will happen fast.
The US tech industry is still built on the idea that the USA is a comfortable, friendly, open liberal democracy. And that is over. I mean, on a basic level any individual H1B placement in the future exists at the whim of the executive. Who do you have to donate to, to keep it? And any skilled migrant who might come over, work the hell out of a job that is beneath their level of education in the quick-e-mart and then start something of their own is not going to come.
Europe has its own problems with pasty-faced, bad-haired weaselly proto-fascists, but it's still fighting.
People overestimate the technology required to build the utility stack, from physical servers to the first bit from an http server. Is it easy? It's straightforward. Can there be downtime? Tell me what us-east-1, Azure Front Door, Github, etc have looked like lately. Everyone uses cloud as an excuse for more uptime, but they're still down frequently, so this argument doesn't hold water. Eat some downtime, you're going to regardless if you manage your own infra or outsource. Can't build it yourself? That's fine, people like Oxide can build it for you, and you own all of it.
The profits you don't pay to hyperscalers is investment in your sovereignty. Easy case to prioritize stakeholders over Google, Microsoft, and AWS shareholders, and the US government's ability to rug pull your access and data at any time. The argument isn't bare metal vs virtualized; the argument is "Do you own it?" You are spending a certain amount no matter what to get the technology capabilities needed.
(have built cloud infra for startups, fortune 100s, financial services firms, and on prem infra for high energy physics, non profits, public goods, etc; thoughts and opinions always my own)
Both those things are like the root account to one's data. If there is a hypervisor backdoor (or if your vendor is told by the government to stop giving you updates or sell you product, or even pull your keys) then its game over. DB's too because they're so mission critical and not trivial to move off.
As far as cloud goes, how many shops are now looking at bringing stuff back in because eventually cloud maximizes its profit margins and captured clients can't say no to ever increasing prices. I imagine leaving the US-owned cloud also means an opportunity to reconfigure what is on the cloud and if it needs to be there.
Here's hope desktop linux comes back into play.
As for Munich moving back to windows, who knows how much of that was 'checkbook diplomacy' of the USA demanding they go back to US products or the US will pull unrelated support or whatever. Now that the USA has become isolationist, if not a threat to the EU, those favors/checks aren't being cashed anymore. So much of this is not a meritocracy but instead the crony capitalism that defines the modern world. Maybe there's potential for actual merit now that the USA is losing global prominence in so many ways.
The EU liberated from US influence can lead to great things and this is a good start. For all the doom and gloom of politics today, the US's century of influence ending can only be a universally good thing, imho.
* "(Covers to) The Histomap. Four Thousand Years Of World History. Relative Power Of Contemporary States, Nations And Empires.": https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... (www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~200374~3000299:-Covers-to--The-Histomap--Four-Thou)
But for global stability it’s best if there was some kind of entity with a legitimate monopoly on force. It’s like I don’t want to live in a town where everyone has guns, I’d like a police force with accountability.
Personally, I like a forum for sorting things out peacefully without relying on the goodwill of the bully du jour.
Your argument is not new and is exactly why enlightened absolute monarchs were fashionable at some point. It sounds good, but the problem is that this works as long as the monarch is good. When they aren’t, or aren’t any more, or their heir aren’t, then it’s horrible.
Democracy is an exercise in optimising for the middle ground: sure, it’s not going to be as efficient as a competent autocracy, but it limits the worst case scenarios.
The war on terror has killed millions of civilians, mostly women and children. Brown University lists excess deaths from the WoT at 4 or 5m. The USA has destabilized many countries and performed coups. It invades and goes to war for its own geopolitical gains and regularly lies why. What you're praising is a horror.
Being defenseless hoping an angry 800lbs gorilla will be kind to you must be the worst system imaginable. A balance of power both economic and arms is going to be the best way forward because now that gorilla knows it can't just do what it wants anymore.
I'm not praising anything. Yes US foreign policy sucks. I'm pointing out historically a balance of power has been even worse. There are too many possible points of failure. Discuss with your favorite frontier LLM.
Ideally idk I'd like a much stronger UN or something, with federal power over member states.
Who runs your local police force? What do you do if they suck? It's really not that hard to implement a good setup, but yeah the hard part is convincing multiple countries to give up a bit of sovereignty. Might take another world war.
If my local police force sucks, they impact me and the other local voters, so they tend to be somewhat easy to fix (as long as we can all agree they suck). Or at least I only have my fellow local idiots to blame.
What happens when the person who chose them is in Beijing, and everyone in my entire country doesn’t want them there? But they still got a global majority?
Typically that’s the kind of thing a lot of people die over.
Yeah multiply this situation x1M and you understand why a balance of power is unstable. To make a civilized society work, people can't pull out guns when they disagree. You sue, or you figure out how to communicate/negotiate, or you just live with it. Any of those are better than war, and a good setup will have plenty of avenues like that.
Because what happens - when like the US is now discovering - the courts are useless? And you don’t even have your own guns to protect your rights?and what someone else has decided to do is your destruction?
Did you ever find it weird that it's the pro-gun pro-rights republicans that are attacking the courts?
Americans have some very weird thinking over guns. I think if they were taken away, they'd have to work harder at getting along with other people (esp women, minorities, china), and therefore get better at it.
It's really not a coincidence that it's the pro-gun Americans who killed Roe v Wade. Their ancestors owned slaves. They love to say it's about "rights", but it's clearly not.
It doesn’t surprise me that those capable (and willing!) of defending themselves would rugpull everyone else if it gave them what they wanted.
What surprises me is how everyone else sits back and lets them and refuses to actually take action to defend themselves, while going ‘woe is me, why won’t anyone do something’.
And acting surprised that the people they’ve been screaming are going to do bad things actually do bad things.
It’s embarrassing. Just like you are apparently advocating for a dictator to ‘save us’, from…. ourselves? Or something?
At least the Trumpers are transparently doing it for personal gain, near as I can tell you’re just doing it for some kind of do gooder fantasy? They tend to be even worse, in practice.
Trumpism is all about maximizing tariff gain/benefit. Economically and politically he may not have room to do more without crippling the USA. The EU is already dealing with tough tariffs from the USA.
Most of the "500% tariffs" is bluster and he backs down to the min/max level the capital owning class he is part of and he ultimately serves don't want to go past.
Are there any publicly traded European cloud companies that will benefit from Europe hosting more of their stuff on their own?
I looked at IONOS, but it seems they just let their cloud product rot away? The cloud backend looks outdated and lacks basic features like uploading private keys that can be used when provisioning new VMs.
I also looked at OVH, but their website and interface look like total chaos to me. I felt lost all the time while I was trying to set up a VM, and while trying to use their AI APIs.
Considering that Europe has an economy as large as the USA, it is puzzling how small these companies are. The combined market cap of IONOS and OVH is less than $10B.
Europe does not have the same market conditions as the US. The continent is divided into a gazillion amount of small countries, each with their own rules, laws, regulations, languages, customers, pension systems, healthcare systems, and taxes. Even the currency is not the same everywhere. Not to mention the cultural differences.
One thing they have for them is a lot of money to invest from their American market, and enough momentum that they can afford barely sustainable European operations for a few years whilst they figure things out and streamline everything.
EU federalism would solve this issue, and likely cause others.
The concept of European federalism is extremely interesting to me. The first I heard about it was at a house party in Prague, from a group of very excited young people. It feels both impossible and inevitable.
They would probably need a anchor client that would allow for predictable growth at scale - AWS always had Amazon.com GCP had its gmail and other workspace apps.
Ideally the varoius goverments in the EU would commit to only hosting their work on them , however from one article read recently even the rules they come up with to test sovereignity claims are gamed to benefit the US providers.
Yep,hopefully their API offerings are industry compatible and requisition of resources for clients is smooth. Would also help if they can onboard similar sized operations that are currently doing their own hosting or using one of the non-EU clouds.
it's been years since the last time I go to zdnet. My experience when opening the link: I've been greeted by a dialog asking me to enable notifications, then the classic cookie dialog, and 5 seconds into reading the article, an auto-playing video with sound shows up pinned to the bottom of my screen. No thank you. Tab closed.
US big tech is not just no longer reliable but toxic, predatory, prying, patronizing, etc..
I have to rely on office 365 at work for some minimal functions. I generally try to avoid it and only use it when necessary. The other day when I logged in to look for some document everything was hidden and Copilot AI was front and center. Copilot is the dumbest LLM possible, terrible integration, terrible responses, everything has become a headache for a simple task I had to do. How long would have until Microsoft corpo customers grind to a halt?
The main issue is the collaboration aspect of LibreOffice. I imagine though with funding LibreOffice can be upgraded to do this. If countries are already trying to migrate away from US tech, they could invest in this.
I personally think the future is a database like postgres or sqlite that is know to be very robust with a nice calc frontend. I believe Mathesar is on it. Watching them closely.
Why ? Because falling back to SQL for big data would ne just great. Excel and Google Sheets seems to struggle.
This administration in particular has done more to erode and destroy American soft power than any other and it's not even close.
A lot of people fundamnetally misunderstand the source of the US's power. Some think it's because oil and other commodities are traded in US dollars. It's not. Oil is traded in US dollars because of American soft and hard power, not the other way around. Sell oil in euros and people will just trade their euros for USD for the exact same reasons.
The ultimate source of American global power is the US military, period. Where the British Empire once was so powerful because it was the world's drug dealer (first tobacco, later opium), the US is the world's arms dealer. The US got incredibly wealthy from WW1 and WW2 and there are many conflicts to this day where each side is firing US sourced weapons at each other.
It requires finesse to maintain this position. It's a bit like being a bank. A bank needs a certain facade of predictability, even neutrality, to continue to profit off whatever happens. People can revolt against the bank and the banking system. It's happened before (eg penny auctions in the Great Depression).
What this administration is teaching the world is that the US is becoming unreliable. It's now a threat to sovereignty and national security to be reliant on the US, for anything. This goes well beyond cloud services and US tech giants. The US was always capable of turning on its protectorates and puppet states but it generally behaved in a far more restrained way to maintain the illusion of independance or at least to prioritize stability and predictability.
I fully expect in the coming years that the EU is going to create their own competitors to things like AWS and they're going to do it by mandating its use by all government systems. It's going to be the new Airbus counter to Boeing.
China is way ahead in this game. A lot of people (myself included) like to point to how much infrastructure, particularly rail, China has built in the last few decades. But fewer look at how they've done it. China originally bought European high speed intercity trains but that was temporary. They bootstrapped their own industries and produce their own trains now. And they use the same rolling stock on all metros and intercity lines to avoid the inefficiencies of localized procurement processes.
I believe that a command economy like China will be the clear winner of the 21st century.
> I believe that a command economy like China will be the clear winner of the 21st century.
I agree that the "command" aspect has been an asset for China, but the real drivers of their economic success has been cheap labor (fueled by weak labor protections), and indifference toward burning fossil fuels (until recently) and in general ignoring the externalities of their rapid industrialization.
If US companies could pay people dirt, work them to death, and care even less than they do now about environmental externalities, a lot more manufacturing would have stayed on US soil.
> This administration in particular has done more to erode and destroy American soft power than any other and it's not even close.
Yup. It is still entirely bizarre to me that they don't see this. Or that they do see this, but think it's fine. Or that there is some other "plan" that actively seeks to destroy the US's dominance from within, and for some reason they think that's a good thing.
The idea of poverty wages in China is very outdated. Labor isn't even necessarily "cheap" anymore in China. But why people continue to manufacture there is because of the infrastructure there.
China has a long-term vision for sustainable devlopment [1]. China is excellent at long-term planning that looks 50 years or more into the future.
As for renewable power, China is adding capacity at an astounding rate. China will likely ween itself. They'll likely end the use of fossil fuels in our lifetime.
As much as housing and food affordability are now very real problems in the US, utility prices are going to get so much worse in the next few years with the administration killing renewables, increasing LNG exports (we're now heavily reliant on natural gas) and we're allowing privatized utilities to price gouge.
I do not blame them for doing this. And if they move over to LibreOffice and a distro like SUSE replacing Microsoft products, they will eventually see support costs decreasing a lot.
Cloud, I do not know if that will reduce costs, but at least they will know their data is more secure than with AWS, Microsoft and others.
Software isn’t Tech, for heavens sake. It sounds glib to call it that in the same vein as software developers calling themselves engineers. Nonsense posturing.
I get it though: EU would rather have China own them (see NXP) rather than US. Because EU-based companies are worthless, broke, and offshored already. It’s a cost cutting measure at that point. Enjoy Libre Office. (Fucking lol)
> EU would rather have China own them (see NXP) rather than US. Because EU-based companies are worthless, broke, and offshored already.
As an individual, I prefer Euro sw/ tech way over Chinese sw/ tech and both 10 orders of magnitudesover american data-stealing, enshittifying klunk - as do many of my colleagues and friends...of late, and it's getting to more and more 'regular' people. Too.
Could you elaborate on which EU companies are a) worthless - got names; b) broke - name one; and c) which ones are off-shored (meaning not Eu-pean)?
I agree with you regarding "Euro tech", but not on "Chinese sw/ tech", they are at least as data-stealing as the US and they have even less democratic controls over there.
Too little, too late. After the Snowden revelations there were no reasons to use US tech, for any org outside of the USA. It was obvious that US state actors do not respect any non-US actor. We Europeans need to treat US IT companies just like Russian or Chinese IT companies. And build our own infrastructure. The US does not care about alliences. It will treat any ally just like any other country.
Edit: Office365 is a pile of horse poo. These tools do not allow you to do brain surgery. There are other alternatives to write text, do calculations, and send emails. Nothing that justifies being compromised by US state actors.
I have been saying this for years most governments instead of spending 100s of billions on software subscription would have been better of supporting open source software. But that is too communist an ideal for these capitalist controlled governments at least they are now moving against foreign capitalist at least.
Maintaining an empire has a cost and History has taught that isolationism is not kind to empires. You want to deal with problems before they arise not when you can't ignore them anymore. That was the lesson WWII taught the US and that it has now forgotten. Basically great power, great responsibility.
You will regret that n% tax rebate when you children have to go fight overseas.
It seems unfair that the US had both a great political foundation and the best geography and sometimes I feel like the US is too big too fail but you people sure are trying to test how robust the whole thing is.
(I know the US is not exactly an empire but an alliance system where it has the dominant role but please don't interrupt during the class)
Competition is good, but they should start from the OS level.
Outside of Windows and MacOS, there is no OS ecosystem that works as well and at scale for an enterprise level deployment.
I don't get the whole "US" aspect, why bring politics into this? We need alternatives and competition regardless of all that. I don't care if Europe, China or India make it, a viable alternative would be a game changer.
For Europe, they're solving the wrong problem. Solve the problem of low pay for developers, and a stifling regulatory atmosphere that inhibits disruptive startups.
If there is a good and viable alternative, why is it just for Europe? It could boost Europe's economy by selling to America and the rest of the world. The tech needs to be good, if the US can do it, why can't Europe?
Replacing office or one app at at time only addresses surface level issues.
> I don't get the whole "US" aspect, why bring politics into this?
There is some level of technology dependency after which it can become a national security risk (and therefore, political). This has happened a bunch in history (e.g. countries reducing reliance on adversaries oil supplies or foreign semiconductors).
The few examples in the article are small and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but I think the article is trying to make the point that this is part of a larger divestiture from American tech companies.
Whether that larger divestiture is happening, however, is probably a pretty dubious claim.
This kind of reminds me of during COVID when everybody was writing articles like, “SF and NYC are dead and everyone is moving out!” Turns out… not so much.
Journalists love taking a few small data points and extrapolating to what feels like should be happening and leading the reader to extreme conclusions.
It’s much more fun to write that a hurricane is coming than it is to write, “we’re seeing some light rain today, and it’s probably within normal variance for this time of year.”
It's just that this isn't like raw resources like oil. there is no "good" or "superior" oil. it's just oil. and there are some differences, but there is no "american refined gas" that is superior.
But with tech, there is a question of quality and superiority. People that use M365 suite can work and collaborate more effectively, if not for actual superiority of the product and its OS integration, then simply because it is so well known and users prefer it the most (it does not repel talent as much).
Why give talented european skilled people more reasons to leave the EU for US, as if existing issues aren't enough? Why not instead directly compete with Microsoft and Google. Why isn't the EU investing in that? They're caught in the "open source" trap. I hate to say it, but they need to make closed source proprietary software that is commercially competitive.
Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech? The U.S. government, through their executive orders and dissolving of the separations of powers, has demonstrated its ability to unilaterally disrupt or shut down private technology services at will. How can any business justify depending on U.S.-based tech infrastructure when its access could vanish overnight on a political whim by an unstable president?
If there is no rule of law, capital, talent and trust are flowing out of that country - for good reason.
> Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech?
Because it's pretty refined since it was funded with resources so great that it was intended to serve global level audience?
I don't believe that EU will have comparable quality "tech" without restricting US market access in EU. Unfortunately, refined high quality software requires considerable resources and no one will invest those considerable resources when the US companies can just offer better software at lower price thanks to their lead and deep pockets until the EU companies go out of business. Sure, EU doesn't need to discover everything again but they will need to pay top talent world class money for years until their products become refined.
> I don't believe that EU will have comparable quality "tech" without restricting US market access in EU.
> Sure, EU doesn't need to discover everything again but they will need to pay top talent world class money for years until their products become refined.
Just like the US didn't need to rediscover the inventions of cars, submarines, the web, the printed press and more to be able to build better iterations on those, wouldn't the exact same apply the other way?
It feels like whatever you're saying today could be said the other way in the past, so why does it really matter?
The fact on the ground is that people don't trust the US overall as much, even less the leadership of the US, so whatever dependency has been built up over the years, has to be fixed, no matter if the "local" technology is shittier at the moment.
I'm sure Americans felt the same about printing presses back in the day, where some things you just have to be able to do without needing the permission of others far away.
When you do something in a mature industry, you skip quite a lot of losing bets that those involved in maturing it couldn't.
That's why Google, Samsung and others were able to create smartphones comparable to iPhone without having a Steve Jobs and a Johny Ive right after Apple made one.
Once you know the way forward, the rest is an engineering task and it's matter of working towards it. Very low risk compared to the initial work done by the pioneers.
Apple did exactly what you're accusing others of, re 'smart phones', skipping lost bets and combining existing technologies, that did exist in smartphone form pre iphone.
Lots of real time material evidence exists.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/z62gjfr
Sure, that's called progress. Apple skipped Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung Skipped Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson and Apple. The next entrants skip Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson, Apple, Samsung.
You get the point. When you are getting into an established industry see what works, skip investing billions in directions that go nowhere.
This sounds like good advice for EU tech companies stepping up to deliver to customers that want to avoid dependance upon existing US companies (and their associated demonstrably capricious government).
> Just like the US didn't need to rediscover the inventions of cars, submarines, the web, the printed press and more to be able to build better iterations on those, wouldn't the exact same apply the other way?
Running a software business in Europe is not against the laws of physics or anything, but it is also worth considering why Europe doesn’t already have a thriving software sector. The US shooting itself in the foot might help a little, but there are still lots of internal barriers, like those outlined in the Draghi report.
> but it is also worth considering why Europe doesn’t already have a thriving software sector
Why is that your impression of the software sector in Europe? Just because there isn't a "Eat the whole world Google/Amazon/Microsoft" company that ends up in American business-news, doesn't mean the it isn't one of the most well-paid and comfortable sectors in the continent, just like everywhere else, compared to other sectors.
I think as a whole it seems like Europe in general and particularly the EU has a lot more focuses than just "Tech Innovation", although it's still one part needing improvement. Even the report you referenced mentions the energy sector as a top priority, and slow steps are taken to upgrade infrastructure at all sorts of levels and sectors.
Software is but one part of life, but of course many of us here get lost in focusing a lot on software itself, I'm guilty of it myself too.
I'm not making any normative judgements, just descriptive ones. Maybe the way Europe is right now is perfect, far be it from me to say otherwise, I don't even live there.
But in the context of "digital sovereignty," it seems to me that so many giant pillars of tech (desktop OSes, mobile OSes, cloud platforms, enterprise crap like Salesforce, and so on) are managed by American firms. So if Europe wanted to take all of those things in house, that would require a significant expansion of the European software sector. And that wouldn't be super straightforward due to the many obstacles to things like venture capital funding outlined in the Draghi report.
Now I'm more than a little skeptical of the whole "digital sovereignty" concept. There's a reason every country doesn't it make it's own airplanes, cars, wine, espresso machines, and medical devices; those reasons apply more or less equally to software development. The cost of “sovereignty” is very, very high. But, if we do buy into the idea that countries need to diversify away from American software, I think that necessarily entails a large increase in the software sector of places like Europe.
Governments can nudge. If they swear off American tech, they will be using something else, and have influence on how that goes. They can put money into getting what they want, and open sourcing it.
The more they invest, the more corporations will be able to switch.
What is cutting off the ICC if not restricting. I think that was a pretty blatant move, and is a large part of the chain reaction we're seeing now.
Who cares about fine details of quality if you are at permanent risk of on/off, and a very real one.
Not every company needs, wants or has room to become google scale. Stability long term is something we hold dearly in Europe, not everybody runs in 10 seconds attention span.
> Who cares about fine details of quality
People who actually work with that to achieve things that may be just as important care a lot.
Can’t achieve things when the Us government decides to cut you off on a whim.
OK sure, some people care if you really need to play with the words. But only absolute fool would ignore those massive risks.
We have fools in many places, but not that much and that bad. Look at defense - every single country in Europe is ramping defense budget big time, most of those money goes to European companies. Doesn't matter much how good US tech currently is, if it has electronics that can be tweaked or switched off remotely its a massive risk. F16 case was really enough for whole world to wake up and reevaluate.
Why should any other industry including what we discuss react differently? Private companies can risk as much as they want, its up to governments to sweeten the deal for local stuff or let it be, sure there market forces can play as hard as wanted.
Acknowledging a risk doesn't always mean eliminating it. We've seen a lot of this dynamic in the rare earths space recently - for most countries, the known and widely discussed risks of depending on China for critical military inputs haven't been worth the cost of establishing domestic production.
bbb b b but Spotify is European :)
A lot of AAA+ games are European, Linux is European and a lot of other software and services are European, a lot of industrial software is European. The platforms are not European, that's what's lacking.
It's not matter of talent, its matter of investing a few tens billions into it and its not going to happen if US companies can just undercut and wait it out.
I did realize that, and agree.
But isn't it a matter of talent? While Americans obsess over tech and high paying jobs, Europeans seem to emphasize other subjects, not to mention have a lot more vacation days. What is to be made of that?
Nope, it's not. Some of the big names in the current AI boom are also European but they go do it in USA because the money is in USA and they can just access the EU markets from there.
I don't know if you are familiar with coding or engineering but it's nor really a kind of a profession where you work all the time and the more hours you put in it the output increases linearly.
It's not like Europeans couldn't code Facebook because they were taking too many vacations, unlike Russians and Chinese that did. It's that Chinese and Russian markets had restriction and local clones or alternatives were able to flourish but EU had completely open market for US "tech".
Cut off Meta, double the vacations in EU and in a year there will be European social media. As it was demonstrated by Elon Musk, you don't need that many people to work in those "tech" companies anyway.
> It's that Chinese and Russian markets had restriction
Russian IT thrived when there were no restrictions or artificial barriers. It's just different culture and different energy that EU doesn't have.
They do though, and they are happy to.
A very small number of government agencies in a few countries have moved away from reliance on the US, but very few businesses have. We still have governments and businesses encouraging the use of US tech by, for example, encouraging use of mobile apps. AWS, Azure and Google dominate cloud services in most of the world. Microsoft dominates the desktop. Businesses and individuals are increasingly reliant on cloud apps that are mostly American.
Here in the UK my daughter's school (a large sixth for college) relies in MS cloud versions of Office and on Teams, you need (at least in my area) to use an mobile app, or a web app hosted on AWS to make an appointment with a GP (and if you are prescribed medication the pharmacy are informed via an API running in AWS). Most SMEs that do run anything of their own use AWS. One of the biggest banks (Lloyds) had issues during the recent AWS outage, and I know they are not the only one to use AWS.
A lot of European governments are pushing ID and age verification mobile apps.
In general a lot of governments are regulating in ways that favour the incumbents.
I think it’s important to focus on the momentum. It’s not easy to redesign and re-engineer systems that have taken years and decades to develop and span many layers of integrations. There is also the issue of retraining as everyone is happily used to whatever system they currently have. It’s unfortunate the US decided to go back in time rather than look to the future but eventually, very few (if any) services would rely on US corps.
Not to mention 95% of all mobile app installs are through App stores controlled by 2 US companies.
But to change these things within the past 7 or 8 months would have been impossible. I get what you guys are saying but there's so much of this stuff that is very entrenched and there's decades of inertia to push against, it can't just happen overnight. The story isn't that no one uses American services anymore, it's that fewer and fewer of us feel comfortable doing so and are open to or actively seeking alternatives in a way we never expected to be.
Trump, of course, is an unstable person, but why does everyone see the other side as any different? To many of us, they are sides of the same coin - and this, by the way, is more or less reflected in the similar lifestyles they lead. Elite politicians attend elite schools, democrat republican or otherwise. So it puzzles me that only now it's common to be skeptical of the US. Better now than never I guess, but I don't think it's true that Trump is somehow worse than his predecessor. The predecessors are just outwardly nicer. Nice vs kind, etc.
Okay? How does that change anything?
It does not change the situation instantly, but it changes the direction of History, and these changes add up over time.
My point is what you’re saying is so obvious, I’m not sure why you’re saying it.
Believe it or not, it’s partly because of regulation.
If you’re on Azure for example as a bank you know that most of the (eg DORA) requirements are met, because regulators have directly talked to Microsoft.
There are high compliance and migration cost for switching with no immediate gain for the business.
> capital, talent and trust are flowing out of that country
Is there non-anecdotal evidence of this that you can share with us?
My understanding is that people make this claim but I haven't seen evidence of it beyond one-off articles about individual professors leaving the country.
There is none. Despite the less stable environment if you are Talent by far the best place to be is the US. If you are an ambitious entrepreneur by far the best place to be is the US.
After I moved out of the US, I got emails all the time about moving to the EU; until I deleted my blog post about it.
The expat facebook groups have exploded if you’re looking for 'evidence'.
For the same reason why you choose "Made in China" over something that's made in your country. Often times it's the best (or even the only) tech for the best price.
I wish, but for a corporation morale grounds are not enough, and the facts speak for the contrary. Even with all the insanity, the US would not touch something as insanely profitable as this, and the government is very protective of the top tech firms. Also on the technical level, EU companies are simply not in the same ballpark.
It’s Europe. They couldn’t even drop Russian oil imports despite them being an existential threat. They’re doing this because anti-US moves are trendy right now and that’s it.
Some of us in Europe are ready to drop Russian oil imports whatever the cost. It's just russian backed populists are ready to rile the crowds for any price increase whatsoever and governments have to tread lightly all the time in order not to let power go to all those far right parties who would just buy the cheapest oil coming from anywhere as long as it allows them to remain in power.
when the momentum really gets going expect similar agitators rallying against reductions of US influence
>Some of us in Europe are ready to drop Russian oil imports whatever the cost.
Translation: "Some of us in Europe are ready to drop drop bread in favor of eating cake, whatever the cost."
Easy for you to write cheques that others have to cash. Be careful with such suicidal empathy, as that has second order effects that back-fire in spectacular fashion. That's why you're supposed to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others.
>It's just russian backed populists are ready to rile the crowds for any price increase whatsoever..
TIL that if you aren't gonna sacrifice yourself for Ukraine and prioritize your family's survival, wanting to have a job, a roof over your head and food on the table, somehow makes you a "Russian populist" now. Interesting logic.
You'd think much differently if you or your family would face unemployment, homelessness or malnourishment due to the economic damages caused by a surge in energy costs across the board. Half my immediate friend circle have lost their jobs in the last ~2 years due to the economic situation, my grandma can't afford her bills from her pension without financial support from us, while access public services like healthcare and childcare has only gotten worse, despite us paying more for everything. Not exactly the environment people feel like gutting themselves even further for a foreign country, whichever that may be.
Building an energy system dependent on Russian gas is, and always was an idiotic thing to do. I live in Finland, and our energy costs are pretty back to more or less what they used ot be, even though we live next to Russia.
I don't know where you're from, but at least Germany's problems run way deeper than their idiotic energy policies. Lack of investment in infrastructure, lack of innovation and all that. Even with cheap energy there's no way German car makers would compete, when Chinese make better EV's for less money. Laziness and lack of innovation is the problem, just like in European IT sector, which just buys everything from America.
Also, let's not forget the huge impact Covid spending had on inflation, and in turn interest rates & people's purchasing power. Ukraine war and sanctions against Russia are completely insignificant compared to that blunder. We're living the recession that was supposed to happen in 2020.
Surprisingly, when you depend on Russia oil and gas for your refineries and industry for decades, you can't always turn it off instantly, it sometimes takes many years due to infrastructure and for come countries, pro-Putin politics.
Being anti US isn't 'trendy', it is a response to the US being anti-EU at the moment, and justifiably being seen as unreliable, mercurial and even dangerous.
> Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech?
First and foremost, because it takes time to switch.
Secondly, because there are a lot of things that just don't have realistic alternatives.
For a large agency, especially one that has statutory or regulatory requirements on how they decide on and deploy hardware and software, even if they can legally choose to switch to open-source options, if they made that decision the day after the election last year, it might have been too late to get major proposals in for the 2025 fiscal year, so they'd have to wait until 2026 to do more than start planning. (This is, fairly obviously, a near-worst-case scenario; other agencies will have much more freedom to change as they please.)
Even if they're less encumbered, the more users you have within an organization, the longer it takes to execute a migration like this, and it can be really really hard to operate for any length of time with a partial migration completed, especially for the support team. I could easily believe that some such migrations are already in the planning stage, but will take months to actually happen.
And finally, because This Is How We've Always Done It is a very, very powerful force. For some organizations, unfortunately, it will take some kind of catastrophic event to realize that they really shouldn't be relying on a foreign and possibly hostile power for all their major enterprise IT vendors.
I have also met the attitude that using hyperscalers is the right way to do it, and running anything of your own that you could outsource to them is weird and unprofessional.
Time well invested. If you are a publicly-traded company, the executive level is financially irresponsible to the stakeholders if they leave the company's data at perpetual risk of just vanishing.
EU is the entity with fascist Hungary and Slovakia having veto powers, isn't it? The one where "free" countries like Denmark push for encryption backdoors?
I think I'll avoid them - for good reason
> The one where "free" countries like Denmark push for encryption backdoors?
In a free political system, anybody is able to push any agenda. What matters is what gets adopted. I agree that the EU is not perfect, but you cannot just take a government’s pet project and claim that it is a failure of the political system.
Lmao, westoids having hard takes on Slovakia after reading headlines on reddit is the funniest thing ever, if only you knew how wrong you are
Quick example, people who stop at headlines keep talking about Fico yapping about stopping aids to Ukraine, yet they give more as a percentage of their gdp than Germany, France, the UK, &c. Fico's a piece of shit but don't stop at what he says, half of his bs doesn't make it further than headlines in western medias
How can Hungary or Slovakia do the same? Literally, how could they? What mechanism exists?
While there are fascist leaders in those countries (especially Trump modelled is remodelling of the country after Orban's autocratic and corrupt Hungary), those are just 2 of 27 - so far far from the majority.
And many decisions in the EU do not allow for their veto votes anyhow - Orban's Hungary has been withhold now for years Billions of EU investments because of how the countries institutions were hollowed out by him.
What do you call a table of 27 with 2 Nazis at it? 27 Nazis.
That's an unfair characterisation of EU. Hungary and Slovakia didn't join under their current fascist governments. They weren't fascist when they joined in 2004.
Kicking them out isn't easy unless there is unanimity. Unfortunately EU requires this kind of quorum for the big decisions, which is kind of a safeguard to precisely avoid going full fascist for the whole EU due to a minority of countries.
> They weren't fascist when they joined in 2004.
And they still aren't by any definition of the word fascism
It's 2025 we should invent new terms for new things, not everything bad is "nazi" or "fascist"
I call it a table of 27 with two Nazis
How do you call a Parliament with two communist representatives, a communist regime ?
27 out of 27 agree that end to end encryption and free speech are dangerous... So spare us all the pearl clutching
You are badly informed. Even Denmark, the main proponent of the bill has withdrawn it's support.
What you have just witnessed was a working civil society. I'll take that over the alternative any day.
Except they don't. Last time I checked it didn't pass.
Literally no other country or market with the perhaps exception of China has anything close to its own tech stack. Europe literally had Linus Torvalds and couldn't keep him. He now lives in Portland, 3 hours from where windows is made and 10 hours away from OS X. Literally the entire tech industry is the west coast of the United States.
The disparity in capability is orders of magnitude. Europe is basically hopeless at this point
I won’t go that far…yes, the West Coast of the US is dominant, but it’s not “literally the entire tech industry” or even figuratively. We’d have a hard time buying new hardware without Chinese and Taiwanese companies. South Korea is a powerhouse in consumer tech; think Samsung and LG. Japan doesn’t have the dominance in tech it once did, but Japan is still a major player with many large tech companies like Fujitsu, Hitachi, Sony, NEC, and many more. Plus, if “tech” isn’t limited to software, then there are plenty of players worldwide in biotechnology and automobiles.
And let’s not count out Europe. I’m actually typing this in a BMW dealership’s waiting room in the Bay Area as I get my brake pads updated. BMW definitely qualifies as technology, even if it’s not a software company.
No Korean government services rely on US hyperscalers (which is the subject of this post). I'm 99% sure the same goes for financial institutions. Those are the key infra and they're sovereign. A lot of big companies do have some things on US hyperscalers, but even that is a relatively small percentage. Overwhelmingly things are on prem.
And now someone will link "but there was just a fire that resulted in many online gov services being down for weeks!!!". Yes. And having that happen once in a decade, after which measures will be taken so that from now on it happens once in 3 decades, is absolutely 100x preferable to depending on US hyperscalers like EU governments do. As we just saw, it's not like AWS and Azure don't go down.
Sure, they don't have their own OS. But even much of China still runs on Windows. China might manage to get entirely rid of it at some point but not yet.
Doesn't Intel depend on ASML when their chip machines break? I don't think there exists a single country in the world that can currently produce a significant amount of full-stack, modern compute. If there is one, it's definitely China rather than the US.
>Europe literally had Linus Torvalds and couldn't keep him
The great thing about Linux is we don't need to care where Linus lives. We obviously have — in principle — the tech, the workforce and the money to build an alternative tech stack. Most of it is open source at this point.
It's just political will. If we had the commitment and sense of urgency to unwind from America we could. Just like in military affairs we don't do it because we have a mental blockade to break with the existing global order.
> The disparity in capability is orders of magnitude.
But then again it's increasingly being made by Indian migrants, right?
How far away the critical state is, who knows. Could it be in this presidential term? Would it happen within ten years of the coming imperial takeover of the presidency? Perhaps.
But when the valley loses its dominance it will likely happen pretty quickly: huge numbers of the people who make it happen will go home, go back to their home states, or just go to live somewhere cheaper. The US is not educating people fast enough or deeply enough to replace them, and there's no sign that AI really can replace the ones that matter.
Just because nobody can see exactly when this will happen doesn't mean you don't start planning for it to happen. Because it will happen, and when it happens it will happen fast.
The US tech industry is still built on the idea that the USA is a comfortable, friendly, open liberal democracy. And that is over. I mean, on a basic level any individual H1B placement in the future exists at the whim of the executive. Who do you have to donate to, to keep it? And any skilled migrant who might come over, work the hell out of a job that is beneath their level of education in the quick-e-mart and then start something of their own is not going to come.
Europe has its own problems with pasty-faced, bad-haired weaselly proto-fascists, but it's still fighting.
These are great news. I was quite pessimistic about this transformation, but seems there are plenty institutions willing to make the leap.
Are you aware of any tracking web that would display all these efforts? Wiki seems a bit outdated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_free_and_open-sour...
EDIT: this seems to be a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732485
Even if you can’t move all of it now the basic building blocks like VMs and databases aren’t exactly cutting edge tech so should be doable.
People overestimate the technology required to build the utility stack, from physical servers to the first bit from an http server. Is it easy? It's straightforward. Can there be downtime? Tell me what us-east-1, Azure Front Door, Github, etc have looked like lately. Everyone uses cloud as an excuse for more uptime, but they're still down frequently, so this argument doesn't hold water. Eat some downtime, you're going to regardless if you manage your own infra or outsource. Can't build it yourself? That's fine, people like Oxide can build it for you, and you own all of it.
The profits you don't pay to hyperscalers is investment in your sovereignty. Easy case to prioritize stakeholders over Google, Microsoft, and AWS shareholders, and the US government's ability to rug pull your access and data at any time. The argument isn't bare metal vs virtualized; the argument is "Do you own it?" You are spending a certain amount no matter what to get the technology capabilities needed.
37signals Leaves the Cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33260061 - October 2022
https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-else...
https://oxide.computer/
(have built cloud infra for startups, fortune 100s, financial services firms, and on prem infra for high energy physics, non profits, public goods, etc; thoughts and opinions always my own)
> Eat some downtime, you're going to regardless if you manage your own infra or outsource.
If its outsourced the downtime is someone else's fault.
People prefer opex to capex.
You are right at a technical level, but short termism and personal incentives trump those.
> You are right at a technical level, but short termism and personal incentives trump those.
Agreed. Never let a crisis go to waste. This is that crisis. Like bankruptcy, change happens gradually, then suddenly.
Both those things are like the root account to one's data. If there is a hypervisor backdoor (or if your vendor is told by the government to stop giving you updates or sell you product, or even pull your keys) then its game over. DB's too because they're so mission critical and not trivial to move off.
As far as cloud goes, how many shops are now looking at bringing stuff back in because eventually cloud maximizes its profit margins and captured clients can't say no to ever increasing prices. I imagine leaving the US-owned cloud also means an opportunity to reconfigure what is on the cloud and if it needs to be there.
Here's hope desktop linux comes back into play.
As for Munich moving back to windows, who knows how much of that was 'checkbook diplomacy' of the USA demanding they go back to US products or the US will pull unrelated support or whatever. Now that the USA has become isolationist, if not a threat to the EU, those favors/checks aren't being cashed anymore. So much of this is not a meritocracy but instead the crony capitalism that defines the modern world. Maybe there's potential for actual merit now that the USA is losing global prominence in so many ways.
The EU liberated from US influence can lead to great things and this is a good start. For all the doom and gloom of politics today, the US's century of influence ending can only be a universally good thing, imho.
* "The Histomap. Four Thousand Years Of World History. Relative Power Of Contemporary States, Nations And Empires." by John B. Sparks: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... (www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~200375~3001080:The-Histomap--Four-Thousand-Years-O), https://web.archive.org/web/20130813230833if_/alanbernstein.... (4194 x 19108 pixels, web.archive.org/web/20130813230833if_/alanbernstein.net/images/large/histomap.jpg) via https://web.archive.org/web/20130813230833/alanbernstein.net... (web.archive.org/web/20130813230833/alanbernstein.net/images/large/histomap.jpg); https://archive.ph/1wEk8/332f1c70b1ffd9854847dbfa7ad77b4915c... (4194 x 19108 pixels, archive.ph/1wEk8/332f1c70b1ffd9854847dbfa7ad77b4915cbd50a.jpg) via https://archive.ph/1wEk8
* "(Covers to) The Histomap. Four Thousand Years Of World History. Relative Power Of Contemporary States, Nations And Empires.": https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... (www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~200374~3000299:-Covers-to--The-Histomap--Four-Thou)
"The world without hegemony" "As Pax Americana ends, a multipolar order is emerging. The history of Southeast Asia holds lessons for what’s to come": https://aeon.co/essays/what-southeast-asian-history-tells-us... (aeon.co/essays/what-southeast-asian-history-tells-us-about-a-multipolar-order) via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45771497 ; https://archive.ph/wBrLt
I’m the last person you can call a fan of US foreign policy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U...
But for global stability it’s best if there was some kind of entity with a legitimate monopoly on force. It’s like I don’t want to live in a town where everyone has guns, I’d like a police force with accountability.
Personally, I like a forum for sorting things out peacefully without relying on the goodwill of the bully du jour.
Your argument is not new and is exactly why enlightened absolute monarchs were fashionable at some point. It sounds good, but the problem is that this works as long as the monarch is good. When they aren’t, or aren’t any more, or their heir aren’t, then it’s horrible.
Democracy is an exercise in optimising for the middle ground: sure, it’s not going to be as efficient as a competent autocracy, but it limits the worst case scenarios.
> It’s like I don’t want to live in a town where everyone has guns, I’d like a police force with accountability
Accountability doesn't equal magic: when seconds count, the police are minutes (realistically: hours, in many places) away.
The war on terror has killed millions of civilians, mostly women and children. Brown University lists excess deaths from the WoT at 4 or 5m. The USA has destabilized many countries and performed coups. It invades and goes to war for its own geopolitical gains and regularly lies why. What you're praising is a horror.
Being defenseless hoping an angry 800lbs gorilla will be kind to you must be the worst system imaginable. A balance of power both economic and arms is going to be the best way forward because now that gorilla knows it can't just do what it wants anymore.
I'm not praising anything. Yes US foreign policy sucks. I'm pointing out historically a balance of power has been even worse. There are too many possible points of failure. Discuss with your favorite frontier LLM.
Ideally idk I'd like a much stronger UN or something, with federal power over member states.
Who would run such a UN? And why wouldn’t they be worse - and what would you be able to do about it, if they were?
And don’t forget, regardless of the title, for anything to get done there inevitably is one man who is making decisions/breaking ties somewhere.
I can’t think of anyone that the various factions could actually trust to do that without screwing over at least (or more!) half of them.
Who runs your local police force? What do you do if they suck? It's really not that hard to implement a good setup, but yeah the hard part is convincing multiple countries to give up a bit of sovereignty. Might take another world war.
If my local police force sucks, they impact me and the other local voters, so they tend to be somewhat easy to fix (as long as we can all agree they suck). Or at least I only have my fellow local idiots to blame.
What happens when the person who chose them is in Beijing, and everyone in my entire country doesn’t want them there? But they still got a global majority?
Typically that’s the kind of thing a lot of people die over.
Yeah multiply this situation x1M and you understand why a balance of power is unstable. To make a civilized society work, people can't pull out guns when they disagree. You sue, or you figure out how to communicate/negotiate, or you just live with it. Any of those are better than war, and a good setup will have plenty of avenues like that.
I think we both have wildly different life experiences.
The only way a real UN would work is with even more violence. The ‘under the boot forever’ type.
The world would need a Qin to have even half a chance [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang].
Because what happens - when like the US is now discovering - the courts are useless? And you don’t even have your own guns to protect your rights?and what someone else has decided to do is your destruction?
Did you ever find it weird that it's the pro-gun pro-rights republicans that are attacking the courts?
Americans have some very weird thinking over guns. I think if they were taken away, they'd have to work harder at getting along with other people (esp women, minorities, china), and therefore get better at it.
It's really not a coincidence that it's the pro-gun Americans who killed Roe v Wade. Their ancestors owned slaves. They love to say it's about "rights", but it's clearly not.
The courts don’t work in China or Russia either.
It doesn’t surprise me that those capable (and willing!) of defending themselves would rugpull everyone else if it gave them what they wanted.
What surprises me is how everyone else sits back and lets them and refuses to actually take action to defend themselves, while going ‘woe is me, why won’t anyone do something’.
And acting surprised that the people they’ve been screaming are going to do bad things actually do bad things.
It’s embarrassing. Just like you are apparently advocating for a dictator to ‘save us’, from…. ourselves? Or something?
At least the Trumpers are transparently doing it for personal gain, near as I can tell you’re just doing it for some kind of do gooder fantasy? They tend to be even worse, in practice.
>Now that the USA has become isolationist, if not a threat to the EU, those favors/checks aren't being cashed anymore.
Trump could threaten tariffs.
Trumpism is all about maximizing tariff gain/benefit. Economically and politically he may not have room to do more without crippling the USA. The EU is already dealing with tough tariffs from the USA.
Most of the "500% tariffs" is bluster and he backs down to the min/max level the capital owning class he is part of and he ultimately serves don't want to go past.
"Replacing Office365, how to keep OS secure": https://help.nextcloud.com/t/replacing-office365-how-to-keep... (help.nextcloud.com/t/replacing-office365-how-to-keep-os-secure/223289)
rage-bait retitling? title says Big Tech, not US Tech.
What other big tech is there really, apart from Chinese tech (which is already avoided across Europe)?
open source is pretty global, i'd say. it's also a theme in the linked article.
Are there any publicly traded European cloud companies that will benefit from Europe hosting more of their stuff on their own?
I looked at IONOS, but it seems they just let their cloud product rot away? The cloud backend looks outdated and lacks basic features like uploading private keys that can be used when provisioning new VMs.
I also looked at OVH, but their website and interface look like total chaos to me. I felt lost all the time while I was trying to set up a VM, and while trying to use their AI APIs.
Considering that Europe has an economy as large as the USA, it is puzzling how small these companies are. The combined market cap of IONOS and OVH is less than $10B.
Europe does not have the same market conditions as the US. The continent is divided into a gazillion amount of small countries, each with their own rules, laws, regulations, languages, customers, pension systems, healthcare systems, and taxes. Even the currency is not the same everywhere. Not to mention the cultural differences.
Pretty hard economy to survive in.
US companies seem to sell into Europe just fine?
Amazon, Google, Microsoft - they all make tens of billions of revenue in Europe.
Why wouldn't a company based in Europe be able to do the same?
US companies get big first, only then try Europe once they have big revenue/headcount to handle the risk/complexity.
One thing they have for them is a lot of money to invest from their American market, and enough momentum that they can afford barely sustainable European operations for a few years whilst they figure things out and streamline everything.
EU federalism would solve this issue, and likely cause others.
The concept of European federalism is extremely interesting to me. The first I heard about it was at a house party in Prague, from a group of very excited young people. It feels both impossible and inevitable.
Here is a subreddit on the topic: https://old.reddit.com/r/EuropeanFederalists/
The US started this way... Europe must be careful about how much power is given the EU or it will end up the same way.
They would probably need a anchor client that would allow for predictable growth at scale - AWS always had Amazon.com GCP had its gmail and other workspace apps. Ideally the varoius goverments in the EU would commit to only hosting their work on them , however from one article read recently even the rules they come up with to test sovereignity claims are gamed to benefit the US providers.
Like https://www.stackit.de/en/ which is the cloud offering of Schwarz Group, owner of Lidl?
Yep,hopefully their API offerings are industry compatible and requisition of resources for clients is smooth. Would also help if they can onboard similar sized operations that are currently doing their own hosting or using one of the non-EU clouds.
Hetzner comes to mind.
Hetzner is not a publicly traded company.
maybe for the better
They have been a sustainable business from the start, and it shows.
it's been years since the last time I go to zdnet. My experience when opening the link: I've been greeted by a dialog asking me to enable notifications, then the classic cookie dialog, and 5 seconds into reading the article, an auto-playing video with sound shows up pinned to the bottom of my screen. No thank you. Tab closed.
US big tech is not just no longer reliable but toxic, predatory, prying, patronizing, etc..
I have to rely on office 365 at work for some minimal functions. I generally try to avoid it and only use it when necessary. The other day when I logged in to look for some document everything was hidden and Copilot AI was front and center. Copilot is the dumbest LLM possible, terrible integration, terrible responses, everything has become a headache for a simple task I had to do. How long would have until Microsoft corpo customers grind to a halt?
Am I way off base, or is there a HUGE potential market for a new spreadsheet program compatible with xls/xlsx?
It can't be that hard to make one, can it? (Famous last words, I know...)
LibreOffice Calc can do this already.
The main issue is the collaboration aspect of LibreOffice. I imagine though with funding LibreOffice can be upgraded to do this. If countries are already trying to migrate away from US tech, they could invest in this.
I know actually that LibreOffice specifically has lamented xlsx, apparently it’s a hard file format to design for.
I personally think the future is a database like postgres or sqlite that is know to be very robust with a nice calc frontend. I believe Mathesar is on it. Watching them closely.
Why ? Because falling back to SQL for big data would ne just great. Excel and Google Sheets seems to struggle.
the spreadsheet part is done already. the real power of excel these days is M365 cloud integration.
Gsuite and Zoho try to compete but they don't come close.
This administration in particular has done more to erode and destroy American soft power than any other and it's not even close.
A lot of people fundamnetally misunderstand the source of the US's power. Some think it's because oil and other commodities are traded in US dollars. It's not. Oil is traded in US dollars because of American soft and hard power, not the other way around. Sell oil in euros and people will just trade their euros for USD for the exact same reasons.
The ultimate source of American global power is the US military, period. Where the British Empire once was so powerful because it was the world's drug dealer (first tobacco, later opium), the US is the world's arms dealer. The US got incredibly wealthy from WW1 and WW2 and there are many conflicts to this day where each side is firing US sourced weapons at each other.
It requires finesse to maintain this position. It's a bit like being a bank. A bank needs a certain facade of predictability, even neutrality, to continue to profit off whatever happens. People can revolt against the bank and the banking system. It's happened before (eg penny auctions in the Great Depression).
What this administration is teaching the world is that the US is becoming unreliable. It's now a threat to sovereignty and national security to be reliant on the US, for anything. This goes well beyond cloud services and US tech giants. The US was always capable of turning on its protectorates and puppet states but it generally behaved in a far more restrained way to maintain the illusion of independance or at least to prioritize stability and predictability.
I fully expect in the coming years that the EU is going to create their own competitors to things like AWS and they're going to do it by mandating its use by all government systems. It's going to be the new Airbus counter to Boeing.
China is way ahead in this game. A lot of people (myself included) like to point to how much infrastructure, particularly rail, China has built in the last few decades. But fewer look at how they've done it. China originally bought European high speed intercity trains but that was temporary. They bootstrapped their own industries and produce their own trains now. And they use the same rolling stock on all metros and intercity lines to avoid the inefficiencies of localized procurement processes.
I believe that a command economy like China will be the clear winner of the 21st century.
> I believe that a command economy like China will be the clear winner of the 21st century.
I agree that the "command" aspect has been an asset for China, but the real drivers of their economic success has been cheap labor (fueled by weak labor protections), and indifference toward burning fossil fuels (until recently) and in general ignoring the externalities of their rapid industrialization.
If US companies could pay people dirt, work them to death, and care even less than they do now about environmental externalities, a lot more manufacturing would have stayed on US soil.
> This administration in particular has done more to erode and destroy American soft power than any other and it's not even close.
Yup. It is still entirely bizarre to me that they don't see this. Or that they do see this, but think it's fine. Or that there is some other "plan" that actively seeks to destroy the US's dominance from within, and for some reason they think that's a good thing.
The idea of poverty wages in China is very outdated. Labor isn't even necessarily "cheap" anymore in China. But why people continue to manufacture there is because of the infrastructure there.
China has a long-term vision for sustainable devlopment [1]. China is excellent at long-term planning that looks 50 years or more into the future.
As for renewable power, China is adding capacity at an astounding rate. China will likely ween itself. They'll likely end the use of fossil fuels in our lifetime.
As much as housing and food affordability are now very real problems in the US, utility prices are going to get so much worse in the next few years with the administration killing renewables, increasing LNG exports (we're now heavily reliant on natural gas) and we're allowing privatized utilities to price gouge.
[1]: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-06-05/President-Xi-s-key-quo...
Does zdnet really auto autoplay audio when you open the page…?
[dupe] Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732485
I do not blame them for doing this. And if they move over to LibreOffice and a distro like SUSE replacing Microsoft products, they will eventually see support costs decreasing a lot.
Cloud, I do not know if that will reduce costs, but at least they will know their data is more secure than with AWS, Microsoft and others.
Software isn’t Tech, for heavens sake. It sounds glib to call it that in the same vein as software developers calling themselves engineers. Nonsense posturing.
I get it though: EU would rather have China own them (see NXP) rather than US. Because EU-based companies are worthless, broke, and offshored already. It’s a cost cutting measure at that point. Enjoy Libre Office. (Fucking lol)
> EU would rather have China own them (see NXP) rather than US. Because EU-based companies are worthless, broke, and offshored already.
As an individual, I prefer Euro sw/ tech way over Chinese sw/ tech and both 10 orders of magnitudesover american data-stealing, enshittifying klunk - as do many of my colleagues and friends...of late, and it's getting to more and more 'regular' people. Too.
Could you elaborate on which EU companies are a) worthless - got names; b) broke - name one; and c) which ones are off-shored (meaning not Eu-pean)?
Do you include EU
I agree with you regarding "Euro tech", but not on "Chinese sw/ tech", they are at least as data-stealing as the US and they have even less democratic controls over there.
Too little, too late. After the Snowden revelations there were no reasons to use US tech, for any org outside of the USA. It was obvious that US state actors do not respect any non-US actor. We Europeans need to treat US IT companies just like Russian or Chinese IT companies. And build our own infrastructure. The US does not care about alliences. It will treat any ally just like any other country.
Edit: Office365 is a pile of horse poo. These tools do not allow you to do brain surgery. There are other alternatives to write text, do calculations, and send emails. Nothing that justifies being compromised by US state actors.
I have been saying this for years most governments instead of spending 100s of billions on software subscription would have been better of supporting open source software. But that is too communist an ideal for these capitalist controlled governments at least they are now moving against foreign capitalist at least.
I wish Europe would shift from leaching off of the defense tax money of the American people. Conveniently for them, we know that won't happen.
Maintaining an empire has a cost and History has taught that isolationism is not kind to empires. You want to deal with problems before they arise not when you can't ignore them anymore. That was the lesson WWII taught the US and that it has now forgotten. Basically great power, great responsibility.
You will regret that n% tax rebate when you children have to go fight overseas.
It seems unfair that the US had both a great political foundation and the best geography and sometimes I feel like the US is too big too fail but you people sure are trying to test how robust the whole thing is.
(I know the US is not exactly an empire but an alliance system where it has the dominant role but please don't interrupt during the class)
Competition is good, but they should start from the OS level.
Outside of Windows and MacOS, there is no OS ecosystem that works as well and at scale for an enterprise level deployment.
I don't get the whole "US" aspect, why bring politics into this? We need alternatives and competition regardless of all that. I don't care if Europe, China or India make it, a viable alternative would be a game changer.
For Europe, they're solving the wrong problem. Solve the problem of low pay for developers, and a stifling regulatory atmosphere that inhibits disruptive startups.
If there is a good and viable alternative, why is it just for Europe? It could boost Europe's economy by selling to America and the rest of the world. The tech needs to be good, if the US can do it, why can't Europe?
Replacing office or one app at at time only addresses surface level issues.
> I don't get the whole "US" aspect, why bring politics into this?
There is some level of technology dependency after which it can become a national security risk (and therefore, political). This has happened a bunch in history (e.g. countries reducing reliance on adversaries oil supplies or foreign semiconductors).
The few examples in the article are small and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but I think the article is trying to make the point that this is part of a larger divestiture from American tech companies.
Whether that larger divestiture is happening, however, is probably a pretty dubious claim.
This kind of reminds me of during COVID when everybody was writing articles like, “SF and NYC are dead and everyone is moving out!” Turns out… not so much.
Journalists love taking a few small data points and extrapolating to what feels like should be happening and leading the reader to extreme conclusions.
It’s much more fun to write that a hurricane is coming than it is to write, “we’re seeing some light rain today, and it’s probably within normal variance for this time of year.”
It's just that this isn't like raw resources like oil. there is no "good" or "superior" oil. it's just oil. and there are some differences, but there is no "american refined gas" that is superior.
But with tech, there is a question of quality and superiority. People that use M365 suite can work and collaborate more effectively, if not for actual superiority of the product and its OS integration, then simply because it is so well known and users prefer it the most (it does not repel talent as much).
Why give talented european skilled people more reasons to leave the EU for US, as if existing issues aren't enough? Why not instead directly compete with Microsoft and Google. Why isn't the EU investing in that? They're caught in the "open source" trap. I hate to say it, but they need to make closed source proprietary software that is commercially competitive.
I can see that - the open source stuff is just not good enough for most enterprise needs.