Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy
1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans
2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology
When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.
There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.
That's mighty impossible for the european mindset - people here are not so risk-eager as to through hundreds of billions on infrastructure for something that might return a profit.
I think it's totally great that competing products get produced in the EU. Not a bad thing from anyone's perspective except the owners of those US companies that will now need to compete.
Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA and Trump, in one of his tantrums, threatened to destroy that this week, with 100% tariffs.
From a world domination point of view fragmentation is bad. On the other hand heterogeneity is good for choice and freedom as at least on paper if one platform kicks you off due to whatever curbs on freedom, you have alternative choices.
Heterogeneity/fragmentation also makes it harder for companies and countries to impose their mores on others. From that PoV Africa also should develop its own tools so as not to be subject to either North American or European values but their own values.
Yeah, assuming Canada is just going to keep going along buying American software and services seems pretty naive. There's less capacity to build alternatives in Canada than there is in Europe, but as Europe builds out alternative ecosystems, Canadians will likely be just as eager customers as Europeans (if not more eager).
The beauty of so many of these solutions being open source solutions also means that it creates avenues for cooperation between organizations that have no official cooperation agreement.
E.g. The Austrian federal Military, the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the city of Leon have no direct forum for cooperating on software projects, yet all three are contributing to the development and rapid adoption of Nextcloud. Canada can easily get in on this too.
Canada has roughly the population of California, and Aus/NZ combined have populations less than California. For these types of market analyses, these countries are closer to US states in market potential.
Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont
put together.
That's the equivalent of 18 states.
Throw in Aus and NZ too and you add another 7 states -- Louisiana, Alabama, Utah, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nevada and Iowa.
Ontario alone has a larger GDP than 45 of the 50 US states, and a bigger GDP than New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont put together.
I think they are a decade or two late to migrate away. They will end up developing their own in a time where these are loss leaders. It’s likely they will pay for it in a bundle while just not using it.
Not to mention in my experience EU companies don’t know how to migrate away from anything as their tech companies operate at the efficiency of a US government agency.
I guess the point here is to keep high prices. If you lower the prices, you can try to enter even Africa, but it's simply easier to keep more or less uniform pricing, unless you're Steam-size and are able to spend resources on doing this properly.
In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created. We want a strong Europe who can build and innovate instead of regulating and fining. In contrast, we certainly don't want see the disastrous joke like Northvolt. We certainly don't want to see the joke that BASF shut down its domestic factories and invested north of 10B in China for state-of-the-art factories. Oh, and we certainly don't want to see a Europe that couldn't defeat Russia and couldn't even out-manufacture Russia, even though Russia's GDP is merely of Guangzhou's.
I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force.
You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.
Sure, Betamax was technically superior to VHS. But in the end the market still decides… nobody said “better” means technically superior… just something people want to use an other options available to them. “Good enough” with attractive value to the individual/business typically wins.
Sure, and right now, a product being owned by a corporation susceptible to direct influence from the US government is a massive negative when people are evaluating products.
The evalutation metric for various vital projects has massively changed over the last couple years. These European products still need to be technically good, but they no longer need to be better than American products in order to find customers.
With the current level of geopolitical tensions, this is nowhere near enough to cause a massive exodous where all systems that were previously working fine are ripped apart and replaced with new systems, *but* one can be sure that whenever people are looking at new projects, or updates to old systems, the evalutation metrics have changed quite a bit, and this is creating strong momentum for European tech.
Not to get too much into a debate about Beta vs VHS, but VHS did have longer run times and its cheapness was the main reason it won, It just fit better for the consumer overall desires at the time
Exactly. It's about whose definition of "better" you use. Sony thought that a better picture would win out, and it did where that mattered: TV studios and video-journalists used Betamax until digital formats took over. For consumers, "better" meant cheaper tapes and longer run time.
JVC also licensed the VHS format to many manufacturers, so there was a lot of competition on recorders, further driving the price of ownership down. I don't recall anyone ever selling Betamax other than Sony.
Edit: JVC actually released VHS as an open standard, not a license, per Wikipedia.
Technology connections did a video on Betamax vs VHS that debunked this in a practical sense as Betamax had a version II that allowed 2 hour recordings, the quality was slightly better to early VHS instead the significant improvement of beta I (original standard)
Retail movie releases used II since most movies could fit on one tape. Beta I was rare and later betamax decks just ignored it or something for compatibility.
VHS HQ and HiFi, which came much later when beta was basically dead, was probably better than beta II and close to beta I in quality
I have made most of my karma off of trashing Teams, and while it is "better" than it was before (I rarely get infinite loops crashing my browser now), it is hard to call it acceptable.
Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting. The entire purpose is supposed to be collaboration with other people; if they aren't going to notify me on the web app, what's the point?
I know a lot of it is because of their need to support an infinite number of potential configurations, but if it had been a protocol instead of an app, we would have had the perfect frontend by now. (But then, how would they be stealing all of my data?)
> Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting.
Lol, we use WebEx, and someone actually went and developed an internal app to make it usable by piloting WebEx through accessibility APIs (including starting the call a minute before the meeting starts).
The EU can also ban access to US products, once EU alternatives are available, for example. "National security" or whatever PR is needed to make the case.
I'm unsure the EU could build and require anything worse than Teams, considering the open source landscape for that product category, for example. The primitives exist, scale them up and lock out US companies from the EU market with policy. Recycle the capital internally, just like VC funds do with their portfolio companies.
I'm absolutely against banning usage of computer programs and platforms BUT I would rally for getting Teams banned from the face of the earth and applying a law to prevent Microsoft to attempt to create or acquire any kind of communicator for the next 50 years.
The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.
Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.
Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.
The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?
One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.
The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.
But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.
> The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
I agree. All this hem and hawing will not get them anywhere, and will just have Microsoft again dropping bundles of money at the foot of officials to "pretty please don't switch awawy."
Mandate it, top down, make it law, then officials have the legal mandate to fall back on to tell Microsoft and the others to pound sand when they come knocking with the briefcase full of money.
It's only recently that the united states has become an enemy of the EU though. I'd say there's much more motivation to move to other software and platforms now.
It's hardly rhetoric, from the European perspective. The EU is already embroiled in a proxy war against a major power in Ukraine, and are now faced with the prospect of their strongest erstwhile ally moving to annex EU territory.
Simultaneous war on two fronts, where one opponent is deeply embedded in your supply chains, is an existential threat.
It doesn't have to be the sky is falling, it's reality. In one year Europe went from "can we fight Russia with American help" to "can we fight Russia without American help" to "can we fight America". If Europe doesn't get itself unencumbered with the US they are in a very vulnerable position.
The dependencies were always there. But never before (since the forming of NATO) has the US leadership so clearly and concretely distanced themselves from Europe. Before that there was a strong sense of North America and Europe belonging to the same “liberal” world where many things did be relatively cheaply exchanged.
The dependencies were therefore seen as a non issue for many. Banks have always been skeptics of the cloud because of the ability of the American government to just pull the plug if they want. Before it was a theoretical possibility that still came up in risk analysis. Today it is something that could even concretely happen.
Prosecutors and others have been denied access to their official work email etc because they displeased the president.
The US is not trustworthy anymore. Your president is switching randomly from on insane idea to something equally insane. Canada doesnt want to the the 51st state. Greenland is part of Denmark, which is in the EU, which has been the biggest ally for the US and now your president was not ruling out using force to take over greenland.
Trump fans are saying "this is how he negotiates, don't mind", etc but anything coming from him os just random bullshit and nothing he says can be believed because the next day he can be 180* on the same topic.
There were no such issues between any of the US allies in the time I can remember.
We thought that whenwe help the US in Afganistan and Iraq then it will be remembered when we need help, but now Trump threw all that goodwill down the toilet when he said that the allies basically didnt do anything.
Sure the issue was always there for you or people like you. But for a majority of the EU population there was no problem until very recently. And now people like you are starting to have more leverage to influence people who can make the right calls.
> I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
This feels different.
Up to now there hasn't a really good technical reason to want to switch from, say, Zoom to Teams (or vice versa). You might switch because of network effects: all your friends / coworkers are on the other one. But, video chat is basically a commodity (all work "good enough" and the features are broadly similar) and has been for quite some time.
What's different is that now all (or nearly all) the people contributing to the network effect simultaneously have a reason to want to switch. So the network effect, which was the only thing that was really "sticky" about any of these apps, is gone.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking
Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".
Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?
Congratulations, you now use the government-mandated messaging infrastructure.
> while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
fortunately, legislation can help here
start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there
the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure
This is the biggest step any country (other than China and those subject to US sanctions) has made to reducing their dependence on American big tech.
Its still a small step, but its a start.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide
You can push people to do this. The government can switch as a matter of policy. It can require companies bigging for government contracts to only use systems based in approved countries. It can make it a requirement for regulated industries (e.g. infrastructure, critical financial services, etc.)
This blind faith in “the market” is charming, but the market is just the outcome of enforceable ground rules (national, international) followed then by price/value.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Sry but the world where ”markets decided” pretty much anything ended when Trump started his second term. EU is finishing a trade deal with India that creates a market of 2 billion people. Europe and China are closer than ever. I’m sure we can get along with Teans and police state just fine.
Yes, decade(s?) ago some city or state in Germany decided to ditch Microsoft for Linux and OpenOffice. It didn't go well and they eventually backtracked.
While, there's a real risk of overselling the enthusiasm right now, there's a much bigger risk of complacency making dinosaurs stick their head in the sand and think nothing ever changes.
IMO, if ones thinks the lessons about competition between tech platforms from the previous few decades are 1-to-1 applicable in the current geopolitical, economical, and strategic state of the world, then that person is either not paying attention, or they're in denial.
Companies, governments, and militaries are looking around their office right now and realizing their organization could grind to a complete halt if Trump made a phone call to a very small handful of executives.
That's an existential risk, and organizations absolutely can and do choose products that are on their face inferior if it helps shield them from existential risk. (Western) Tech is one of few industries that has no institutional experience with dealing with geopolitical risk, but it's happening now.
The market makes decisions on quality and pride but it can also use politics, patriotism, religion, and other factors which may not have the greatest impact compared to the first two.
It's possible that both the appeal of home* grown product (patriotism) combined with distaste of the current US government and the tech companies that support it (politics) is enough to push people to switch even if the quality is lower
we were over globalized. COVID showed us that when we couldnt even produce life saving medicines domestically. If the take away from world war 1 was too much nationalism, the take away from covid is, too much globalism.
Resilient cultures are by definition market inefficient.
Even assuming this is true, EU cloud providers no longer have to compete with their American counterparts on an even footing thanks to the insanity coming out of the White House (and American society more generally). There's a very big push to get off of American providers, and many (though not all) customers are willing to make sacrifices to do so.
If providers like OVH play their cards right, they can use this sudden influx of cash to both scale up, and improve their offerings. There's a lot of money on the table right now.
I use AWS and OVH at work and this has not my experience.
AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality. I'd love to never have to use redshift or EMR again for instance. OVH is more basic, but what it has tends to work at least.
> AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality.
Being cynical AWS has more services because many of those are deliberately siloed in order to create a separate billing item, i.e.:
"You want to use AWS Foo ...great, welcome to AWS ! But unless you want to re-invent the wheel re-programming the standard workflow, you should really use AWS Bar and AWS Baz alongside it. Dontcha' like all the cute names we've given them ? Here are all the price sheets, don't forget to read the small print ... good luck figuring out how much it will cost you".
> Most EU companies, including this one, offer subpar services compared to their American counterparts
Not true.
But you know what the best thing about the EU companies is ?
Transparent pricing.
EU company: Yes, you really can accurately calculate to the nearest cent how much your compute instance will cost you and exactly what you are getting for that money. No surprises.
US company:Is that Compute Savings Plan, EC2 Savings Plan, On-Demand or Spot. What speed is my network "up to" ? And then of course the big "I DUNNO" in relation to "how many IOPS am I going to be charged for EBS disk transfer ?"
EU company: Of course we don't charge you for LIST etc. on S3. We only charge you for off-network GETs and the associated data transfer, on-network is free.
US company: What do you mean LIST etc. should be free ?
You know what else I like about the EU companies ?
At least two of them allow pay as you go from a reducing credit balance.
Yes that's right US companies. It IS possible to give your customers a way to 100% guarantee you will never have an "oops I just spent a million dollars overnight" moment.
Oh I agree. China is clearly outplaying everyone. But EU surely doesn't want to replace one leash (US tech stack) with different leash (Chinese tech stack).
I keep wondering though. Is insane amount of compute really that crucial? Aren't most real computing needs served well with not so cutting edge tech? I am 5-10 years behind on most of my machines. Servers we have at work are very modest (and outdated) yet the software these servers power are still valuable. Maybe EU could run on some domestic RISC-V cheapo chips.
There'll be a vacuum filled by non-US brands, China is learning and given they'll push to be independent eventually they'll compete with AMD/Intel/Nvidia, Europe has ARM.
The worst thing in the long-term for American hardware makers is for the US to block other countries to purchase from them and having that money invested in alternatives.
My fingers always ache when I hear praise for the company that through its incompetence nearly lost me my company's domain name... twice. Shame on me for staying with them.
Depends how hooked into the "cloud infrastructure" ecosystem they are. If it's a provider of vms which are easy to move from one provider to another that's one thing, if it's reliant on the latest cool aws thing that's another.
Switching to sovereignty-protecting, locally-hosted collaboration, compute, and storage is by no means impossible. FOSS advocates have been eagerly beating this drum and providing options for 25+ years.
The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools.
The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.
For what it's worth, if you want a self hosted replacement for Zoom Galene has worked great for me, The server requirements are remarkably low, especially if you are like me and just need a personal video chat to a few people. I run it on an old apu-2 with openbsd(which is just about the worst combination and it still works great) As a bonus there is no client, that is, the client is just a web page so very low friction to get people to use it.
I am running a Galene instance via the YunoHost self-hosting package on a small dedicated server (2 cores, 4gb of RAM).
So far it’s much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality. Feels better than Jitsi and even a FaceTime / WhatsApp call.
> So far [Galene is] much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality
Latency is better, since Galene uses an unordered buffer instead of a jitter buffer. Lipsynch should also be slightly better, as Galene carefully computes audio/video offsets and forwards the result to the receiver so it can compensate.
Audio and video quality, on the other hand, should be roughly the same, unless Jitsi is doing something wrong.
The inertia (or actively maintained status quo) in Europe towards the US platforms is massive.
Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses.
>The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech
Until now nobody thought it was a problem.
At least not a big one.
The EU made some moves to define a "cloud computing" platform for Europe, and very little people paid attention because business-wise it was very difficult to compete with US corporations that have vast amounts of money in cash and find easy to get funding.
But now there are some (small) alternatives.
LIDL has its own cloud for retail.
And I believe T-Systems sells some cloud computing for goverments based on OpenStack...
- Tchap is a message app for officials,
- Visio, based on LiveKit
- FranceTransfert, I don't know what is it.
- Fichiers => Drive
- Messagerie => Email
- Docs => A better Google Docs
- Grist => Excel version of Google docs.
It aimed at "public worker", people working for the government.
And they can strike back at corporate America by licensing the stuff under gnu licenses. Software that’s reasonably small, reasonably effective and portable. What a concept. If only the EU or UK had 5-10 hackers…
Visio is more than just the software, it's a French run tool where the entire stack is provided at an enterprise/governmental level with various guarentees about availability, confidentiality etc.
Not so much "aiming" as doing it. The alternative already exists, is open-source, and used by 40,000 government users. By 2027 all government agencies will use it exclusively.
My bet would be that "the standard" will be Heinlein Groups (company behind mailbox.org) OpenTalk (already better than Jitsy) and now they are doing OpenCloud as scaleable NextCloud alternative. The company behind the projects needs it for their own usecases, has stable business and they have decades of experience.
It doesn't matter. Office suites are a commodity. Google suite is knockoff of MS Office at certain point in time. That's just the nature of digital - information want's to be free.
It's network effects / lock-in. There is a reason why people still use Microsoft Office and that is that surprising amount of industries have everything build around it. In my country anything law related is submitted in Microsoft Word. Academic texts? Microsoft Word. Communication with government? Microsoft Word.
The reason why Google Docs somewhat managed to break this was 1. free, 2. multiplayer/easy to share.
One law about requiring the state documents to be submitted in open formats, editable in libre software... and the lock instantly breaks.
PS: The project has no backend and is purely browser-based, but I’m based in Europe and developing the project here, so I consider it a European project.
Many EU members impose regulatory requirements for software in some sectors. If you want to get certified you need to go through some of them and while they are arcane they are also required.
EU could easily force the hand - not in the next month or so but over a period of time. No need to discriminate against US companies but EU companies might be preferred and might have better access to EU services.
We already have customers asking for this. They are not the majority but given the recent events this could quickly become a valuable chunk of the business - perhaps even overnight. We as a business are already thinking about it. And it is not just about moving the data to an EU data center. This is of course acceptable in many cases but still subject to the CLOUD Act. We are talking about a clean cut situation.
It is true that good alternatives are not available, yet. But I would not underestimate EU tech companies either. There are plenty of great engineers and great companies in EU so strong competitors can spun up in short order. Now with AI coding assistants, it is even more doable then before.
It is also potentially a great opportunity especially now.
In Spain you need to be ENS-certified (esquema nacional de seguridad) in order to provide services to the goverment.
Nowadays it is similar / aligned to NIS2 certification.
But you need to certify more than just apps. Processes are more important than apps.
It's baffling that the E.U. and others (corporations anywhere really) keep using and paying for Zoom when Jitsi and Nextcloud Talk are free and work very well. This is not a political issue, but one of data sovereignty.
My hope is that all this push towards tech independence (not just from EU) will make the most "basic" tools open-source and they wouldn't suck as much as they do now.
What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Keynote or even Pages on macOS.
Multiple governments having to solve essentially the same issue on a global scale is a unique opportunity to save costs by working on open source together, and get funding and direction that's never been available to OSS before.
Word also kind of sucks. My biggest gripe is that it doesn’t understand markdown input. And once you add tables to the word doc, it turns into even more of a mess to work with.
The latest version of OpenOffice (4.1.x) is over a decode old, aside from security releases with "bug fixes and little enhancements", so it's not surprising that it hasn't improved in the last decade.
OpenOffice has been effectively dead for many years (though, maddeningly, Apache continues to publish it and squat the trademark); LibreOffice is the mainline where development continues.
It also doesn't feel like the mid 2000s anymore, where offline word/excel are essential for most day to day work.
Most of the time I deal with csv downloads for data, or the shit PDFs that I can only fill in with the Adobe reader on windows. I can't recall the last time I fired up OnlyOffice (better MS garbage compatibility) for anything related to work.
This doesn't mean that those tools are irrelevant, but significantly less needed, and less of a migration hurdle for many companies.
Yeah, I’ve been able to use desktop Linux without many issues in a corporate environment. The main issue was the web version of office being incomplete. If corporate IT teams embraced it, I bet most companies could be free of Windows without too much issue.
The bigger problem seems to be the cloud services - teams, OneDrive, sharepoint and all the account management stuff.
I hope so too, but don't believe that's the ultimate intent here.
The problem is that the tech independence is being pushed by government who want more control - not less. (Not speaking specifically of France and this instance, but looking at the anti-encryption rules that the UK and Ireland are pushing)
From that standpoint, I imagine the "solution" here won't be to push an open source alternative, but a closed one that they to control.
I agree that it's not an intent. However hopefully it's going to be open-source, as is the case for most government work in the UK for example. One can dream I guess
Instead of these politics driven projects that usually fail at least partially what tends to succeed is if an angry nerd starts a project to replace something with free alternative, such as Linux, VLC, ffmpeg, ...
Replicating features from existing software has become extremely easy due to AI. I won’t be surprised if open source is able to easily catch up with the bigger products.
I doubt Americans will even pick up the phone or respond to LinkedIn messages / emails when they will se the budgets for the software Engineering roles in the EU.
I am saying that as an European, just to be clear.
I know several folks who've migrated from US -> EU tech roles in the last few years. Yes, you earn less and pay (somewhat) more taxes. But if you have a few kids the difference in cost of education pretty much wipes out the difference, and some folks really value the stress reduction of a robust social safety net (layoff protections, healthcare coverage while unemployed, etc)
Not everyone is optimizing for total comp. Some are optimizing for better lives. It's not a wild concept considering how many people get pulled into startups, 90% of which fail, under the guide of "mission" and lower market comp. Do you pick a mostly assured better quality of life? Or an equity payout lottery ticket/fairy tale? Certainly, there is a minority of folks making wild comp at FAANG, but that is a privileged minority of total tech and IT workers.
My health insurance for a family of four in Spain is $2k/year. In the US, it was exceeding $25k/year with premiums, copays, deductibles, etc. While not free, it is accessible.
There was a time in my life we had to decide in the middle of the night if we could afford to take one of our children to the ER in the US when they were a newborn. I will never have that feeling in Europe, and that is priceless. Tax me more, I will happily contribute to a functioning governance system. I like taxes, with them I contribute to civilization. As an American, I am all in on Europe. It's not perfect, but the bar is in hell.
I don't know about France, but here in Denmark you'd generally find tech jobs on LinkedIn.
If you have a decent amount of experience I don't think you'd be looking for very long.
But as stated by other commenters, the salaries and lower and the taxes higher.
What you get back is great worker protection, child care, free education and generally a feeling of safety for yourself and family. We also have a democracy that offers more than two choices!
Taxes are not really an issue because of the services you get out of it: free healthcare, free education for your kids, etc.
But yes, salary before taxes is much lower than in the US. If your goal is to make as much money as possible, either stay in US or move to a different European country (Northern Europe or Switzerland).
> Meanwhile in Europe ? Take your time job hunting a new job, healthcare is still free.
Currently, healthcare coverage tend to be better in several European countries when you are jobless... because the system try to compensate the fact you do not have income anymore.
Don't get me wrong, their is many 'flaws' in several European healthcare systems and it is far from perfect. but it tends to be more "human" and less "for profit".
I left the US, not because I was worried about healthcare for myself or my family, but because of how I felt it reflected on me that I was fine choosing to stay and cash a large check every month while others around me had to worry about healthcare.
But in the other hand you don't have to worry about mass shootings.
You can freely walk (mostly) wherever you want without risking your life (that is not normal in most of the world).
And you're not going bankrupt because of a minor/medium medical condition.
There is also NGI Sargasso which had EU grants being awarded to collaborations between parties in the EU and the US, working on internet innovation projects. Looks like that funding program has closed. Not sure if these open calls were slashed by the Trump government.
In the Netherlands we return 30% of your taxes in the first 10. So we welcome you as well. We may pay less compared to the USA but we have health care, better work life balance and we all talk English.
From 1 January 2024, expats who meet the conditions receive the following tax benefits:
- 30% tax free for the first 20 months;
- 20% tax free for the next 20 months;
- 10% tax free for the last 20 months.
So that's a tapered reduction over the first 5 years and the amount of money that you gain after tax is between negligeable and insultingly small.
Basically in its current form "The Dutch 30% ruling" is not really worth it, if you want to move to The Netherlands do it for other reasons, and the advertisment of this mechanism feels borderline disingenious in its current form.
Why wait? If you can get a work visa you might as well, independent of this push. English proficiency in France isn't amazing though (speaking as a Dutchman that visits France most summers), so learning French would be a big help.
This is scaremongering - taxes are in no way 30% higher in EU.
Someone pulling mid-6-figures in the Valley is already paying a ~35% effective tax rate (state + medicare + federal). That same person taking a low-6-figures job in Spain would pay ~40% effective tax rate - and Beckam's Law would likely cut that to 24% for the first 6 years in any case
Seriously, why are people still using twitter? It's owned by a Nazi supporter, is full of white nationalist racist posters, and seems a strange place to announce you are moving off of American tech.
Gee, if only there had been a European market leader in instant messaging, voice over IP and video chat in the 2000s already. Then we could just use that instead of Microsoft Teams.
Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy
1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans
2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology
When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.
There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.
> build a better model with lower latency.
That's mighty impossible for the european mindset - people here are not so risk-eager as to through hundreds of billions on infrastructure for something that might return a profit.
I think it's totally great that competing products get produced in the EU. Not a bad thing from anyone's perspective except the owners of those US companies that will now need to compete.
China, India. There are little EU-wide network effects similar to American ones.
Outside companies don't do well in China
India doesn't have nearly the purchasing power of EU of US
Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA and Trump, in one of his tantrums, threatened to destroy that this week, with 100% tariffs.
Canada is very much in the same boat as the EU.
From a world domination point of view fragmentation is bad. On the other hand heterogeneity is good for choice and freedom as at least on paper if one platform kicks you off due to whatever curbs on freedom, you have alternative choices.
Heterogeneity/fragmentation also makes it harder for companies and countries to impose their mores on others. From that PoV Africa also should develop its own tools so as not to be subject to either North American or European values but their own values.
Canada is in the same boat as the EU -- desperately looking for alternative vendors at the moment.
... and Canada doesn't seem very keen on going on like this.
Yeah, assuming Canada is just going to keep going along buying American software and services seems pretty naive. There's less capacity to build alternatives in Canada than there is in Europe, but as Europe builds out alternative ecosystems, Canadians will likely be just as eager customers as Europeans (if not more eager).
The beauty of so many of these solutions being open source solutions also means that it creates avenues for cooperation between organizations that have no official cooperation agreement.
E.g. The Austrian federal Military, the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the city of Leon have no direct forum for cooperating on software projects, yet all three are contributing to the development and rapid adoption of Nextcloud. Canada can easily get in on this too.
Canada has roughly the population of California, and Aus/NZ combined have populations less than California. For these types of market analyses, these countries are closer to US states in market potential.
What's is your argument? That tech companies don't need them? Sounds like such a brutally myopic american take.
Sure.
Canada has a GDP of:
Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont
put together.
That's the equivalent of 18 states.
Throw in Aus and NZ too and you add another 7 states -- Louisiana, Alabama, Utah, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nevada and Iowa.
Ontario alone has a larger GDP than 45 of the 50 US states, and a bigger GDP than New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont put together.
I am pretty sure many in Minnesota right now would love to be able to exit the current fascist regime and be part of Canada instead ...
I think they are a decade or two late to migrate away. They will end up developing their own in a time where these are loss leaders. It’s likely they will pay for it in a bundle while just not using it.
Not to mention in my experience EU companies don’t know how to migrate away from anything as their tech companies operate at the efficiency of a US government agency.
India, but many companies aren't willing to price for the market nor respect corporate norms there.
> nor respect corporate norms there.
What do you mean?
Weird, because software has probably the lowest marginal cost of goods sold of any product or service. You can make money selling at almost any price.
Yes, there is some cost to provisioning and running a cloud account. It's pretty small though. Some disk space and electricity.
By "corporate norms" I presume you mean bribes paid to the person making the purchasing decision?
I guess the point here is to keep high prices. If you lower the prices, you can try to enter even Africa, but it's simply easier to keep more or less uniform pricing, unless you're Steam-size and are able to spend resources on doing this properly.
What corporate norms are notably different in this context?
No, thank you. I would rather run Chinese spyware.
In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created. We want a strong Europe who can build and innovate instead of regulating and fining. In contrast, we certainly don't want see the disastrous joke like Northvolt. We certainly don't want to see the joke that BASF shut down its domestic factories and invested north of 10B in China for state-of-the-art factories. Oh, and we certainly don't want to see a Europe that couldn't defeat Russia and couldn't even out-manufacture Russia, even though Russia's GDP is merely of Guangzhou's.
The French Gendarmerie has been running Linux for a while now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu.
I don't know the details but it seems like a good first step.
I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Products don't necessarily win on merit.
Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force.
You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.
Sure, Betamax was technically superior to VHS. But in the end the market still decides… nobody said “better” means technically superior… just something people want to use an other options available to them. “Good enough” with attractive value to the individual/business typically wins.
Sure, and right now, a product being owned by a corporation susceptible to direct influence from the US government is a massive negative when people are evaluating products.
The evalutation metric for various vital projects has massively changed over the last couple years. These European products still need to be technically good, but they no longer need to be better than American products in order to find customers.
With the current level of geopolitical tensions, this is nowhere near enough to cause a massive exodous where all systems that were previously working fine are ripped apart and replaced with new systems, *but* one can be sure that whenever people are looking at new projects, or updates to old systems, the evalutation metrics have changed quite a bit, and this is creating strong momentum for European tech.
Not to get too much into a debate about Beta vs VHS, but VHS did have longer run times and its cheapness was the main reason it won, It just fit better for the consumer overall desires at the time
Exactly. It's about whose definition of "better" you use. Sony thought that a better picture would win out, and it did where that mattered: TV studios and video-journalists used Betamax until digital formats took over. For consumers, "better" meant cheaper tapes and longer run time.
JVC also licensed the VHS format to many manufacturers, so there was a lot of competition on recorders, further driving the price of ownership down. I don't recall anyone ever selling Betamax other than Sony.
Edit: JVC actually released VHS as an open standard, not a license, per Wikipedia.
Technology connections did a video on Betamax vs VHS that debunked this in a practical sense as Betamax had a version II that allowed 2 hour recordings, the quality was slightly better to early VHS instead the significant improvement of beta I (original standard)
Retail movie releases used II since most movies could fit on one tape. Beta I was rare and later betamax decks just ignored it or something for compatibility.
VHS HQ and HiFi, which came much later when beta was basically dead, was probably better than beta II and close to beta I in quality
I have made most of my karma off of trashing Teams, and while it is "better" than it was before (I rarely get infinite loops crashing my browser now), it is hard to call it acceptable.
Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting. The entire purpose is supposed to be collaboration with other people; if they aren't going to notify me on the web app, what's the point?
I know a lot of it is because of their need to support an infinite number of potential configurations, but if it had been a protocol instead of an app, we would have had the perfect frontend by now. (But then, how would they be stealing all of my data?)
> Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting.
Lol, we use WebEx, and someone actually went and developed an internal app to make it usable by piloting WebEx through accessibility APIs (including starting the call a minute before the meeting starts).
So it's not just a failing of Teams.
The EU can also ban access to US products, once EU alternatives are available, for example. "National security" or whatever PR is needed to make the case.
I'm unsure the EU could build and require anything worse than Teams, considering the open source landscape for that product category, for example. The primitives exist, scale them up and lock out US companies from the EU market with policy. Recycle the capital internally, just like VC funds do with their portfolio companies.
I'm absolutely against banning usage of computer programs and platforms BUT I would rally for getting Teams banned from the face of the earth and applying a law to prevent Microsoft to attempt to create or acquire any kind of communicator for the next 50 years.
It wasn't seen as a priority national security measure before.
Now we have a US leader who may wake up tomorrow and put 100% tariffs on cloud services to EU corps or have the NSA demand chat logs.
The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.
Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.
Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.
The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?
One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.
The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose.
But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.
I see a "top-down" approach, actually.
Government and public services change to (ideally) open source, and "impose"/"require" downstream compatibility.
This would create the incentive and make change easier
> The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
I agree. All this hem and hawing will not get them anywhere, and will just have Microsoft again dropping bundles of money at the foot of officials to "pretty please don't switch awawy."
Mandate it, top down, make it law, then officials have the legal mandate to fall back on to tell Microsoft and the others to pound sand when they come knocking with the briefcase full of money.
It's only recently that the united states has become an enemy of the EU though. I'd say there's much more motivation to move to other software and platforms now.
I don’t think that’s accurate. These issues were always there, but “the sky is falling” rhetoric is all the rage at the moment (in both directions).
> “the sky is falling” rhetoric
It's hardly rhetoric, from the European perspective. The EU is already embroiled in a proxy war against a major power in Ukraine, and are now faced with the prospect of their strongest erstwhile ally moving to annex EU territory.
Simultaneous war on two fronts, where one opponent is deeply embedded in your supply chains, is an existential threat.
It doesn't have to be the sky is falling, it's reality. In one year Europe went from "can we fight Russia with American help" to "can we fight Russia without American help" to "can we fight America". If Europe doesn't get itself unencumbered with the US they are in a very vulnerable position.
The dependencies were always there. But never before (since the forming of NATO) has the US leadership so clearly and concretely distanced themselves from Europe. Before that there was a strong sense of North America and Europe belonging to the same “liberal” world where many things did be relatively cheaply exchanged.
The dependencies were therefore seen as a non issue for many. Banks have always been skeptics of the cloud because of the ability of the American government to just pull the plug if they want. Before it was a theoretical possibility that still came up in risk analysis. Today it is something that could even concretely happen.
Prosecutors and others have been denied access to their official work email etc because they displeased the president.
Trust has been eroded.
The US is not trustworthy anymore. Your president is switching randomly from on insane idea to something equally insane. Canada doesnt want to the the 51st state. Greenland is part of Denmark, which is in the EU, which has been the biggest ally for the US and now your president was not ruling out using force to take over greenland.
Trump fans are saying "this is how he negotiates, don't mind", etc but anything coming from him os just random bullshit and nothing he says can be believed because the next day he can be 180* on the same topic.
There were no such issues between any of the US allies in the time I can remember.
We thought that whenwe help the US in Afganistan and Iraq then it will be remembered when we need help, but now Trump threw all that goodwill down the toilet when he said that the allies basically didnt do anything.
>but anything coming from him os just random bullshit and nothing he says can be believed because the next day he can be 180* on the same topic
Not to mention that threatening to go to war with an ally as a negotiating tactic is crazy regardless of how inconsistent you are about it.
There were always issues with Nordstream, but the project rapidly imploded only after the war made it all untenable.
Tariffs + coercion via-vis EU tech regulation + Greenland are rapidly making the transatlantic tech status quo untenable.
Sure the issue was always there for you or people like you. But for a majority of the EU population there was no problem until very recently. And now people like you are starting to have more leverage to influence people who can make the right calls.
Even during president Obama. the US spied on Merkel's mobile phone.
> Even during president Obama. the US spied on Merkel's mobile phone.
There is a huge gap between spying on someone phone and calling openly to invade a territory.
Every country spies on each other for various reasons (industrial, geopolitics) even between allies.
But I think we can agree that an ally by definition is not suppose to ring your door bell and say he wants to take your land against your will.
> I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
This feels different.
Up to now there hasn't a really good technical reason to want to switch from, say, Zoom to Teams (or vice versa). You might switch because of network effects: all your friends / coworkers are on the other one. But, video chat is basically a commodity (all work "good enough" and the features are broadly similar) and has been for quite some time.
What's different is that now all (or nearly all) the people contributing to the network effect simultaneously have a reason to want to switch. So the network effect, which was the only thing that was really "sticky" about any of these apps, is gone.
And also, the speed at which you can build solutions has significantly been reduced because of AI. I wonder if this plays a role in their decision.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking
Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".
Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?
Congratulations, you now use the government-mandated messaging infrastructure.
> while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
fortunately, legislation can help here
start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there
the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure
This is the biggest step any country (other than China and those subject to US sanctions) has made to reducing their dependence on American big tech.
Its still a small step, but its a start.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide
You can push people to do this. The government can switch as a matter of policy. It can require companies bigging for government contracts to only use systems based in approved countries. It can make it a requirement for regulated industries (e.g. infrastructure, critical financial services, etc.)
This blind faith in “the market” is charming, but the market is just the outcome of enforceable ground rules (national, international) followed then by price/value.
What I wonder is if there will be the pay for enticing developers to build it.
I think many of use will love to do this kind of stuff, but is mostly US companies that pay for it.
For example, I like to make RDBMs and ERPs kind of software, but here in LATAM is near impossible to get funding for it, how is in Europe?
If they want to build viable competitive products then they'll need to pay for a lot more roles than just developers.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
No they need to tariff/ban things that are non-EU
Sry but the world where ”markets decided” pretty much anything ended when Trump started his second term. EU is finishing a trade deal with India that creates a market of 2 billion people. Europe and China are closer than ever. I’m sure we can get along with Teans and police state just fine.
Half the EU are a few percentage points away from electing their version of trump.
Yes, decade(s?) ago some city or state in Germany decided to ditch Microsoft for Linux and OpenOffice. It didn't go well and they eventually backtracked.
While, there's a real risk of overselling the enthusiasm right now, there's a much bigger risk of complacency making dinosaurs stick their head in the sand and think nothing ever changes.
IMO, if ones thinks the lessons about competition between tech platforms from the previous few decades are 1-to-1 applicable in the current geopolitical, economical, and strategic state of the world, then that person is either not paying attention, or they're in denial.
Companies, governments, and militaries are looking around their office right now and realizing their organization could grind to a complete halt if Trump made a phone call to a very small handful of executives.
That's an existential risk, and organizations absolutely can and do choose products that are on their face inferior if it helps shield them from existential risk. (Western) Tech is one of few industries that has no institutional experience with dealing with geopolitical risk, but it's happening now.
The market makes decisions on quality and pride but it can also use politics, patriotism, religion, and other factors which may not have the greatest impact compared to the first two.
It's possible that both the appeal of home* grown product (patriotism) combined with distaste of the current US government and the tech companies that support it (politics) is enough to push people to switch even if the quality is lower
Better is not enough make people change, sadly. This is why VCs burn so much money to establish products.
The big difference is that USA was nor perceived as a threat before. It is acutely dangerours now and there is no perspective of it changing.
I don't see the dependency on these productivity and communication tools as that difficult of a problem to solve.
They are going to have a much harder time weaning off American cloud infrastructure and on to something purely domestic.
Hardware is the biggest problem: PCs (CPUs, RAMs, GPUs), Cellphones, routers, etc.
Globalization appears to be self imploding by virtue of the current american president.
Now everybody realises you can trust no one.
we were over globalized. COVID showed us that when we couldnt even produce life saving medicines domestically. If the take away from world war 1 was too much nationalism, the take away from covid is, too much globalism.
Resilient cultures are by definition market inefficient.
ScaleWay and OVH are already filling this gap.
StackIT is the AWS competitor actually, OVH is not really laid out to be a hyperscaler.
CleverCloud, Hetzner
Good luck with OVH. Most EU companies, including this one, offer subpar services compared to their American counterparts.
Even assuming this is true, EU cloud providers no longer have to compete with their American counterparts on an even footing thanks to the insanity coming out of the White House (and American society more generally). There's a very big push to get off of American providers, and many (though not all) customers are willing to make sacrifices to do so.
If providers like OVH play their cards right, they can use this sudden influx of cash to both scale up, and improve their offerings. There's a lot of money on the table right now.
I use AWS and OVH at work and this has not my experience.
AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality. I'd love to never have to use redshift or EMR again for instance. OVH is more basic, but what it has tends to work at least.
> AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality.
Being cynical AWS has more services because many of those are deliberately siloed in order to create a separate billing item, i.e.:
"You want to use AWS Foo ...great, welcome to AWS ! But unless you want to re-invent the wheel re-programming the standard workflow, you should really use AWS Bar and AWS Baz alongside it. Dontcha' like all the cute names we've given them ? Here are all the price sheets, don't forget to read the small print ... good luck figuring out how much it will cost you".
> Most EU companies, including this one, offer subpar services compared to their American counterparts
Not true.
But you know what the best thing about the EU companies is ?
Transparent pricing.
EU company: Yes, you really can accurately calculate to the nearest cent how much your compute instance will cost you and exactly what you are getting for that money. No surprises.
US company:Is that Compute Savings Plan, EC2 Savings Plan, On-Demand or Spot. What speed is my network "up to" ? And then of course the big "I DUNNO" in relation to "how many IOPS am I going to be charged for EBS disk transfer ?"
EU company: Of course we don't charge you for LIST etc. on S3. We only charge you for off-network GETs and the associated data transfer, on-network is free.
US company: What do you mean LIST etc. should be free ?
You know what else I like about the EU companies ?
At least two of them allow pay as you go from a reducing credit balance.
Yes that's right US companies. It IS possible to give your customers a way to 100% guarantee you will never have an "oops I just spent a million dollars overnight" moment.
They are fine. Cloud is a commodity. Hetzner and Bunny are pretty great and i am sure there are many more.
The problem is when US decides to ban sales of compute hardware to EU (like they do to China). Then it will be clear who's really in power.
> Then it will be clear who's really in power.
If China closed the door overnight to the US, it would also be clear who's really in power.
The US simply does not have the capacity to replicate the manufacturing domestically.
Even if it were possible, "100% Made in the US" would end up costing at least 20–30% more.
And the US does not have a plan B. Sure there might be India .... one day....years away.
Oh I agree. China is clearly outplaying everyone. But EU surely doesn't want to replace one leash (US tech stack) with different leash (Chinese tech stack).
I keep wondering though. Is insane amount of compute really that crucial? Aren't most real computing needs served well with not so cutting edge tech? I am 5-10 years behind on most of my machines. Servers we have at work are very modest (and outdated) yet the software these servers power are still valuable. Maybe EU could run on some domestic RISC-V cheapo chips.
There'll be a vacuum filled by non-US brands, China is learning and given they'll push to be independent eventually they'll compete with AMD/Intel/Nvidia, Europe has ARM.
The worst thing in the long-term for American hardware makers is for the US to block other countries to purchase from them and having that money invested in alternatives.
That could end in an ugly stalemate pretty fast, considering ASML is Dutch.
I agree with Scaleway (I would more compare it to Digital Ocean) but OVH is really good and comparable.
My fingers always ache when I hear praise for the company that through its incompetence nearly lost me my company's domain name... twice. Shame on me for staying with them.
DigitalOcean is fantastic in my experience, way better than The Big Three, especially Azure.
Yes I know! Scaleway is great as well. But I was referring to the product portfolio.
I’ve used OVH for multiple projects and they’ve been wonderful to work with.
sure, gotta start somewhere.
They need to do both the hard things and the easy things, and do them in parallel.
Which they are.
Stop being reasonable!
Jitsi meet exists for long time and it works. What is needed is eu sovereign clouds
Depends how hooked into the "cloud infrastructure" ecosystem they are. If it's a provider of vms which are easy to move from one provider to another that's one thing, if it's reliant on the latest cool aws thing that's another.
Switching to sovereignty-protecting, locally-hosted collaboration, compute, and storage is by no means impossible. FOSS advocates have been eagerly beating this drum and providing options for 25+ years.
The missing ingredient has always been the will to absorb the inevitable cost of change, and the friction of choosing something other than the standard, go-to, often at least apparently free (or at least bundled) tools.
The current U.S. threats against NATO and allies creates a rift in the previously-accepted international order that may finally motivate material change. Often such change is chaotic and discontinuous—it feels well nigh impossible, right up to the moment it feels necessary and inevitable.
For what it's worth, if you want a self hosted replacement for Zoom Galene has worked great for me, The server requirements are remarkably low, especially if you are like me and just need a personal video chat to a few people. I run it on an old apu-2 with openbsd(which is just about the worst combination and it still works great) As a bonus there is no client, that is, the client is just a web page so very low friction to get people to use it.
https://galene.org/
+1.
I am running a Galene instance via the YunoHost self-hosting package on a small dedicated server (2 cores, 4gb of RAM).
So far it’s much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality. Feels better than Jitsi and even a FaceTime / WhatsApp call.
> So far [Galene is] much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality
Latency is better, since Galene uses an unordered buffer instead of a jitter buffer. Lipsynch should also be slightly better, as Galene carefully computes audio/video offsets and forwards the result to the receiver so it can compensate.
Audio and video quality, on the other hand, should be roughly the same, unless Jitsi is doing something wrong.
The inertia (or actively maintained status quo) in Europe towards the US platforms is massive.
Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses.
The options? Introductory classes to:
- LinkedIn
- WhatsApp business
- Facebook and Instagram ads
- Gsuite
I really hope Marc Andreessen is happy.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-fou...
>The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech
Carried interest loophole
He's helping with a fascist takeover of the country, why wouldn't they be happy?
We need more like this. Europe is totally dependent on US companies for cloud computing.
Until now nobody thought it was a problem. At least not a big one. The EU made some moves to define a "cloud computing" platform for Europe, and very little people paid attention because business-wise it was very difficult to compete with US corporations that have vast amounts of money in cash and find easy to get funding.
But now there are some (small) alternatives.
LIDL has its own cloud for retail.
And I believe T-Systems sells some cloud computing for goverments based on OpenStack...
Small steps, but steps.
As a dual US/EU national who would love to move to Europe, I, for one, welcome the increase in tech demand on that side of the pond.
Can access X because it's X and locally blocked, "ironic" to use Twitter to post about sovereignty.
It's ongoing for a will with La suite numérique (https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/).
- Tchap is a message app for officials, - Visio, based on LiveKit - FranceTransfert, I don't know what is it. - Fichiers => Drive - Messagerie => Email - Docs => A better Google Docs - Grist => Excel version of Google docs.
It aimed at "public worker", people working for the government.
Github: https://github.com/suitenumerique
Ironic to use Github to post about sovereignty )
I'm trying to not use it myself but yes, la suite numérique should get out of GitHub.
They already did it for the Ministry of Education with [La Forge](https://docs.forge.apps.education.fr/). Used to be forgejo, now a GitLab instance.
GitLab, a YC and by extension an American company )
This can go as far as we want )
That was a lowry response.
Built using Django!
And they can strike back at corporate America by licensing the stuff under gnu licenses. Software that’s reasonably small, reasonably effective and portable. What a concept. If only the EU or UK had 5-10 hackers…
Even something already available off the shelf!
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-ove...
One of my networking groups uses Jitsi. It's fine.
It's pretty awful to setup compared to the Livekit-based solution.
Visio is more than just the software, it's a French run tool where the entire stack is provided at an enterprise/governmental level with various guarentees about availability, confidentiality etc.
Not so much "aiming" as doing it. The alternative already exists, is open-source, and used by 40,000 government users. By 2027 all government agencies will use it exclusively.
What is that option?
Visio with live kit (part of lasuite) or opendesk with jitsi would be my guess.
https://livekit.io/ https://www.clever.cloud/product/visio/ https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
https://jitsi.org/ https://www.opendesk.eu/en
As an aside I am surprised it has taken this long but seems inevitable now given the last 18 months.
My bet would be that "the standard" will be Heinlein Groups (company behind mailbox.org) OpenTalk (already better than Jitsy) and now they are doing OpenCloud as scaleable NextCloud alternative. The company behind the projects needs it for their own usecases, has stable business and they have decades of experience.
Visio from https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
It's funny that it's such a blatant knock-off of Google Workspace - the repos even have the same names:
https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
I wonder if the emoji will grow into its own set:
https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet/blob/main/src/fronten...
It doesn't matter. Office suites are a commodity. Google suite is knockoff of MS Office at certain point in time. That's just the nature of digital - information want's to be free.
I feel like we would see a lot more movement if we’ve reached the commodity point…
It's network effects / lock-in. There is a reason why people still use Microsoft Office and that is that surprising amount of industries have everything build around it. In my country anything law related is submitted in Microsoft Word. Academic texts? Microsoft Word. Communication with government? Microsoft Word.
The reason why Google Docs somewhat managed to break this was 1. free, 2. multiplayer/easy to share.
One law about requiring the state documents to be submitted in open formats, editable in libre software... and the lock instantly breaks.
> blatant knock-off of Google Workspace - the repos even have the same names
That's exactly what we need though, so I see that as a plus.
If you need to generate an invoice, try my project EasyInvoicePDF - a free, open-source, European-based alternative.
Supports 10 languages (including French) and all major currencies. E-invoicing coming soon.
App: https://easyinvoicepdf.com
Github: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
PS: The project has no backend and is purely browser-based, but I’m based in Europe and developing the project here, so I consider it a European project.
Many EU members impose regulatory requirements for software in some sectors. If you want to get certified you need to go through some of them and while they are arcane they are also required.
EU could easily force the hand - not in the next month or so but over a period of time. No need to discriminate against US companies but EU companies might be preferred and might have better access to EU services.
We already have customers asking for this. They are not the majority but given the recent events this could quickly become a valuable chunk of the business - perhaps even overnight. We as a business are already thinking about it. And it is not just about moving the data to an EU data center. This is of course acceptable in many cases but still subject to the CLOUD Act. We are talking about a clean cut situation.
It is true that good alternatives are not available, yet. But I would not underestimate EU tech companies either. There are plenty of great engineers and great companies in EU so strong competitors can spun up in short order. Now with AI coding assistants, it is even more doable then before.
It is also potentially a great opportunity especially now.
In Spain you need to be ENS-certified (esquema nacional de seguridad) in order to provide services to the goverment. Nowadays it is similar / aligned to NIS2 certification.
But you need to certify more than just apps. Processes are more important than apps.
It's baffling that the E.U. and others (corporations anywhere really) keep using and paying for Zoom when Jitsi and Nextcloud Talk are free and work very well. This is not a political issue, but one of data sovereignty.
My hope is that all this push towards tech independence (not just from EU) will make the most "basic" tools open-source and they wouldn't suck as much as they do now.
What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Keynote or even Pages on macOS.
Multiple governments having to solve essentially the same issue on a global scale is a unique opportunity to save costs by working on open source together, and get funding and direction that's never been available to OSS before.
As much as I cheer for OpenOffice, it sucks. And it has been decades now.
I'm not even an advanced Word / Google Doc user.
Are we gonna wait for 100 more years for it to be good?
Word also kind of sucks. My biggest gripe is that it doesn’t understand markdown input. And once you add tables to the word doc, it turns into even more of a mess to work with.
The latest version of OpenOffice (4.1.x) is over a decode old, aside from security releases with "bug fixes and little enhancements", so it's not surprising that it hasn't improved in the last decade.
LibreOffice is the actively developed fork.
There's a nice diagram on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Forks_and_deriv...
OpenOffice? Do you mean LibreOffice?
OpenOffice has been effectively dead for many years (though, maddeningly, Apache continues to publish it and squat the trademark); LibreOffice is the mainline where development continues.
It also doesn't feel like the mid 2000s anymore, where offline word/excel are essential for most day to day work.
Most of the time I deal with csv downloads for data, or the shit PDFs that I can only fill in with the Adobe reader on windows. I can't recall the last time I fired up OnlyOffice (better MS garbage compatibility) for anything related to work.
This doesn't mean that those tools are irrelevant, but significantly less needed, and less of a migration hurdle for many companies.
Yeah, I’ve been able to use desktop Linux without many issues in a corporate environment. The main issue was the web version of office being incomplete. If corporate IT teams embraced it, I bet most companies could be free of Windows without too much issue.
The bigger problem seems to be the cloud services - teams, OneDrive, sharepoint and all the account management stuff.
I hope so too, but don't believe that's the ultimate intent here.
The problem is that the tech independence is being pushed by government who want more control - not less. (Not speaking specifically of France and this instance, but looking at the anti-encryption rules that the UK and Ireland are pushing)
From that standpoint, I imagine the "solution" here won't be to push an open source alternative, but a closed one that they to control.
I agree that it's not an intent. However hopefully it's going to be open-source, as is the case for most government work in the UK for example. One can dream I guess
De Gaulle strikes back)
Finally the year of Minitel on the desktop!
I like CryptPad.fr. End-to-end encrypted google docs.
Instead of these politics driven projects that usually fail at least partially what tends to succeed is if an angry nerd starts a project to replace something with free alternative, such as Linux, VLC, ffmpeg, ...
> if an angry nerd
Ah yes, the mythical AngryOpenSourceNerd, heard about his Kick channel.
This is the kind of thing France often wants to do yet never implements.
Replicating features from existing software has become extremely easy due to AI. I won’t be surprised if open source is able to easily catch up with the bigger products.
Replicating the software is easy, running the services at AWS-scale is hard.
Would you need to though?
If an organisation ran it's own instance, it would only need to scale for that organisation ( including any external attends over a bridge ).
That does of course assume companies have the expertise/appetite to run things themselves.
Indians are doing the same too.
Don't believe this has anything other than to do with the USA's recent attacks on NATO countries.
I wonder if the EU will begin trying to recruit American software engineers. I’d love to move to France.
I doubt Americans will even pick up the phone or respond to LinkedIn messages / emails when they will se the budgets for the software Engineering roles in the EU.
I am saying that as an European, just to be clear.
I know several folks who've migrated from US -> EU tech roles in the last few years. Yes, you earn less and pay (somewhat) more taxes. But if you have a few kids the difference in cost of education pretty much wipes out the difference, and some folks really value the stress reduction of a robust social safety net (layoff protections, healthcare coverage while unemployed, etc)
Not everyone is optimizing for total comp. Some are optimizing for better lives. It's not a wild concept considering how many people get pulled into startups, 90% of which fail, under the guide of "mission" and lower market comp. Do you pick a mostly assured better quality of life? Or an equity payout lottery ticket/fairy tale? Certainly, there is a minority of folks making wild comp at FAANG, but that is a privileged minority of total tech and IT workers.
> Some are optimizing for better lives
Of course. I just hope these people know that for example healthcare in Europe is by no means free.
It's not free, but it's much cheaper. (And yes, that includes taxation.)
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/health-spending.html
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_health_expendit...
As a bonus, all that spend doesn't make us better in outcomes.
https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low#life-expec...
My health insurance for a family of four in Spain is $2k/year. In the US, it was exceeding $25k/year with premiums, copays, deductibles, etc. While not free, it is accessible.
There was a time in my life we had to decide in the middle of the night if we could afford to take one of our children to the ER in the US when they were a newborn. I will never have that feeling in Europe, and that is priceless. Tax me more, I will happily contribute to a functioning governance system. I like taxes, with them I contribute to civilization. As an American, I am all in on Europe. It's not perfect, but the bar is in hell.
We Asked 300 People About Health Care Costs. The Numbers Are Shocking. - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/opinion/health-insurance-... | https://archive.today/MnYz9 - January 22nd, 2026
That article is just mindblowing. My countries Health Service is far from perfect, but that is insanity.
This is a component of what those who can qualify for some sort of visa are fleeing. The economics are undeniable.
With a baby on the way, I'd seriously consider it for their lifetime benefits. Where does one begin looking?
I don't know about France, but here in Denmark you'd generally find tech jobs on LinkedIn.
If you have a decent amount of experience I don't think you'd be looking for very long.
But as stated by other commenters, the salaries and lower and the taxes higher.
What you get back is great worker protection, child care, free education and generally a feeling of safety for yourself and family. We also have a democracy that offers more than two choices!
They've been incentivizing it for years. Talent passport, EU Blue card and the Tech Visa. As I have heard they'll pay you to move there.
Expect 50% salary and taxes that will make your eyes water. French bureaucracy is kafkaesque even in 2026.
Other than that I agree I'd love to move there.
Taxes are not really an issue because of the services you get out of it: free healthcare, free education for your kids, etc.
But yes, salary before taxes is much lower than in the US. If your goal is to make as much money as possible, either stay in US or move to a different European country (Northern Europe or Switzerland).
As a software engineer in the US you're not really worrying about access to health care, and have access to public schools as well.
What happens to your health insurance if you get too sick to work?
> As a software engineer in the US you're not really worrying about access to health care
You're "not really worrying" ... whilst you are in a job.
There fixed that for you.
As I am sure you are acutely aware US is the home of lay-offs and is generally easy to fire people.
If you loose your job in the US it becomes panic stations because you loose that precious employer-paid healthcare overnight.
Meanwhile in Europe ? Take your time job hunting a new job, healthcare is still free.
> Meanwhile in Europe ? Take your time job hunting a new job, healthcare is still free.
Currently, healthcare coverage tend to be better in several European countries when you are jobless... because the system try to compensate the fact you do not have income anymore.
Don't get me wrong, their is many 'flaws' in several European healthcare systems and it is far from perfect. but it tends to be more "human" and less "for profit".
I left the US, not because I was worried about healthcare for myself or my family, but because of how I felt it reflected on me that I was fine choosing to stay and cash a large check every month while others around me had to worry about healthcare.
What if you get laid off?
"Health Insurance Is Now More Expensive Than the Mortgage for These Americans" - https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/aca-health-insurance-c...
"free"... as in paid for with high taxes
But in the other hand you don't have to worry about mass shootings. You can freely walk (mostly) wherever you want without risking your life (that is not normal in most of the world). And you're not going bankrupt because of a minor/medium medical condition.
Europe is a _very_ different place.
Not everything here is so bad.
> They've been incentivizing it for years.
There is also NGI Sargasso which had EU grants being awarded to collaborations between parties in the EU and the US, working on internet innovation projects. Looks like that funding program has closed. Not sure if these open calls were slashed by the Trump government.
https://ngisargasso.eu/
In the Netherlands we return 30% of your taxes in the first 10. So we welcome you as well. We may pay less compared to the USA but we have health care, better work life balance and we all talk English.
Isn't the primary tongue of locals in the Netherlands Dutch? Yes you know English, but don't the locals speak Dutch or German to each other?
the first 10 what? Years? It's actually not like that: https://www.government.nl/topics/income-tax/shortening-30-pe...
From 1 January 2024, expats who meet the conditions receive the following tax benefits:
- 30% tax free for the first 20 months;
- 20% tax free for the next 20 months;
- 10% tax free for the last 20 months.
So that's a tapered reduction over the first 5 years and the amount of money that you gain after tax is between negligeable and insultingly small.
Basically in its current form "The Dutch 30% ruling" is not really worth it, if you want to move to The Netherlands do it for other reasons, and the advertisment of this mechanism feels borderline disingenious in its current form.
Why wait? If you can get a work visa you might as well, independent of this push. English proficiency in France isn't amazing though (speaking as a Dutchman that visits France most summers), so learning French would be a big help.
Do you have a suggestion of where to begin looking? Doesn't have to be France either.
I'm not sure, it depends on what kind of work you're looking for. For the Netherlands, I'd start here.
https://www.tech-careers.nl/job-seeker-visa-for-tech-roles-i...
Will not. You should love to move youself to pay 30% more taxes and work for 30% less salary (not sure what percentage to apply first).
> pay 30% more taxes
This is scaremongering - taxes are in no way 30% higher in EU.
Someone pulling mid-6-figures in the Valley is already paying a ~35% effective tax rate (state + medicare + federal). That same person taking a low-6-figures job in Spain would pay ~40% effective tax rate - and Beckam's Law would likely cut that to 24% for the first 6 years in any case
more like 50+ % less salary, just saying
translation (and without twitter): https://www-numerama-com.translate.goog/cyberguerre/2167301-...
If only they'd taken their reliance on Russian natural gas so seriously.
https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319
Which itself links to:
https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...
Seriously, why are people still using twitter? It's owned by a Nazi supporter, is full of white nationalist racist posters, and seems a strange place to announce you are moving off of American tech.
Not to mention JD Vance uses it so it's like sharing a room with a massive dog turd
Because for better or worse it still has significance and popularity. Nothing else really comes close.
Politicians use it a lot. Because media and journalist started using it.
Because it's not and you are out of touch with reality?
Link to the actual article: https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...
Earlier repo submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004
Gee, if only there had been a European market leader in instant messaging, voice over IP and video chat in the 2000s already. Then we could just use that instead of Microsoft Teams.
For a fraction of what these products cost France could fund open source alternatives.
Edit: I'm not saying they don't.
You mean something like LiveKit, with a basic implementation of user management etc such as https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet ?
They do. « we are committed to contributing back to the LiveKit community whenever feasible ».
The tool they're building is open source: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004
Deleted tweet?
It's difficult to take an announcement like this seriously when it's posted on Twitter.
This is just some account from a tech journalist
This is the press release:
https://presse.economie.gouv.fr/souverainete-numerique-letat...