Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy<p>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<p>2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market<p>3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology<p>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.
Don't take the Canadian market for granted.<p>There's a <i>strong</i> desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.
It should also go without saying that Canada already had a vertically integrated telecoms giant in RIM/Blackberry that handled end to end smartphone comms globally in the 3G era, right down to compressing emails through their servers so they could be transmitted efficiently over 2G data networks.<p>Unfortunately Blackberry was heavily dependent on US telecoms and corporations buying their servers and devices to pad their profits. And since then, local engineering talent from the Kitchener-Waterloo region has been siphoned off by Silicon Valley money, mostly to craft elegant solutions to deliver more ads to your devices.
Canada's telcos are a "narrow waist" for a lot of software licensing.<p>A lot of business customers bundle their business/productivity software with their phone and Internet services. Did you know you can buy Google Workspace and/or Microsoft Office through your telco? I was shocked to find out how many do this when I worked for one of the telcos.<p>Just like how consumers bundle their streaming services with their home Internet plans.<p>One bill for all the things is convenient.<p>I would bet it's the same in EU (but can't say for sure, I only have first-hand info about Canada).<p>If there was a real push to move companies away from these platforms, it would probably start there, mostly because the telcos are typically very government-aligned due to regulatory and spectrum concerns, and would get in line with government efforts to promote non-US alternatives, if they decided to.<p>Getting the majority of consumers to ditch their US-based streaming and entertainment is another thing though, I can't see that happening ever, no matter how at-odds the US and Canada become.
Not only software. Think back to who supplied the vaccines during COVID.
The British and the Russians also had a COVID vaccine (and much cheaper), and the French cancelled theirs because they realized it would come too late to be competitive.<p>So if they were restricted to some reason to use their own only, they would be fine.
> weaponized against us<p>I take a more optimistic stance here. Trump can only live so long, and everybody except basically Trump and John Bolton knows that the majority of his idiotic tariffs (and nonsensical belligerence like pretending NATO control of Greenland doesn't meet all our defense needs) are wealth-destroying on net, as well as wealth-destroying for at least 10x the number of people than they help (many of them I'd say 100-1000x as many). When Trump leaves the stage, those who replace him will either be Democrats sprinting at full speed from all his policies to demonstrate how not-Trump they are, or Republicans who want to grow the economy. Either way, the stupidity in a lot of his policies is a temporary condition.<p>Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
> Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.<p>It is debatable if everyone but John Bolton and Donald Trump knows this. After all, according to the last NYT poll the current POTUS commands an approval rating of 41 % in the USA. The number of people I meet who do not understand how tariffs work, for example, is staggering.<p>Anyway, it is smart policy to expect the worst and plan for it instead of being surprised by another insane president voted in by the people of the USA. Call it risk management if you like. It would be negligent of the leaders of the EU and its member nations to not account for that. The EU has to reduce dependence on unrealiable trade partners, this is true whether we are talking about warmongering Russia, dictatorial China (probably the most reliable of the three!), or unpredictable USA.<p>So, let's hope for the best and prepare for the worst. The EU can't change it if preparation harms US economic interests in the long run. That's on Trump.
For those who haven't looked at the results, I find them more depressing:<p>>What emotion best describes how you feel about Donald Trump’s presidency so far?<p>Of Republicans:<p>40% Satisfaction<p>24% Enthusiasm/pride<p>6% Hope<p>5% Relief<p>They are loving this.
> After all, according to the last NYT poll the current POTUS commands an approval rating of 41 % in the USA. The number of people I meet who do not understand how tariffs work, for example, is staggering.<p>For sure -- the bottom 41% of economic literacy are so misinformed that they have no clue what they're talking about. But those voters aren't picking the nominee for President from among a circus of general morons, the party elites are, and the Republican Party elites are rich dudes who don't want to screw ourselves back to the stone age. Without Trump just flailing around like an idiot, they'd be content to do things that preserve the status quo in a lot of areas. They pander to the unsophisticated Trumpists where needed, but it's lip service, since a lot of them, for instance, love open borders because of how it depresses wages and gives them a compliant workforce. They talk a big game about the debt or the deficit, and also work to make sure we increase defense spending and funnel as much healthcare spending as possible through a bunch of private insurers who add a huge margin to our healthcare costs.
I don't know, one might argue the US primary system is closer to the circus.
> the Republican Party elites are rich dudes who don't want to screw ourselves back to the stone age.<p>They said that about Trump I. The Republican Party elites have power, but they don't have all power on the conservative side of American politics. They contend with the Religious elites and various conservative cultural elites and the libertarians and so on. Trump didn't get elected by accident, there are a lot of people who love what he is doing, what he represents. They will happily vote for "the next Trump" when the time comes, and their elites will bend the Republican or the Democrat elites with tax cuts just as easily as they did for Trump.
Trump has done/is doing generational harm to the perception of the US worldwide, to say nothing of US soft-power influence. It's going to take decades to rebuild that trust after he's gone, and we still have a couple of years of his term to run yet.
MAGA will likely not die with Trump, and the Democrats have done their fair share to shaft Canada too. (If Jimmy Carter were still alive you could ask him about his family tree farm and what he thinks of softwood lumber tariffs.) As our PM recently said in Davos, the U.S.-led rules-based world order was a bit of a sham from the get-go. Certain countries were more equal than others. The rules were always flexible and they bent in favour of the U.S. most of all. Canada and other middle powers got an okay deal nonetheless, so we went along with it. That's over now, and "Nostalgia is not a strategy.".<p>Now that we're always going to be four years or less from the next <i>potential</i> bout of American insanity, it's time to build a new order that is less vulnerable to big powers and more equitable for everyone else. An order in which the rules are applied more consistently and have teeth. That doesn't necessarily mean breaking out the feather quills and having a big shin-dig at Versailles though. It's doing lots of little things that shift our dependence to like-minded middle powers whenever and wherever possible.<p>e.g. The white house has threatened other countries (including Canada) with tariffs in order to deter regulation or taxation of american software giants in non-U.S. jurisdictions. That makes dependence on these companies an exploitable (and already exploited) weakness. This is why governments, like France, want alternatives.
It seems optimistic to me at this point that he could be replaced by a Republican not largely crafted in his image. It's possible, but I certainly wouldn't take it for granted.
Americans elected trump not just one time. They did it twice.<p>They all knew who he was by the end of the first mandate yet they still elected him again.<p>Why wouldn’t they find another « trump like » when trump goes away ? Vance or someone else, the list is long.<p>I see no reason for things to change and that’s if the USA doesn’t become an autocracy in the meantime. Trump already did so much in a year, that’s fascinating. He just need to boil the frog a bit longer but everything is in place.
Exactly. Trump is just a symptom. If he disappeared tomorrow, the people who elected him are still here, and they still want the same things: Belligerence, Cruelty, Isolationism, and lots of other terrible things. When Trump is no longer in the picture, they'll find a new candidate who offers this.
You don't have to convince every Trump voter. The margin who swung from Biden to Trump and elected Trump aren't all those things. They just don't want what the Dems were selling in 2024, specifically: the dems' adopted ideology surrounding gender, plus using race and gender to pick who gets jobs and into schools, rather than merit. If they removed just those two planks from the DNC platform, (1) Harris would have never been nominated, and (2) Trump couldn't have won.
This is the logic of running to the middle. And yet moderate candidates do poorly these days.<p>Worth noting who gives this advice and to whom.
"sorry bro, we had to vote Nazi because the degenerate folks at the institute of gender tries to normalize trans people".<p>That's how you sound. Crying about blue hairs is the worst reason to vote fascist.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissenschaft" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...</a>
Well, the isolationism is dubious. Trump and his followers (with a few exceptions, granted) seem happy to throw isolationism to the wind as soon as there's a chance of wielding power over a defeated enemy.
The real thing that's changed here is that the US gets no benefit from defending Ukraine or Europe<p>European politicians need to wake up NATO was really an exercise in helping the US with its proxy wars their support will not be reciprocated<p>Not with trump and not with his successor
I think that your outlook on US politics and future leadership is naively optimistic (though I very much hope to be wrong).<p>First and most importantly, I don't think it should be considered a given at this point that there will be a democraticly elected successor to Trump. It's clear from past attempts and current declarations and actions that the Trump regime will try to maintain power instead of ceding it at future elections - whether they will succeed or not will depend a lot on American institutions and the power of the people.<p>Secondly, your assertion that only Trump and Jon Bolton agree with the current policies seems deeply wrong. First of all, the VP (with a real chance to be President, given Trump's age and apparent health), seems very much on board. Secondly, much of Trump's policies are based on the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 document, including at least some of the foreign policy decisions. Thirdly, a desire to re-orient US foreign policy away from Europe (and thus NATO) and towards China exists in a large part of the traditional foreign policy establishment. Fourth, the leaders of the Democratic Party seem to have learned entirely the wrong lessons from the last election, looking more at which of Trump's policies they should adopt rather than what alternative solutions they can promise to the American people.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.<p>Every official or aligned pundit in the GOP is obliged by Trump's universally-known vanity to make a show of supporting literally every dumbass thing he does, knowing he'll purge them if they even question things. So I will say we can't actually get a read on what they truly think until Trump is gone, preferably by passing away peacefully of old age rather than hanging around live-tweeting his takes on the next administration's actions. Of course this means I'm speculating as well, and I admit that.<p>I just think that I've never seen anyone approaching the Trump levels of pettiness, vanity, and most of all, what looks to me like pure foolishness. Including even his inner circle. Most of them are single-issue extremists.<p>I actually agree that re-orienting foreign policy and military toward China is just plain smart. But it's idiotic to do that by picking fights with allies, and anyone less dumb than Trump can accomplish a pivot to China while at minimum not causing hostility across the Atlantic. Ideally the West should instead be firming up our alliance and working together to counter Chinese influence, plus, it'll be better to have NATO intact leading up to a potential hostilities with China when they invade Taiwan. Of course, China is working hard on amplifying and promoting division inside the US to destroy NATO in the hopes that Europe will run to their arms economically and thus be unable to oppose China. Kind of like how much of Europe has/had dependencies on Russian petroleum which complicated their ability to respond to Crimea and the rest of Ukraine invasion.<p>> leaders of the Democratic Party ... looking more at which of Trump's policies they should adopt<p>I haven't witnessed any adaptation at all from the DNC. It seems that all their beliefs are still summed up as "We ran a perfect candidate and she ran a perfect campaign. It's the voters who are the problem!"<p>I can't emphasize enough how collossal the DNC's screwup in 2024 was. We have a system that has been running for hundreds of years where the idea is a primary election gets you two candidates who are at least spitting distance from electable, and then we have to pick one of those two in the general election. It's <i>wildly</i> imperfect in that it entrenches exactly two parties at a time. But the DNC in 2024 took this system and operated it with utter incompetence by just installing <i>the biggest loser</i> of the 2020 primaries as the only alternative to Trump. Many people were so disgusted they stayed home. If they've admitted this, it hasn't been publicly.
trump disappearing isnt going to restore trust now the world has seen how broken american politics is.
Trump already left the stage once. This is something deeply wrong with the US that can't be explained away as a phase.
I think every American needs to understand this quote:<p>> "We will never fucking trust you again."[0]<p>It doesn't matter that Trump will eventually no longer be President, and it doesn't matter that there are still members of the American political establishment that support the old way of doing things. Trump does not act alone, and there is rapid attrition of those older bureaucrats who valued the USA's allies. Trump's allies in the GOP will continue to be in power, and perhaps worse, the partisan appointees that have inundated the public service will remain.<p>The USA has burned its bridges. There is no more trust to be found.<p>0: <a href="https://www.readtheline.ca/p/matt-gurney-we-will-never-fucking" rel="nofollow">https://www.readtheline.ca/p/matt-gurney-we-will-never-fucki...</a>
Thanks for that excellent link. I suppose I have to remain optimistic here, but I think that you and I disagree on one really important thing and time will prove one of us right (I think we both probably hope I'm right): I think that Trump is too different from the others, even people he's ushering into the administrative state. That's my opinion because Trump seems to govern from:<p>- 1 part petty corruption: stupid stuff like deals that enrich Kushner, his Trump company itself, and that of his close personal allies<p>- 1 part vanity: stupid stuff that serves no purpose but to exact revenge against people who humiliate him. And let's throw in silly stuff he says just to 'troll the libs' to this group too.<p>- 1 part just pure inexplicable stupidity. Things like pointless tariffs, or the idiocy around Greenland, that hurt nearly everyone and especially the US itself. Honestly some of this may be just the petty corruption part, where someone who stands to make a fortune from the chaos has cut him in on a deal we don't know about.<p>I simply don't see that same motivation triad coming from anyone else, even among Republicans. Other Republicans are driven more by political ideology, their own goals, their own ideas about the culture, their belief that X policy makes the economy stronger, etc. So, while you should judge us by what we do in the future, and bearing in mind that more idiots of his caliber may be discovered, I think and hope that you'll find out that Trump was simply the perfect storm of moron, and can never be repeated.
There is a pessimistic take on that too though. What if the next guy gives you all the corruption and cruelty, without the vanity and stupidity?
That sort of corruption is endemic to the American political establishment. They profit from their inside knowledge of congress, wielding their insider knowledge to make themselves wealthy; not all do it, but enough do that it's nigh impossible to pass legislation to deal with it.<p>What you refer to as vanity I consider vindictiveness, and as evidenced by his continued support is something that appears strongly associated with Trump's supporters. Vindictiveness is the point, and it's what they voted for.<p>And stupidity, well, PISA performance doesn't bode well for most nations. There's a steady decline witnessed the world over.
Germany elected Hitler and we pretty much trusted them again in less than 20 years.
The damage Trump has done to international relations will last much longer than the three years that he has left in office.<p>It was an open secret that the USA was a transactional unreliable ally, now it's just common knowledge.<p>Even the most ardent "look West" politicians have stopped talking about avoiding China.
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But they EU doesn't make any software... So unless Canada is willing to go with Chinese software which would kinda invalidate any "moral" ground they have and well frankly the USA wouldn't allow it seems like the USA can take it for granted.
Canada's software market was $73B in 2024.<p><a href="https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/software-market/canada#:~:text=The%20software,to%202030." rel="nofollow">https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/software-m...</a>
Am I missing something when I go to the companies here all of them except SAP are USA companies? So this research is just pointing out that Canada spends all it's software money in the USA?
I'm in public sector IT and yes, Microsoft Canada is considered a Canadian company. And yes, it's dumb as hell.<p>As a response to the tariffs we were told to use Canadian companies, and lo and behold, all of our big name software companies were magically Canadian.
Mostly because it's easier to get a Canadian visa and pay less. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this in hiring panels.
The EU doesn't make any software? Really now..
Canada <i>just</i> announced a huge deal with China last week. You're wrong on all counts.
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.
It’s great yes, but if we in the US weren’t proving so untrustworthy, EU startups and tech giants could focus on building things that actually might out innovate us and everyone else. Which would be a win-win.<p>Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.<p>I don’t blame them. There is value in trusting your tools and not risk having them weaponized. It’s just sad all around.
> It’s great yes, but if we in the US weren’t proving so untrustworthy, EU startups and tech giants could focus on building things that actually might out innovate us and everyone else. Which would be a win-win.
Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.<p>You could apply this to Slack vs Teams as well. Slack was already good, Microsoft just duplicated their work, came out with an inferior product and won. So, was it worth it?
Sometimes rebuilding a tool makes it better. You hopefully learn from the past.
At this point I am praying that one of the things pushing back on this administration will be American Companies that have gotten rich on the back of "American Globalism", learning just how much it hurts when the US doesn't do its responsibility to remain Allies with it's nominal Allies.<p>And the EU, Canada, and anyone else who the current US administration is slighting, should absolutely be moving cash hard and fast away from the American Economy, if they want change in US policy. TACO, is about economic policy, and it's hard to imagine this administration continuing it's more unpopular global (and even local policies), if it's discovering it's not actually backed by US Mega-Corps.
There is no unringing this bell. Maybe a sane administration would slow the migration, but the damage is done. America is a capricious partner who can flip the table at any moment.
100%<p>The reason there is no unringing this bell is not just that we have a capricious, vainglorious president, it's that all of checks and balances that are supposed to restrain the executive have proven worthless so far. Republicans in Congress have completely declared their impotence, having fully relinquished their duties that the Constitution specifically delegates to the legislative branch, like tariff power, war powers, etc.
The day I heard trump wants to fire Powell and manage the fed « his own way », I emptied all my trading accounts and bought gold.<p>I guess I’m not alone, gold is exploding.
The wheels for the great decoupling have been set though. The companies (which are also persons apparently thanks to the perversions of American law) have made their bed and will have to sleep in it themselves.<p>Of course, there are huge unrealized opportunities to be had in economic powerhouses such as Belarus, Argentina, Russia, and whichever other member exists in the Board of Peace.
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 current US administration wants a captive Europe. One that buys its defense, energy and technology products from them. One that sells its territory, regulations and know-how to them.<p>Ask the Department of State if they'd like a European-sized French attitude and strategic autonomy.
Current admin has been on record for years saying the same thing. Warning EU about russia, warning EU about China, warning them about not innovating.<p>I don't know if this was planned internally but it seems the way they figured out how to get EU to actually do something is to make it seem like big bad trump is going to hurt them.<p>Current admin has gotten more out of EU than 20years of asking nicely.<p>Before:
US: "please increase military spending"
EU: "no"<p>US: "please do not support our advesaries"
EU: "builds nordstream"<p>US: "stop killing innovation"
EU: " more regulation"<p>Now:<p>US: "We will invade greenland"
EU: "omg we need to invest in greenland and increase its military support, we will send more troops immediately!"<p>US: "we will pull out of nato"
EU: "omg we hate US we need to massively increase military spending and industry"<p>US: "our tech companies will not listen to you"
EU: "omg big bad america, we should try to make out own"<p>I don't like it but at the same time, it works? Let EU rally against US who cares as long as they actually do something.<p>Simply put absolute best thing for US is a strong EU. China is an advesary that will take the entire US system to challenge if EU can handle the rest then it's a win.
> Before: US: "please increase military spending" EU: "no"<p>What this meant between the lines for 60+ years is “please increase military spending on US overpriced weapons that we gonna sell you, weapons will be degraded versions of native counterparts and don’t think about making your own independent military industry. Oh by the way bring those weapons when we will do 20 years of failed occupation in Middle East, because we are the only country in NATO that triggered article 5 and bunch of Euros died for nothing. Because that’s the deal, we protect you, for the economic price of helping our imperial hegemony since 1940s stay at the top, but suddenly we decided this is a bad deal after all.”
It never ceases to amaze me the contortions some people put themselves through to make this US administration seem sane or even vaguely interested in the flourishing of Europe, Canada or the wider west.
Something tells me when the 'something' is a major trade deal with China suddenly it'll be 'oh my god how could you'. The US wants a EU vassal, what they're going to get is an EU that realigned itself to be politically and economically equidistant from the US and China.
If this is some kind of move, fair play, but its ham fisted because rank and file westerners across the world have lost respect and faith in America, that wont be rebuilt by some other president. Nobody will want fighter jets etc controlled by America. Perhaps USA is fine with it but to me it feels severely damaging.
> US: "We will invade greenland" EU: "omg we need to invest in greenland and increase its military support, we will send more troops immediately!"<p>> US: "we will pull out of nato" EU: "omg we hate US we need to massively increase military spending and industry"<p>It's in both the EU and the US's interest to ensure NATO is the strongest partnership possible and the US's actions over the last few weeks have undermined it almost perfectly.
> I don't know if this was planned internally but it seems the way they figured out how to get EU to actually do something is to make it seem like big bad trump is going to hurt them.<p>This is an interesting take. You appear to be suggesting that the US has the EU's best interests at heart.<p>It ignores the fact that, on the rare occasion the Trump administration was not actively trying to undermine the EU, their "helpful advice" has always boiled down to "you should be more like us, and not being like us means you're failing."<p>My opinion, which I believe is common among Europeans, is that the opposite is true.
No. The US does not want an independent EU.
It wants an EU that lets any US company do here whatever it wants.
It wants the EU to split up so it can force bad trade deals on our countries.
We don't want a trade deal that lets you sell chlorinated chicken or other stuff that is currently banned here.<p>The US wants us to spend more on military but not on our own weapons but to spend all our money buying US made stuff.
Now what the president of the US achieved is that we want to spend more to develop our own local alternatives and improve them, not buy more from the US. Why would we buy from you if your president threatens to invade Greenland?<p>Also - military spending was increased not because Trump bullied us into it doing it. It was seen as necessary because of russian attack on Ukraine. Trump was not some genius diplomacy mastermind. He is a man child that is pissed of for not getting the Nobel peace price. How childish is that? This is not some person who can be taken seriously in any way.<p>Regulation is good, Micro-USB and USB-C for phones and computer chargers is better than the dozens of different chargers that was before. Only Apple was unhappy and didn't want it.
We don't want big US tech companies to steal our personal data and do whatever they want wit it.<p>Also - now trump is pissed off at Canada for trying to get a trade deal with China, when it was he himself who first said Canada should become a part of the US, started with random bs tariffs on canadian goods, etc. What else can you expect from Canada, why should they not try to find a more reliable trade partner? How can it be rational, what Trump is doing?
> US: "stop killing innovation" EU: " more regulation"<p>Have you ever stopped to think that maybe a large number of Europeans look at the lack of US regulation with disgust?
> isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want?<p>no, I certainly do not read that <i>at all</i>. This is not what the U.S. wants -- a genuinely free EU that has its own economy and source of tech entirely independent of the U.S. That is quite the opposite of what the U.S. wants but it inevitable that it is what the U.S. will get.
> even though Russia's GDP is merely of Guangzhou's<p>Am I missing something? [1] lists Guangzhou’s GDP as 435,746 M USD, while [2] lists Russia’s GDP as 2,173,836 M USD.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_Chinese_cities_by_GDP" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_Chinese_cities_by_...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...</a>
What a joke of a comment. Trump and Musk and Vance explicitly support every anti-EU party in a half-dozen EU countries. Cuz they wanna make EU stronger, durrr.
Seen from Europe, the current US administration doesn't want a Europe, end of story.<p>Trump 1.0 already tried to convince EU countries to exit the EU.<p>Trump 2.0 keeps insulting the EU, threatening the EU economically and threatening it militarily. To the point where even most of the far right EU candidates who were betting on being the ${EU COUNTRY} Trump are now doing their best to display how they're very much not Trump.
> even the current administration want<p>Sure, the US admin wants a strong US military, for example, ideally with 100% US weapons. Etc.
Europe will then redirect the 300B euros it was investing in US treasuries annually to Eurobonds, while redirecting the $300M in purchasing from US companies to EU companies. This is biting the hand that feeds the US.<p>Europe will buy LNG from Canada instead of the US, and continue to purchase imports from China. I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure). CATL is currently building the largest battery factory in Europe in Spain.
I think they should (in practice there could be something in the middle). Yes, they may have more bickering with the US, but that's just part of the messy diplomatic process. At the end of the day, we want to see strong allies that share a compatible value system with us. I'm actually more optimistic too: a stronger Europe will earn more respect because of their strength. And that respect will lead to more negotiation instead of more bickering.
lol hahaha Europe will "say" and maybe in a few decades they might get around to starting some of that. Europe still buys gas from Russia; can't even ween itself off it during a war.
Switching gas providers is more difficult than switching from Zoom to Google Meet or other alternative.
> lol hahaha Europe will "say" and maybe in a few decades they might get around to starting some of that. Europe still buys gas from Russia; can't even ween itself off it during a war.<p><i>EU countries give final approval to Russian gas ban</i> - <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-countries-give-final-approval-russian-gas-ban-2026-01-26/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-countries-give-fi...</a> | <a href="https://archive.today/wOHeR" rel="nofollow">https://archive.today/wOHeR</a> - January 26th, 2026<p>> Under the agreement, the EU will halt Russian liquefied natural gas imports by end-2026 and pipeline gas by September 30, 2027.<p>> The law allows that deadline to shift to November 1, 2027, at the latest, if a country is struggling to fill its storage caverns with non-Russian gas ahead of winter.<p>> Russia supplied more than 40% of the EU's gas before 2022. That share dropped to around 13% in 2025, according to the latest available EU data.<p>> The European Commission plans to also propose legislation in the coming months to phase out Russian pipeline oil, and wean countries off Russian nuclear fuel.<p><i>Ember Energy: The final push for EU Russian gas phase-out</i> - <a href="https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-final-push-for-eu-russian-gas-phase-out/" rel="nofollow">https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-final-push-for-...</a> - March 27th, 2025<p>Considering Russian's invasion started February 24, 2022, it's fairly impressive Europe has only needed ~5 years to disconnect entirely from Russian gas supplies. Better late than never. They've proven they have the capacity to achieve these objectives in a timely manner, when motivated.
> Considering Russian's invasion started February 24, 2022,<p>You mean 2014.<p>But thank you for proving my point. 2014 - 2027 just a short 15 years (assuming it actually happens I have my doubts).
You also previously asserted, without citations, that Canada could not export natural gas to anyone but the US, so forgive me if I don’t take your opinion in high regard as it relates to global energy trade.<p><i>China and Canada Energy Pact as Canada Aims to Cut Reliance on US</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640932">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46640932</a> - January 2026<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45919165">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45919165</a> ("This line here makes it clear to me you've never really researched any of this. Canada doesn't have the ability to export that to anywhere but the USA and refuses to even consider building another pipeline." -- tick_tock_tick - November 13th, 2025)<p>I'm confident you could make more factually accurate and less emotionally driven comments if you tried. Please consider it. Very little of the information I rely on for my comments is paywall gated, they are web searches away for your consumption and mental model enrichment.
>"I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure)."<p>So after Russia fails "a strong EU" is no longer needed? Also waiting for Russian economy to fail may prove to be forever and not even desirable. Changing the system of government to one that treats people like it should is much better goal
Putin will need to die for Russia to change. Change is not possible in Russia until then. A strong EU is required post Russia.<p>Until then, starve the Russian economy of fossil fuel export revenue (which funds their war efforts). They have liquidated a majority of their gold reserves and have exhausted a majority of their military hardware stockpiles. If we wanted to wrap this up, we’d be bombing their oil and gas export facilities, but it appears we haven’t made it to that milestone yet.<p><i>Russia Liquidates 71% of Its Gold Reserves to Finance War Effort</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46738690">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46738690</a> - January 2026
oh man, I agree with what you are saying but EU is a joke.!
Is it really though?
We have strong labour laws, consumer laws, antitrust laws, personal information laws and so on because the majority of us want it. We understand that this do not maximize growth, and consider that worth it.
In fact, the most of us sees the current US administration as a very big joke.
> 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.<p>This is a pretty ridiculous statement.<p>It is clear that the US under current administration is absolutely hostile to EU, and that the US in general is untrustworthy when a good portion of its people see the actions of the current administration as desirable.
> 2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market<p>What about China? India?
india is a great market, but:<p>1. extremely price sensitive; zoho is regarded as expensive<p>2. 121 major languages in active/business use, with 22 formally recognised by government. These people may understand limited english.<p>3. 28 unique states plus 8 unique territories.<p>so in many ways its like expanding across the US, except there are 22 languages as well as 36 state law regimes, plus federal law, and then indian city law, transfer pricing regimes, currency settlement issues... etc.<p>China is also possible, but still price sensitive and strongly culturally prefers local solutions<p>edit: fixed formatting.
EU market is by no mean easy, it's heavily fragmented requiring very often intense localization effort.
For sure. But a major goal of US foreign policy was to create an EU so it would be easier for trade. Backsliding on support, wanting to sabotage it, doesn’t help US companies as it just adds burden.
Seems easier to comply to the single market rules though than 50 odd different states.
> there’s not an easy 3rd economy<p>There isn't right now but India very much wants to be that in about a decade
> When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada<p>I don't think Canada's pretty entertained about US either. US is completely alone in this regards.<p>From what I can feel, US wanted to isolate itself from Global economy/Globalization and its <i>succeeding</i> at it.
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.<p>Canada is very much in the same boat as the EU.
> Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA<p>It is "is" and it will continue to be is probably for the rest of Canada existence. You can't trump geography here and frankly Canada's decades of under investment in shipping infrastructure means they need to use USA ports for foreign trade anyway.
Why did he threaten 100% tariffs?
He did not like the Canadian prime minister's speech about "great powers" weaponizing economic integration, so he decided to prove him right.
Because Canada has been in trade talks with China and may potentially lower its tariffs on China which gives them a back door into the US. There are some specifics and it's all conditional. It depends on the kinds of deals it settles on.
I do feel as why demands reason and I am not sure if you can reason with the unreasonable which is what the Canadian speech was about in Davos and then POTUS threatened 100% tariffs again.<p>Kind of proved the point of America being an un-reliable partner which is what I inferred from Canadian PM's speech & his call for middle economies to connect with each other and strengthen together to have more leverage overall.
Because after the US threatened to destroy our economy and/or annex us by force and/or cancel nu-NAFTA and/or impose tariffs on us regardless, we realized that Americans don't actually want us as friends so we started diversifying our trade partnerships and negotiated a mutual tariff relaxation deal with China.<p>The previous Canada-US relationship is gone. Months ago I wrote on HN that purely by virtue of having to weather this storm, the nature of Canada-US relations will be irrevocably and fundamentally altered. Even if Trump and his cronies were jailed tomorrow, it's too late. The rest of the world understands that Trump is just a symptom of the disease affecting America and it's going to get worse, not better.
Delusion? Dementia? Being surrounded by yes-men?
What was the last successful French software project in the Telecom or Conferencing space?<p>This project has been forced into the hands of 40k users, but likely due to a plethora of bugs and user experience issues they are picking a date far in the future for broad deployment.<p>Belledonne Communications has been actively breaking Linphone, conference calling broke back in August 2023 for example and remains broken to this day.<p>If we look to Québécoise in Canada, SFLPhone would crash after 2 dozen calls, and Jami (formerly GNU Ring) is still a beta quality product with some neat DHT concepts that I'd love to see work.<p>The French sphere has a software delivery and quality problem. The user rejection factor will remain high until they choose to fix the bugs that cause users to run away.
Ffmpeg.<p>Basically all videoconferencing (except teams) is built on the back of French open source software.
Idk, VLC is kinda everywhere and while not the super cutting edge of video playing anymore, is still pretty OK. If they'd just attach a chat and SIP client to VLC they'd be set.
Impossible n'est pas français !<p>And you seriously are saying Teams is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Ok I concede the videoconferencing works, but it's quite a feat to make a text chat window so slow and buggy. Sometimes when I type, it is spelling stuff backwards!
Message texting is a solved problem since IRC or ICQ
CYCLADES (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES</a>) was influential in the design of important Internet concepts like the OSI model and TCP.
There is also australian and british markets I assume?
<i>Some</i> Americans. Others of us are very aware of this.
It's not clear that anything will be kneecapped. You need more than a desire to not use these products, you also need a viable alternative. Using products from China or Russia probably isn't deemed viable if the concern is politics, which leads to a need for Europe or Canada to build alternatives. They have not been good at this for a long time, maybe that will change, but it's not clear that it will.
There are plenty of <i>viable</i> alternatives. Perhaps not all are as polished as some of the mainstay US companies, but the funtionality is there. It's no surprise that people in the US are ignorant of the existence of the many excellent EU software companies and services.
India.<p>Today India invited President of EU commission on its republic day & I feel like there are discussions on signing free trade agreement.<p>I was in my car watching it live when I recognized the President of EU commissioner and I was like hey!!<p>I feel like friendly relations of EU and India are definitely on the rise & I have said this previously as well and talked to my other cousins/family who works in Coding and most agree that a deeper India-EU ties are possible.<p>One thing we were discussing is if EU could directly invest funds in Indian companies instead of going through 10 layers of councils/commissioning companies but to people who want to either build private solutions (Preferably open source?)<p>I do feel like that's inevitable too. EU's financing is something which I have heard is tricky within EU itself but there are some recent initiatives to stream line it and perhaps India can even integrate into it if its actually net positive for India.<p>Overall I feel like I am pretty optimistic about India EU relations (though I feel like I have bias but what do people from EU think respectfully?,I'd be more than happy to answer as I talked to my developer cousin about it for almost 2 days on how EU India integration especially in tech feels so good and inevitable haha :>)
I can't wait to see how many indians we are going to be forced to import due to that "free trade deal". They must have looked at how well it went in canada and said among themselves "now that's how you destroy a country we gotta get some of that". [EDIT] Hopefully national politicians get balls, more balls, and tell their MEPs to vote against it like the mercosur deal.
This BS should stop (even if you vote for AfD or National front)<p>It is so difficult we still to get a working visa into Western EU. The way this is done is by total bureaucratic nature of Ausländerbehörde.<p>When he was CTO from Netflix, Gaurav Agarwal
Could not get a visa to relocate to Germany. (No more with Netflix)<p>So even of one has > €80K salary and working in Apple or MS hq in Munich it is pain in the arse.<p>On the other hand this is encouraging people to apply and get passports. I for one would have never naturalised as German if the residence permit was quick and easy.<p>In summary, there are encouraging people to migrate.
What little immigration we have from India are highly educated and thus quite productive individuals.<p>You’re (deliberately?) confusing the issue with e.g. illegal immigration or asylum seekers who often come from poor, war-torn areas with little education and possibly a very different mind-set.<p>I haven’t been accosted by roving gangs of well-educated IT Indians, I find the thought funny ;)
For what its worth, I have to mention that India losses more on this deal than Europe because India's actually for the first time iirc imo giving up tariffs or reducing them. India has the highest tariff rates for a developing country from the start (indiscriminant) and is only offering upgrades to EU mostly fwiw in terms of this free trade deal.<p>I have heard this deal be described as EU beneficiary from EU sources.<p>Ah yes, I feel like what you want for an EU is a connection with America which has been a very unreliable partner would even be an understatement in today's geopolitical environment.<p>It's saddening to see if you are from EU who actually believes so. I am more than happy to answer your queries in good faith but this just feels like pushing some of your own agenda or straight up racist.<p>We come with open arms even though the massacre of jallianwala bagh is still in our memories. There is just no question regarding the fact that EU primarily british forces had extracted immense wealth from India and India had to primarily rebuild it from scratch healing from the scars of its colonial past.<p>There's actually an internal pushback from some people i feel like who feel like EU is still imperialist & want to shut down this deal from India side given India hasn't lost much after the trump's tariffs compared to EU whose greenland was in some serious sovereign threats.<p>But I guess the point is that EU India deal is inevitable in this multi polar deal. India wants EU to be the financial hub where EU can then reinvest in India and India can create technological innovation.<p>I have tried to respond with as much calm as possible but I must admit that your message felt like a must admit,ragebait to me in start but I hope that this detailed message can help clear up on the details.<p>If you have any reasonable questions man, feel free to ask!
Not sure why you're being downvoted, Europe has been mostly bad at software and services for a long time now. There's a reason Linus lives in Oregon.<p>There's always this occasional chatter about being more competitive, and certainly some good ideas -- for example, the Draghi Report -- but then nothing happens, or you get a few half measures at most.<p>I guess the one upside of Trump being such an aggressive jackass is that it might finally provide enough impetus for European countries to take further integration more seriously.
Europe has good software companies. It's just that the US has bigger VC funding which makes European companies unable to compete when US/EU companies are "fighting".
<i>There's a reason Linus lives in Oregon.</i><p>What is the reason Linus lives in Oregon? By his own admission, 90% of his workday is reading and answering email. We have email in Europe, so that can’t be it.
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.<p>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.
EU is a colony of USA. If it would be necessary, US can simply force EU to buy US technology.<p>If you check the EU politics, they never do or say anything that can be interpreted negatively by US or damage US interests.<p>In 2025, EU and US signed an agreement that obliges EU to buy energy resources from US at ridiculously high prices, despite that EU is already struggling with the high price of energy.
Let's not go over the top.<p>The announcement is about a tool developed internally by the French government to use internally, too. This is a very wasteful approach that does not create real competitors to US giants, and it is liable to be cancelled at the next round of cost reduction...
An insider view: there is a major push in a lot of state related team & department at the moment to go “sovereign tooling”. With alternatives for a lot of stuff.<p>This is not just a corner of the universe, most of us are switching tools at the moment, the trend is definitively big.
It’s not just this, it’s the arrogant attitude of the administration on tarriffs, Ukraine, and a broad range of topics
And that will change in 3 years or even at the end of this year... A lot is blown out of proportion by the EU itself because it serves its own agenda to expand reach and power.<p>Realistically there is zero alternative to US tech/online dominance in sight in Europe and the credible competitors are more likely to be Chinese (tiktok, temu, shein, etc.) What is happening is EU politics.
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.<p>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.
No. No one really gives a shit about AI other than the tech industry and vocal CEO culture which is just using it to bury recession and regular lay offs. Otherwise it's novelty value and frustration but no one is going to use it or pay enough for it to be viable as an economic backbone.<p>There are many more important things to consider. Like literally everything else society sits on top of.
> They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.<p>What failed with Mistral?<p>Which anti-AI regulations are we talking about, and don't these apply to any solution distributed in the European Union, hence also to American ones?
> build a better model with lower latency.<p>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.
The US capital markets are truly a wonder to behold. There's no way to replace that. For good and ill, you'd only get weird looks in Europe if you asked for €10 billion for an unproven business model in what's somehow also a competitive market.<p>To be fair this example does look a lot like insanity.
This is part of the answer.<p>I have a theory about the second part; European consumers have an even more suspicious view of "corporate overlords" if they are domestic/European than if they are American. Not because Americans are more trustworthy, but because they see Europeans as "anonymous masses" and are therefore more "neutral" to the internal struggles in Europe.<p>Signing up to a service owned by a European "dynastic" family, possibly in a neighbouring country, feels like more of a surrender of autonomy.
You don't have to love risk to build something you need.
> There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT<p>Before or after the bubble pops?<p>What does chatgpt has over competitors again? Besides a deranged ceo of course
>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.<p>I think the idea of a Eurostack is more compelling: standard office productivity tools that aren't beholden to Microsoft, Apple, or Google. That means email, calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, slide decks, video conferencing.<p>Imagine if every government and corporation in the eurozone stopped paying for Windows licenses and O365 subscriptions.<p>LibreOffice exists, of course, but it lacks an alternative to Outlook and Teams/Zoom. It would benefit from a benevolent corporate sponsor with deeper pockets than TDF which AFAIK is purely volunteer-driven.
1. ChatGPT is shit<p>2. We prefer anti-AI regulations and not having a stupid Musk indoctrinating half the country
We’re also pissing off Canada. This administration is actively destroying America to reduce the influence of American liberal values on the world. Destroying America is part of the plan.
China, India. There are little EU-wide network effects similar to American ones.
Outside companies don't do well in China<p>India doesn't have nearly the purchasing power of EU or US
China: Everything that puts western buyers off Chinese stuff, same happens in reverse. E.g. translation is really really hard. Every previous time I have illustrated how bad Google Translate is at this by quoting the Chinese output, someone has missed the point and replied to tell me the output is so bad as to be almost incomprehensible.<p>India: Lots of people, sure, even after accounting for how they've only recently fully electrified and don't all have office jobs where software is even slightly relevant… but the entire economy even in aggregate let alone per capita (and therefore TAM) is smaller, and the linguistic situation is (according to what I was told by Indian coworkers at a previous job) an exciting mix where everyone speaks 3+ languages and intermixes them in basically every sentence.
> When we piss everyone off in the EU<p>Companies are supposed to compete anyway, without having to get pissed off first.
The typical mature technology company in the US earns half their revenue from outside the US. Makes it harder to understand even tacitly supporting white supremacy and ignorant isolationism.
A core tenet of the "dark enlightenment" mind-virus that has taken hold of the valley is the idea that civilizational decline/collapse is not only inevitable but imminent, so they don't really mind getting a bigger slice of a smaller cake, as long as they are in charge[1].<p>However, they also are getting citizenships from other countries or buying pacific island bunkers: just in case.<p>1. The collapse inevitabilitism absolves them of any guilt when their actions make the world worse, since "it was going to happen anyway"
They supported it because they saw an opportunity to remove limitations on them, both domestically (see FCC, restrictions on state level AI laws, etc) as well as internationally (regulations, digital taxes, etc in the EU and Canada, for example).
... 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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>Canada has a GDP of:<p>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<p>put together.<p>That's the equivalent of 18 states.<p>Throw in Aus and NZ too and you add another 7 states -- Louisiana, Alabama, Utah, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nevada and Iowa.<p>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.
> 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.<p>This is not correct as of 2024. In 2024, Ontario had a GDP of CAD 1.17B. [1] In USD, this is (at .73 exchange rate, which is favorable for these calculations) this comes to US 854B.<p>In 2024, the following US states had greater GDPs [2]: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and tied with Washington. GDP growth in 2025 was worse for Ontario than these states, and it would be expected Ontarios' position to continue to decline.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/248023/us-gross-domestic-product-gdp-by-state/?srsltid=AfmBOoqIlNJitZ3kIe64NHr_9No-WXKMLR-6CZgtGTI15qr7GpzMEkWF" rel="nofollow">https://www.statista.com/statistics/248023/us-gross-domestic...</a>
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 ...
Canada is in the same boat as the EU -- desperately looking for alternative vendors at the moment.
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.<p>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.
>2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market<p>I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product.<p>The regulations were insane.<p>I imagine software is significantly easier, but there is a mountain of difference when it comes to electrical and plumbing.
Regulations are le bad.<p>- signed someone from a country where ~10m people still drink water from lead pipes (the USA)
And in France alone 7.5 million home have lead pipes [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.zerowaterfilter.com/blogs/zerowater-knowledge-center/lead-in-tap-water" rel="nofollow">https://www.zerowaterfilter.com/blogs/zerowater-knowledge-ce...</a>
Regulations are neutral. They can be positive, or negative. And should be pruned occasionally probably.<p>And yea, we have lots of old lead pipes here in certain places. But let's not pretend we can't find fault with the immigrant ghettos in Europe or myriad other issues y'all have over there.<p>There's problems everywhere there's sufficient numbers and complexity.
Lead pipes in Chicago were due to union regulatory capture and not lack of regulations
We are still making hardware and feel the same way about the US market. The litigation is insane. Meanwhile the Chinese don't give a damn about any of those.
> I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product.<p>If you are unwilling to follow regulations to sell your hardware here, then it tells me the regulations are already doing its job properly.
India, but many companies aren't willing to price for the market nor respect corporate norms there.
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.<p>Yes, there is some cost to provisioning and running a cloud account. It's pretty small though. Some disk space and electricity.<p>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?
> nor respect corporate norms there.<p>What do you mean?
No, thank you. I would rather run Chinese spyware.
Countries are waking up to the danger of having the US in a position to take control of most of their computers and phones via software updates.<p>Open source solutions like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu</a> could become more prominent. There's even interesting non us hardware options like <a href="https://starlabs.systems/" rel="nofollow">https://starlabs.systems/</a><p>The US has had an unfair advantage in tech, defense, science and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With the newfound isolationism, tariffs, threats etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere, especially if governments can help bootstrap these sectors with efforts like these.
For those who don't want to use Twitter:<p><a href="https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319</a><p>Or here's the linked article:<p><a href="https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-remplacer-microsoft-teams-et-google-meet-par-visio-un-outil-souverain-pour-les-appels-video.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...</a><p>And here's the app, Visio:<p><a href="https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/visio" rel="nofollow">https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/visio</a>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLODO" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLODO</a><p>A Front for clandestine Operations? (Speculative Timeline)<p>- April 6 & 8, 1980: Sabotage and arson against Philips Data Systems and CII-Honeywell-Bull in Toulouse. Speculation: French State Operation. A move to protect national technological sovereignty during the "Plan Calcul" era.<p>- May 19, 1980: Arson attack on the archives of ICL (International Computers Limited) in Toulouse. Speculation: Continuation of the French State's "cleansing" of foreign influence.<p>- September 11, 1980 & December 2, 1980: Attacks against a computing firm in Toulouse and the UAP (Union des Assurances de Paris) in Paris. Speculation: American Operation? Possible retaliation or disruption of French administrative networks.<p>- January 28, 1983: Bombing of the new computer center at the Haute-Garonne Prefecture in Toulouse. Speculation: American Revenge. A direct hit against the French State's local administrative brain.<p>- October 26, 1983: Total destruction by fire of the Sperry Univac offices (a US multinational) in Toulouse. Speculation: French Revenge. A final "tit-for-tat" response targeting a key asset of the US military-industrial complex on French soil.
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.<p>The missing ingredient has <i>always</i> 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.<p>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.
I fail to imagine a single bit of business software that cannot be achieved with open source software, outside of specific proprietary processes. But your average office technology work, I see being very plausible to move to open source. There is definitely going to be a breadth of quality across the tools, but the outputs can all be the same I believe. Even on a personal level, it's worth cultivating self-reliance on tools you control. But at a national scale it feels perhaps existential, worth what learning pains there may be. You also cultivate local software industries.
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The French Gendarmerie has been running Linux for a while now <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu</a>.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.
<i>> Even though it is acceptable these days</i><p>Have you <i>used</i> Teams these days? If you think it's acceptable, I suggest that may be the Stockholm Syndrome kicking in.
He didn't say <i>good</i>. I'd agree with his assessment. It's <i>acceptable</i>.<p>And for all its many flaws it does have some advantages over Meet (which is what my company switched to it from):<p>* Remote control of other people's desktops (except on Linux unfortunately). Meet has no solution for that. Endless "no up a bit, left.. no you had it. Third one from the top. Here let me share my screen instead".<p>* Conversations you have in meetings don't disappear into the aether. In fact for recurring meetings it's even clever enough to use the same chat.<p>* You can directly call people. Meet requires you to create a meeting and then invite someone.<p>Ok that's all I've got. My list of complaints is <i>much</i> longer, but even so it just about makes it to <i>acceptable</i>.<p>Kind of crazy that Google hasn't just solved this though. Clone Slack, integrate it with Meet. Make a high performance desktop client (not web app) with remote control. They'd make a fortune.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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?)
> <i>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.</i><p>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).<p>So it's not just a failing of Teams.
I have also seen situations where sales opted into Microsoft early on. When they grew in relation to engineering forced the rest of the company to standardize to Microsoft products so they could get better rates and “save money”.
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.<p>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.
It wasn't seen as a priority national security measure before.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.<p>Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.
> If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.<p>In a multipolar world you don't critically need that if you can order your hardware from party I when party C or U shuts you out.<p>Remember that China is running their own Android island with Huawei and Xiaomi. Yes, a lot of Chinese people flash the Play Store, but it isn't strictly necessary. Not hard to imagine the EU and India creating their own islands too.<p>Kind of wicked we have to think this way though. I much prefer a world with the maximum healthy amount of open trade and travel.
I see a "top-down" approach, actually.<p>Government and public services change to (ideally) open source, and "impose"/"require" downstream compatibility.<p>This would create the incentive and make change easier
Yeah "all bids for government contracts must" is a really powerful sword.<p>It pushes money into the market, creates skills and business and, crucially can look beyond quarterly profits (for better or worse).
> 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.<p>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."<p>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.
Given how software is largely delivered via SaaS models these days, I'd start with a Chrome OS competitor as a client<p>And then build out Google App suite, Office 365 exquivants
Good luck getting the EU off Android and iOS?
It would take Samsung (or what's left of Nokia) a whole 10 seconds to produce a Google-free phone based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) if there was a market for it. Which it might soon be.
There's /e/OS, a fork of Android
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<p>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.<p>Simultaneous war on two fronts, where one opponent is deeply embedded in your supply chains, is an existential threat.
I’ll give you that the current US administration isn’t exactly scoring points for subtle diplomatic negotiation, but remember too that most of the United States was purchased from other countries.<p>It’s not a completely bonkers idea that the US could purchase all or some of Greenland. In the end, we’ll probably just see a strengthening or enforcement of the existing treaty for US military use of Greenland which is all the US wanted. Europe is still getting used to the president’s rather unique, and yes aggressive, negotiation style born out of his NYC real estate developer days.
> Europe is still getting used to the president’s rather unique, and yes aggressive, negotiation style<p>I think you’ll find the EU doesn’t have much appetite for this sort of thing. They’ll take the risk at face-value, and put mitigations in place going forward (including if necessary, divestment from US tech firms)
Yes, but the difference is that Denmark has said it many, many times, that it Does Not want to sell Greenland. The discussion should have ended there. But Trump kept saying "We will get it one way or the other" and did not rule out the use of force, etc. This is just insane and will alienate any allies. The Greenlanders also have said that they do not want to be part of the US. Some americans have joked that you could pay 100k to every greenlander and they would accept you happily, which would be totally stupid.
They would lose the free education and free healthcare that Denmark provides currently. Having to pay for medical insurance or to send your children to university from Greenland would wipe out any of the money the US would pay to bribe the greenlanders. It would be an unbelievably bad deal for them.<p>You did not need any more strengthening of any military treaties with Denmark, the US could already open as any military bases on Greenland, there was nothing stopping you from doing that, sending more of your army there to deter China or Russia, or whatever else. Here, <a href="https://people.com/donald-trump-wants-ownership-greenland-psychologically-important-11883940" rel="nofollow">https://people.com/donald-trump-wants-ownership-greenland-ps...</a> He is saying he needs to own it to personally feel good. How does this make sense diplomatically?<p>Any excuses you make will not make him look better or make him look like he can be trusted. If you want to achieve something in international politics have to be made carefully, not by threatening to annex Canada or parts of your allied countries.<p>Your president is just destroying the good image and goodwill towards the US with his 'negotiation style'. His style is childish bullying and temper tantrums, he can not be taken seriously as a reliable partner when he can say one thing today, and tomorrow say something totally different, even if you think you have reached an agreement with him on something.
> aggressive, negotiation style born out of his NYC real estate developer days<p>This is what someone would say if they only know Donald Trump from TV.<p>Everyone who knows Trump from his NYC real estate days knows that he's (and this is possibly the worst insult any New Yorker can hurl at someone) "a bum." There's a reason NYC would never vote for him.<p>He doesn't pay his contractors, reneges on legal agreements he himself created, and uses legal threats and fights to screw over anyone he pleases, especially if they can't afford the legal fight. It's a lie-cheat-steal mentality, and might makes right.<p>It's not like, some hard-nosed NYC negotiating strategy. He's a crook. There's really not much more than that.
This post right here is why the rest of the free world will never trust the US again.
This is incredibly mild compared to some things I've heard from family and people that went to my highschool. People here are completely unhinged, unmoored from the reality of the rest of the country, let alone the rest of the world.
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.<p>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.<p>Prosecutors and others have been denied access to their official work email etc because they displeased the president.<p>Trust has been eroded.
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 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.<p>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.<p>There were no such issues between any of the US allies in the time I can remember.<p>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.
There were always issues with Nordstream, but the project rapidly imploded only after the war made it all untenable.<p>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.<p>There is a huge gap between spying on someone phone and calling openly to invade a territory.<p>Every country spies on each other for various reasons (industrial, geopolitics) even between allies.<p>But I think we can agree that an ally <i>by definition</i> is not suppose to ring your door bell and say he wants to take your land against your will.
And at the same time, Germany spied on Obama.
> 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.<p>This feels different.<p>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.<p>What's different is that now <i>all</i> (or nearly all) the people contributing to the network effect <i>simultaneously</i> 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<p>Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".<p>Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?<p>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.<p>fortunately, legislation can help here<p>start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there<p>the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure
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.
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.<p>Its still a small step, but its a start.<p>> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide<p>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.)
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.
What I wonder is if there will be the pay for enticing developers to build it.<p>I think many of use will love to do this kind of stuff, but is mostly US companies that pay for it.<p>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?
> 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.<p>No they need to tariff/ban things that are non-EU
> legit better<p>Than ... Microsoft Teams? You're saying Microsoft Teams won because it is better than the competition?
Teams is not better than Slack, but here we are ...
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
> 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.<p>Classic neo-liberalism BS (pardon my french). Markets are not some natural law written in the atoms, it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want. Countries can create or destroy markets just with laws, you put a tax here, you put a legal requirement there. That's for example the reason that big american tech companies have been kicked out of South Korea:<p>- <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/08/south-korea-google-maps-geographic-data-restrictions" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/08/south-korea-go...</a><p>- <a href="https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-korea/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-...</a><p>Sure, if there are 2 competing companies that play with the exact set of rules, the mArKeT wIlL deCiDe, but that would be a really stupid decision from any government to not shape the rules in its favor. Europe is slowly waking up to this reality, better late than never I guess.<p>Did the "market decide" that Nvidia chips won't be shipped to China ? Did "the market decide" to put tariffs to get benefits from other countries ? Did "the market decide" to put embargo to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela.. ?<p>Hearing that regulations and laws is "wishful thinking" makes no sense at all. It's more the opposite, it's the only way to shape the markets the way you want to.
Better is not enough make people change, sadly. This is why VCs burn so much money to establish products.
You're delusional if you think people willingly use half of these products, remove the billions spent on lobbyism and these things will evaporate in 5 years tops
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.<p>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
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 really hope Marc Andreessen is happy.<p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-founders-explain-why-theyre-supporting-trump/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-fou...</a>
>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
He's helping with a fascist takeover of the country, why wouldn't they be happy?
I don't see the dependency on these productivity and communication tools as that difficult of a problem to solve.<p>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.<p>Globalization appears to be self imploding by virtue of the current american president.<p>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.<p>Resilient cultures are by definition market inefficient.
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ScaleWay and OVH are already filling this gap.
CleverCloud, Hetzner
StackIT is the AWS competitor actually, OVH is not really laid out to be a hyperscaler.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Being cynical AWS has more services because many of those are deliberately siloed in order to create a separate billing item, i.e.:<p>"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".
They are fine. Cloud is a commodity. Hetzner and Bunny are pretty great and i am sure there are many more.<p>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.
Well, then the EU can also ban the sale of ASML machines to US and anyone dealing with the US. Let's hope we won't get to that.
> Then it will be clear who's really in power.<p>If China closed the door overnight to the US, it would also be clear who's really in power.<p>The US simply does not have the capacity to replicate the manufacturing domestically.<p>Even if it were possible, "100% Made in the US" would end up costing <i>at least</i> 20–30% more.<p>And the US does not have a plan B. Sure there <i>might</i> be India .... one day....years away.
That could end in an ugly stalemate pretty fast, considering ASML is Dutch.
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.<p>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.
I think companies should just allocate raw computing and put agnostic stacks on top of it instead of using whatever shinny serverless G-Azurezon Serverless Function Lambda Cloud with NOTREDIS CACHE and LOCAL FLAVOR OF KUBERNETES plus the new OTEL-BUT-INVENTED-HERE monitoring solution.
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.
> Most EU companies, including this one, offer subpar services compared to their American counterparts<p>Not true.<p>But you know what the best thing about the EU companies is ?<p>Transparent pricing.<p><i>EU company</i>: 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.<p><i>US company</i>:Is that Compute Savings Plan, EC2 Savings Plan, On-Demand or Spot. What speed is my network <i>"up to"</i> ? And then of course the big <i>"I DUNNO"</i> in relation to <i>"how many IOPS am I going to be charged for EBS disk transfer ?"</i><p><i>EU company</i>: 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.<p><i>US company</i>: What do you mean LIST etc. should be free ?<p>You know what else I like about the EU companies ?<p>At least two of them allow pay as you go from a reducing credit balance.<p>Yes that's right US companies. It <i>IS</i> possible to give your customers a way to 100% guarantee you will never have an <i>"oops I just spent a million dollars overnight"</i> moment.
I’ve used OVH for multiple projects and they’ve been wonderful to work with.
sure, gotta start somewhere.
Jitsi meet exists for long time and it works. What is needed is eu sovereign clouds
They need to do both the hard things and the easy things, and do them in parallel.<p>Which they are.
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.
Can access X because it's X and locally blocked, "ironic" to use Twitter to post about sovereignty.<p>It's ongoing for a will with La suite numérique (<a href="https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/" rel="nofollow">https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/</a>).<p>- 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.<p>It aimed at "public worker", people working for the government.<p>Github: <a href="https://github.com/suitenumerique" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/suitenumerique</a>
The inertia (or actively maintained status quo) in Europe towards the US platforms is massive.<p>Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses.<p>The options? Introductory classes to:<p>- LinkedIn<p>- WhatsApp business<p>- Facebook and Instagram ads<p>- Gsuite
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It is also potentially a great opportunity especially now.
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.<p><a href="https://galene.org/" rel="nofollow">https://galene.org/</a>
+1.<p>I am running a Galene instance via the YunoHost self-hosting package on a small dedicated server (2 cores, 4gb of RAM).<p>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<p>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.<p>Audio and video quality, on the other hand, should be roughly the same, unless Jitsi is doing something wrong.
What happened to Jitsi?
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.<p>But now there are some (small) alternatives.<p>LIDL has its own cloud for retail.<p>And I believe T-Systems sells some cloud computing for goverments based on OpenStack...<p>Small steps, but steps.
I don't think a cloud provider that is _just_ a cloud provider exists. All of the cloud providers I can think of (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Baidu, etc) are subsidiaries of larger corporations whose profit centers are elsewhere.<p>The capital requirements needed to spin up a public cloud and the services that come with that are absolutely massive. It makes me think that cloud computing, despite the gigantic profits it brings in, is not sustainable on its own.
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.
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!<p><a href="https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-overlooked-member-benefit" rel="nofollow">https://www.fsf.org/blogs/membership/jitsi-meet-an-often-ove...</a>
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.<p><a href="https://livekit.io/" rel="nofollow">https://livekit.io/</a>
<a href="https://www.clever.cloud/product/visio/" rel="nofollow">https://www.clever.cloud/product/visio/</a>
<a href="https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/" rel="nofollow">https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/</a><p><a href="https://jitsi.org/" rel="nofollow">https://jitsi.org/</a>
<a href="https://www.opendesk.eu/en" rel="nofollow">https://www.opendesk.eu/en</a><p>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 <a href="https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/" rel="nofollow">https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I'm not even an advanced Word / Google Doc user.<p>Are we gonna wait for 100 more years for it to be good?
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.<p>LibreOffice is the actively developed fork.<p>There's a nice diagram on Wikipedia:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Forks_and_derivative_software" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Forks_and_deriv...</a>
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.
OpenOffice? Do you mean LibreOffice?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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)<p>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.
This is great. With more users alterantives will improve. The one place I would LOVE to see more effort at an international standard is in operating systems.<p>And no <i>just adopting Linux</i> is not enough. It needs to ecompass the full breadth of Windows and MacOS and be as turn-key and good at integration as MacOS. The Linux ecosystem is just too fragmented and still caters too strongly to developers. A full stack international standard, including being able to deploy packaged priorietary software and drivers, would provide potentially real competition to Microsoft and Apple.
"Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying Microsoft". Same for Oracle and AWS, until a year ago. Before the current insanity, Europe whould become independent like never. Now, it will take about a decade, IF the insanity continues in the next presidential terms.
the Europeans have only ever purchased American products because they were cheaper by the feature, and there wasn't a political constituency to placate (see the [wine lake|wikipedia]). and the US in return.<p>as it was, so shall it always be.<p>any appetite to flush money down the drain because Greenland feels insulted will dull very very quickly. However as defense treaties have always been more fleeting than NATO has been, we can be sure the Europeans will quickly find better, more reliable partners than they've had in the US, no doubt at lower cost for all concerned.
Non-french might not realize that we have a huge free software community of france, made up in large part of communist state-funded scientists / researchers. They do a lot of cool stuff, you can see a few projects for example on Framasoft who has the explicit goal of un-Googling yourself : <a href="https://framasoft.org/en/" rel="nofollow">https://framasoft.org/en/</a> <a href="https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/" rel="nofollow">https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/</a><p>That said, having technical solutions isn't enough to replace USA / private solutions. The answer has to take into account the economical, social and political situation
This is great and definitely doable. It's the initial bit that's hard, people hate switching but then when they get used to it, they won't switch back.<p>What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.
I would love to switch away from Teams. Sadly the organizations I belong to do not want to pay for anything else.
was talking to a friend about this, there's wero but i haven't really seen it around (Germany).
Isn't that what "LaSuite" is? I know this particular instance is for the French government; but isn't it open source?<p><a href="https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr" rel="nofollow">https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr</a>
Ought to add X to that list as well!
De Gaulle strikes back)
The actual website listing all the tools of this office suite (in French)<p><a href="https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products" rel="nofollow">https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products</a>
The software part of this would be easy. People will literally write it for free, out of the sheer joy of building Free & open source software. The part the state needs to do is bootstrap a network effect that leads to people actually using it.<p>I guess they’ll need to employ a <i>few</i> engineers to add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness.
Fixing network effect is easy for hegemonies, just ban the competition. You can use national security or save the children pretext in democratic countries.<p>US took over TikTok forcefully, Europeans are looking into forcing their contenders into domination but if it doesn't look like working they can just use the US tactics.
I like CryptPad.fr. End-to-end encrypted google docs.
They should just fund pairux
I work at a French research institute and our Zoom contract ends soon so we get to switch to Visio. It's not too bad but quite tier below Zoom. Noise cancellation is not great, being browser based also comes with limitations, in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam ...
They've already invested in Matrix. Why not use that?
Finally the year of Minitel on the desktop!
@see: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004</a>
Every country should ban American social networks and messaging tools ASAP
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.
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, ...
This is the kind of thing France often wants to do yet never implements.
Jit.si supports the EU privacy rules
This would be a great thing for humanity as a whole, but not for France. So I doubt it will happen. Hope strings eternal.
If they did it by growing open source competitors, it would be brilliant. Linux-equivalents for all major categories.
Honestly the greatest thing trump did is help us, French, and maybe Europeans, to get back our sovereignty.<p>I’m fed up of having to use Americans tech for everything and people getting along with it.<p>Chinese managed to separate almost completely from the American tech market, eu can do it too.<p>Maybe get stronger relations with China too, this 70 year old consensus where we must follow the USA whatever the case is finally ending.<p>For instance, i bet there would a be lot to win if we diplomatically supported China annexion of Taiwan. Cheaper microprocessors, unrestricted access to newly annexed Taiwanese factories.
Semi-related thought bubble:<p>I wonder what would happen if EU countries started encouraging ad blocking via their ISP DNS servers?
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.
Don't believe this has anything other than to do with the USA's recent attacks on NATO countries.
"You know what they call Zoom in Paris?"<p>"What do they call it?"<p>"Le Zoom"
Indians are doing the same too.
I live and work in Germany and know many people across Europe. Admittedly more in Western Europe, and admittedly my bubble leans toward traditional industries.<p>I see a lot of talk about <i>"sovereignty"</i> and <i>"European software"</i>. What I don’t see is action.<p>Does anyone working in Europe actually see signs that people are taking this seriously?
> What I don’t see is action.<p>Building serious products and services in this space is easily 5 year investment, by that time there will be a new US administration.<p>Hope is not a strategy, but it's certainly cheaper in the short run.<p>----<p>But have you divested from US assets?<p>Maybe one should, considering we just deployed armed troops with live ammunition to scare of America.<p>I fear we don't know how close this was. Maybe, we'll know in 50 years.
Well, my company is! I just migrated this weekend our database from AWS RDS to a Hetzner VPS with Volumes. It's a small step, but it works for us and it is way cheaper!
Same. French here. I can't stand hearing these words anymore, when at the same time I read that the French intelligence services closed a 5-year deal with Palantir.
<a href="https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/lellouchenico/status/2015775970330882319</a><p>Which itself links to:<p><a href="https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-remplacer-microsoft-teams-et-google-meet-par-visio-un-outil-souverain-pour-les-appels-video.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...</a>
translation (and without twitter):
<a href="https://www-numerama-com.translate.goog/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-remplacer-microsoft-teams-et-google-meet-par-visio-un-outil-souverain-pour-les-appels-video.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp" rel="nofollow">https://www-numerama-com.translate.goog/cyberguerre/2167301-...</a>
Silicon Valley type of companies grew to be giants by exploiting personal data of users without any regard for privacy and lax regulations. European companies can’t match them because of the regulations and privacy laws. It’s not the lack of talent or investment that is holding EU back.
I’ve worked at a couple monster corporations who spent a lot of time and money to move off of Google and Amazon, because they were paranoid about espionage, only to return a couple years later at even greater expense.<p>I doubt the French government will fare any better. They will end up spending hundreds of millions of Euros , maybe a couple billion, and have to return in a couple years. Especially with AI moats being built. AI is far too competitive. Every company will need to employ AI as a Goon ( see David Graber) to defend against all of the AI Goons going after them.
If only they'd taken their reliance on Russian natural gas so seriously.
Let's hope the alternatives they build are open source
Jami is read for the big time!
Link to the actual article: <a href="https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-remplacer-microsoft-teams-et-google-meet-par-visio-un-outil-souverain-pour-les-appels-video.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.numerama.com/cyberguerre/2167301-la-france-veut-...</a><p>Earlier repo submission: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004</a>
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.
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.<p>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)
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.<p>If you have a decent amount of experience I don't think you'd be looking for very long.<p>But as stated by other commenters, the salaries and lower and the taxes higher.<p>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!
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.
I think you're not quite understanding just how bad EU pay is for software. Frankly with the $$ you basically always going to come out ahead with the more comp especially since USA software companies normally offer great healthcare and comparable vacation.
> Some are optimizing for better lives<p>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.)<p><a href="https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/health-spending.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/health-spending.html</a><p><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_health_expenditure_per_capita_by_country.svg" rel="nofollow">https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OECD_health_expendit...</a><p>As a bonus, all that spend doesn't make us better in outcomes.<p><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low#life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure-over-time-1970-2014ref" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low#life-expec...</a>
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.<p>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.<p><i>We Asked 300 People About Health Care Costs. The Numbers Are Shocking.</i> - <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/opinion/health-insurance-obamacare-subsidies-america.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/opinion/health-insurance-...</a> | <a href="https://archive.today/MnYz9" rel="nofollow">https://archive.today/MnYz9</a> - January 22nd, 2026
That article is just mindblowing. My countries Health Service is far from perfect, but that is insanity.
I mean the issue here is your arguing on hackernews. The vast majority of people on this site in the USA just don't have these issues. Health care is taken care by the employeer and they are paid more.
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.<p>Expect 50% salary and taxes that will make your eyes water. French bureaucracy is kafkaesque even in 2026.<p>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.<p>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.
> As a software engineer in the US you're not really worrying about access to health care<p>You're "not really worrying" ... whilst you are in a job.<p>There fixed that for you.<p>As I am sure you are acutely aware US is the home of lay-offs and is generally easy to fire people.<p>If you loose your job in the US it becomes panic stations because you loose that precious employer-paid healthcare overnight.<p>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.<p>Currently, healthcare coverage tend to be <i>better</i> in several European countries when you are jobless... because the system try to compensate the fact you do not have income anymore.<p>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".
What happens to your health insurance if you get too sick to work?
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_of_1993" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...</a><p>> The FMLA allows eligible employees to take up to 12 work weeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period to care for a new child, care for a seriously ill family member, or recover from a serious illness.<p>There's limitations on that, but the common idea that Americans don't have healthcare is unfounded and appallingly ignorant.
The bet is that you will earn enough prior to 50 or maybe even 40 so that you won’t have to work, and then you can live off the investments and wherever you want.<p>High risk, high reward and all that. Although, the previous 20 years of high compensation are obviously no indication of the next 20.
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" - <a href="https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/aca-health-insurance-cost-subsidies-expire-37a595a9" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/aca-health-insurance-c...</a>
"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.<p>Europe is a _very_ different place.<p>Not everything here is so bad.
> They've been incentivizing it for years.<p>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.<p><a href="https://ngisargasso.eu/" rel="nofollow">https://ngisargasso.eu/</a>
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<p>This is scaremongering - taxes are in no way 30% higher in EU.<p>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
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.
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.
the first 10 what? Years? It's actually not like that: <a href="https://www.government.nl/topics/income-tax/shortening-30-percent-ruling" rel="nofollow">https://www.government.nl/topics/income-tax/shortening-30-pe...</a><p>From 1 January 2024, expats who meet the conditions receive the following tax benefits:<p>- 30% tax free for the first 20 months;<p>- 20% tax free for the next 20 months;<p>- 10% tax free for the last 20 months.<p>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.<p>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.
I think it was like that some years ago. Now, as you said, it's really useless. 20 months are just the time to find an apartment, furnish it and get used to the place.<p>Afterwards you have to pay some of the highest taxes in the world....
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?
Dutch people still speak Dutch to each other so if you were going to live there permanently and wanted to properly participate in society you would need to learn Dutch.<p>However the average level of English ability in NL is extremely good, you won't meet many people who don't have really good English especially for younger generations. Definitely not the case in e.g. France or Italy
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For a fraction of what these products cost France could fund open source alternatives.<p>Edit: I'm not saying they don't.
You mean something like LiveKit, with a basic implementation of user management etc such as <a href="https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet</a> ?
They do. « we are committed to contributing back to the LiveKit community whenever feasible ».
The tool they're building <i>is</i> open source: <a href="https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet</a>
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Earlier: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766004</a>
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
Politicians use it a lot.
Because media and journalist started using it.
Because for better or worse it still has significance and popularity. Nothing else really comes close.
Because they EU still can't make software and most people in America don't care.
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It's wild to me that the first Trump Administration didn't teach this lesson. The
"Just Trust me Bro" Foreign policy that has existed clearly only works if the person in power is trustworthy, and you have to carefully investigate any policy that is enforced by "trust". One of the most disappointing failures of the Biden Administration was that they didn't realize this.<p>The greatest failure of every other country was to get lulled into a false sense of security when the US Gov't shifted back to an at-all trustworthy foreign policy.
Deleted tweet?
I've been recently researching if I could replace American cloud providers with something like OVH or Hetzner (the latter I occasionally use for VPS) and there is no fucking chance. It's great that 37signals and DHH can do it, and I have no trouble believing they have saved money, but for situations in which I operate, both startup and enterprise environments but where devs are scarce and teams small, it's simply not realistic.
... probably using whatng cartel web engines, and that would be ridiculous for sure.
This is the French government aiming to have all the government agencies use videoconferencing software that was developed internally by themselves.<p>So a huge waste of taxpayers money...<p>This is a pure ongoing cost to develop and maintain (more so than using an market product) while not getting any traction externally. The productive way to do this is to encourage private companies to develop these products and to support them with government contracts. There are not going to conpete with Silicon Valley if they don't create actual private competitors. Absolutely ridiculous approach but unfortunately typical of the industrial scale waste of the French government...
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It's difficult to take an announcement like this seriously when it's posted on Twitter.