What's strange about it? SAP and T-Systems are by far the largest IT consulting shops in Germany. Of course they get almost every huge contract. Now, I agree that a more diverse landscape in that industry would be preferable, but feigning surprise is not helping one bit.
The corona app doesn't need to be a huge contract. But SAP and T-Systems can sure waste a huge amount of time and charge a huge amount of money for it.
Developing a tool to be used by 80 million people to help fight a global pandemic under big time pressure is not a huge contract?
Most of old Europe saw China succeed in its "Copy a successful American thing" manner and decided to try the same. Except they don't have the competence overall as orgs.
competence at what, exactly?
Competence at designing and building large systems on schedule. At Nokia there was a saying around 2010 that in the time the Chinese produce a new phone model we can produce a new powerpoint slide.
>That's the tragedy of the government-backed tech in France. You also have a lot of very skilled tech companies there, but they are not the ones getting government support to grow further. That's almost an universal tragedy. The good techies, the innovative engineers or the avant-garde researchers... Typically, the one doing the work... are generally not the one doing outreach, going around in convention, networking,…
I is too easy to attribute this to some „culture“ that randomly formed and which did not happen in europe. I mean how likely is that? I believe there is a much more structural thing to it
It is also a matter of culture. For example cutthroat capitalism is not really a thing in Europe, social capitalism (or soziale Marktwirtschaft) is. Culture plays a huge role in this. Most Europeans have a lower risk appetite since it's not like Europe is swimming in successful, well funded, well advertised startups to set an example for a new generation of entrepreneurs. Most also value personal life too much to be willing to make all the sacrifices a startup would require.
But one of the biggest issues in Europe is that it's not very unified yet. A French startup will launch a French product, not a "European" product. The only way to get buy-in from enough people is to have a multinational startup and product. An initiative promoted by both Germany and France has a better chance since it may appeal to ~150 million citizens.
The corona app doesn't need to be a huge contract. But SAP and T-Systems can sure waste a huge amount of time and charge a huge amount of money for it.
Developing a tool to be used by 80 million people to help fight a global pandemic under big time pressure is not a huge contract?
It isn't if you do it well. Think of WhatsApp that had about 55 people when it was bought for several billions. Especially if you need it done quickly, many mediocre developers are no substitute for a few good developers.
Maybe SAP and Telekon can be arsed to gather their best if it's actually important. For Toll Collect, the usual suspects failed very hard. Much effort, buggy and very late results.
I.e. Germany has: * A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950 The US is close to becoming a failed state due to the increasing wealth and income gap. Also, please do me a favour and read up a bit on the history of silicon valley and us innovation. It's hard to claim the government…
> * A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950 None of these things (for good or bad) have anything to do with making good tech products.
But they do have all to do with low salaries. My salary is low for American standards, but I can rely on public hospitals, public schools, and public transportation systems. I do not need to save for retirement either. Or for my kids tuition.
Does anybody have any technical details to share about Gaia-X? I mean service discovery, interchangeable services/interfaces, etc. has been around since the SOAP days (~ 2003) at least. Cloud can mean many things. Does there exist anything at all or is it just talk at the political level atm? Do they intend to fund new research into bringing these things, or will they pick existing tech?
Well, if you know German there is this longwinded brochure: https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt...
Thanks, that's exactly what I feared and would call strategical/non-technical ;) I mean it mentions "open source technologies", and contains a vague general description of the concept of identity providers, and, of course, platitudes a la "industry 4.0" but nothing concrete. I want to hear about protocols, operating systems/POSIX/Linux, integration into TelCo provisioning platforms maybe if that's on the radar and they want to have 5G on board, payment standards, containers (chroot, VMs, Docker-like/Linux-only namespace containers, or whatever), or even IP networking. Also, going by the stock photos and the use case example, I'm a bit surprised this is targetting industry applications rather than public authorities, schools, medical etc.
It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to…
That's very true. Another thing is that it is not like EU is somehow very far behind the US in terms of services hosting or "the cloud". There is French OVH provider and there is German Hetzner. While the former has an opinion of being cheap but no so great (especially in terms of support), the Hetzner really shines.
Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especially dedicated servers are first class. In many, many situations it makes much more sense (both from costs perspective and ease of migration to other provider) to use dedicated servers and hire someone who will manage them, than throwing tons of money into Amazon pockets to get "X-large instances" that have power of old Celeron laptop (exaggerating a bit, but not that much).
Well, salaries are always relative to the local market so to attract the top 5% of talent they will need to offer maybe $180k/yr.
I would guess that the top 5% of talent in cloud architecture is in global demand. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, attract developers from all over the world, not just those local to Seattle or Silicon Valley. Knowing you can triple your salary by moving is a pretty big incentive for a lot of people.
Even with the motivation of a big salary jump, not everyone is willing to relocate to the US though.
It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to…
Europe: Politicians want "something great", so there is a verdict that "something great" will be developed. A huge budget is provided, but it must be ensured that the usual suspects (public or semi-public research institutions) get most of the share. The whole project structure becomes fragmented beyond believe, nobody cares about commercial success. The project fails, but not in the eyes of the researchers, who claim that there was never the goal to create a commercial product. With the bazillion of research money they gained "valuable insight" into the whole problem and made "considerable progress".
US: Andy von Bechtolsheim meets with two bright guys, sees the huge potential of their algorithm, walks back to his Porsche, signs them a 100,000$ cheque, and a few years later we have a global tech giant called Google who the rest of the world either admires or is afraid of.