Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#411

Post by _gfrc » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

stu2b50 wrote: post #376

deathcakes wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"University-educated people in my social circle are often woefully unaware of economic trends that have swept the US, be it the gig economy, X-as-a-service, the nature of Venture Capital, the idea of scaling a company aggressively, the value of information, mobility of labor and paying market rate for experts, the high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a Germ…

I don't see how SaaS as a concept has made anyone's life particularly bad. For many B2B the consumer gets exactly what they want--constant support and updates--and the producer gets that sweet sweet high margin subscription payment. Same for "high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a German industrial company". Honestly that's a lesson from all the way back to…

I believe the reply was focussed towards the gig economy and the use of venture capital to scale aggressively.

I agree with a lot of points op is making, but when it comes to e.g. the gig economy and using vc funds to scale b2c businesses by undercutting competitors, I'm very happy that we have a different situation in Germany.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

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Post by _Wintermute » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 4:26 PM UTC

KineticLensman wrote: post #283

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe me, the UK is ages ahead of Germany in terms of digitization.

Can't comment on the UK / Germany comparison directly, but I still continue to be pleasingly surprised by the quality of access to functions provided by gov.uk. E.g. I recently renewed my passport wholly online, registered my car, checked that the Govt had a record of my car's MOT (roadworthyness) certificate, etc.

I never really appreciated gov.uk until I moved to France. Here nothing is online, you need to take days off work to stand in line and collect paperwork.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#413

Post by j4yav » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 4:26 PM UTC

dukeyukey wrote: post #326

davedx wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah in the Netherlands here, and I’ve spent some time recently integrating a German fintech vendor. The cross of new and modern and old beurocratic way of doing things has been almost dystopian and really slowed everything down. Contrast to similar vendors in the UK is quite something.

Can you go into more details on this? I've only worked closely with UK/USA companies and I'm really interested how they compare to German/French ways of doing things. Does the Netherlands more closely align to the Uk/USA on this?

In my experience the Netherlands is quite a bit like the US. Not as much VC available, but businesses tend to be pretty agile and willing to pivot to get results. All normal day to day government interaction is digital and works well. ING is a good example of a very big Dutch company that seems to do pretty well with innovation.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#414

Post by Nasrudith » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

rorykoehler wrote: post #369

joelbluminator wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of criticism of the US/VC model, sure it brought tremendous success stories but it's not clear if the model actually works.

Ye I’m not a fan. All it does is entrench existing inequality. A few new millionaires are minted but I’m interested in solutions that provide an economic floor for everyone so we can all bootstrap if we want to instead.

The distribution is a result of VC being a lotto that pays out well enough that not only is it not a bad idea to play it in terms of return on investment. Unfortunately it takes a lot of money to "buy every ticket". Which means to "win" for a VC they need to win big enough to outweigh their massive pile of failures.

Except instead of a lotto board paying out it is growth of a successful company.

The second desire? Prepare for disappointment as it isn't a goal. A goal implies a workable path even if it is far fetched like "try to research a way to become immortal". Providing an economic floor is not only not a strategy for advancement (let alone a workable one) it would fail even if you had a magical no knowledge or possession prerequisite requirement provider of infinite "basics" to be unscarce like air or file bit combinations. Economics deal with the scarce - while rendering things irrelevant would be good a floor implies an actual use to build upon into the scarce.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#415

Post by ardy42 » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 4:29 PM UTC

gspr wrote: post #181

heipei wrote: post #164

As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, there's so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit: - Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home! - When I tried to read or wa…

I think the two first points are more specific to Germany than to the old world as a whole. Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south. While I agree with the basic premise of the last point too I think you maybe underestimate th…

> Up here in Scandinavia, we often laugh at how much Germans interact with humans, send letters and faxes, and make phonecalls in their business lives. They are woefully far behind. From what I understand the same is true for the south.

I wouldn't necessarily call it "being ahead" to embrace increased isolation from other human beings.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#416

Post by jokoon » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

If China wants tech sovereignty, I don't see why Europe shouldn't. I don't understand the negative comments here.

The core problem isn't really the innovation, the economics, or europe's ability to compete with american giants, it's rather geopolitics, privacy, GDPR, surveillance, industrial espionage, tax havens.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#417

Post by heipei » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 4:34 PM UTC

joyj2nd wrote: post #385

heipei wrote: post #164

As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, there's so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit: - Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home! - When I tried to read or wa…

> As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, As a new immigrant your are still in the euphoria phase of your new live... > but the reality is that any European who truly grasps the pace of the US tech industry would rather go there directly.. Well, as a naturalized citizen with a PhD from the US and experience in technology I can assure you, that this is not the case for e…

Should have been more clear: I worked in the US tech space since ~ 2013 (CyberSecurity) but do so as a remote employee, working from Germany. Hence I got the sometimes surreal experience of working for a VC-backed crazy-growth US corporation while still hanging out with my German friends on weekends who work consulting gigs or at a parts supplier for the automotive industry. Salary-wise the difference was between 2x and 5x, depending on whether you count stock-based compensation. After a while I found it hard to talk to my German friends about my job since it was happening at such a different pace from their regular jobs yet none of them seemed even remotely interested in landing such a job themselves.

I agree with you, I wouldn't move to the US for my job (and neither would any of my former colleagues), but we all appreciated the fact that when it comes to business, it's better to work for a US company which understands that sometimes you have to spend money in order to make money, which is not always the case in Germany.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#418

Post by KKKKkkkk1 » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

heipei wrote: post #164

As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, there's so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit: - Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home! - When I tried to read or wa…

The venture capital stuff was good for a time when Moore's law was repeatedly erasing whole industries at a cadence of every two years. That's how stupid ideas like blitzscaling could work [0]. How much longer will it last? That remains to be seen.

I find it instructive that a society that hasn't been exposed to VC practices has created some of the most valuable and innovative companies in the world.

[0] Blitzscaling 14: Elizabeth Holmes on Managing Product Strategy, Regulation, and the Media https://youtu.be/juhATwufdbc

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#419

Post by BiteCode_dev » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

So, instead of working with well established EU companies like OVH or Lease Web, they, once again, build-to-fail a sovereing solution.

They will not be able to hire the necessary talent, don't benefit from decades of expertise, have to build trust with multiple communities plus a client portfolio and have to pay for building infrastructures.

As @heipei said, Europe mentality is already years late when it's about tech. And while I do think we desparatly need our own alternative to the US GAFAM and clouds, this is, once again, a doomed attempt that will mostly enrich a few well connected people.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#420

Post by orf » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

joelbluminator wrote: post #394

afr0ck wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should really reconsider your assumptions about server scaling and AWS business in general. AWS builds truely complex and ahead-of-time distributed systems that humans could never build before because of lack of knowledge and concentrated efforts. Distributed systems are really hard and not very well understood and algorithms are immensly complex and even harder to to engineer espeically on AWS scale. See DynamoD…

The main business in AWS is not DynamoDB. I'm not even sure what it is without checking, and seems like people hosting on Google / Microsoft / other big corp can do without. Nor does Europe need to copy 100% of AWS's feature set.

I’m pretty sure that under the hood a lot of AWS services like S3 are backed by dynodb, and if so then ‘chopping up and selling dynodb’ is a pretty core focus.