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EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

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Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#131

Post by robertlagrant »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #127
throwaway7281 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent COVID-App is a prime example of that. SAP plus German Telekom, neither of which is known for innovation, grab a 60M plus deal to develop a single app. In Italy a startup took over the job for 1/50 of the price and with at least as good or better job. Is the above play a problem for Germany? No. Do you they even understand an problem? I don't think so.

If the app was developed on time and works, thats fine. 60 million isn't that much in the grand scheme of government contracts. In a situation like this i would want a proven vendor, and pay premium over startups. UK has spent 11 billion on a healthcare IT system and got nothing to show for it. https://independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/hea...

It doesn't have nothing to show - lots of stuff did get usefully upgraded (thankfully) although of course nowhere near 11 billion's worth.

It's the public sector commissioning the private sector in matters that it often doesn't understand. This will fail far more often than it will succeed.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#132

Post by zuppy »

bsaul wrote: post #6

As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the private sector in europe is currently unable to produce GAFA-sized companies in the IT sector. My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings. EDIT…

how can companies grow without ending up being aquired by large US companies?

it’s a very hard to solve this problem, considering the current climate when there are a lot of multi billion (and trillion) dollars companies.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#133

Post by adriancr »

88840-8855 wrote: post #63
justoreply wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

several people still remember the Stasi and they don't want a state controlled app to monitor their movement. If you want your app to have the biggest installation base (without asking for a mandatory installation) you can't ask for user location, with it enabled fewer people will install it

... the same people that shop on amazon, use "payback" (a shopping monitoring system), post crap on facebook and enjoy google's personalisation. Please, mate, this is just populism what you are doing there.

I take it you haven't lived under a communist regime?

There's a difference between what you share willingly and stuff being collected on you, especially in private matters.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#134

Post by adriancr »

88840-8855 wrote: post #80
jclos wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you ask normal people, they will hate this - only some data fanatics want this feature. Show the evidence. Wanting data privacy is far from the fringe minority sentiment you imply it to be, otherwise GDPR wouldn't be so popular.

life and death vs annoying ads. i think there is a difference, mate.

There should be another solution that doesn't bring stasi level monitoring...

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#135

Post by lotsofpulp »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #112
bsaul wrote: post #6

As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the private sector in europe is currently unable to produce GAFA-sized companies in the IT sector. My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings. EDIT…

I wonder if the existence of such giant monopolies is more of a symptom or result of a non-functioning capitalist system. The world, at least the western world, desperately needs viable mature competition not based in the US. I would go so far as to say not having it is a real problem for democracy and maybe even go as far as it being an issue of national security. With the close ties between intelligence services an…

> I wonder if the existence of such giant monopolies is more of a symptom or result of a non-functioning capitalist system.

I think it’s a simple confluence of the US having many English speaking people with lots of money, plus English is spoken worldwide, plus labor is readily available in the US.

There exists buyers, labor supply, and the inherent ability for software to scale with very low marginal costs means targeting the US market results in a higher probability of success.

Once you can grab the rich US market, you now have the momentum to grab other markets, and being first is more important than being better where network effects are in play.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#136

Post by patrickaljord »

christophilus wrote: post #32
pdimitar wrote: post #15

As an EU citizen, I don't believe for a second that this will result in anything useful, ever. There's too much vested interest that's quietly making the politicians do what the big business wants. Has been the case for a long time now. The only thing that's going to happen is that those big and old companies will get their hands on that funding while fulfilling exactly zero of their promises.

It’s pretty similar here in the US. What do you think the solution is? I don’t like the consolidation and regulatory capture I see everywhere.

I agree that the EU has too many regulations preventing innovation and high taxation preventing investment. However, I think the main reason is that "big tech" is a winner take all market. For example, look at Google, they are investing way more than $10 billion in their cloud and yet still can't make a dent in AWS, even Microsoft is still far away. Same thing with search (Microsoft invested billions in bing) or Office (Google investing billions in docs) etc. There is no way in hell €10B is going to be enough. The market already picked AWS.

The only country where these are not dominant is simply the one where they prevent these winners from entering, that would be China, they have their own cloud, search, retail etc.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#137

Post by okl »

dragonwriter wrote: post #129
jolux wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

60mm is a preposterous amount of money for building almost any application. That’s like 600 engineer years of time in the US.

> That’s like 600 engineer years of time in the US. It's a lot less than that in terms of total personnel costs ($100K is a modest salary-only for a software engineer, it's extremely low as a full cost of employment.)

As an average, I guess it's about right for Germany.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#139

Post by dalbasal »

Vespasian wrote: post #116
dalbasal wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this even supposed to produce large companies? With the language used here, it could be anything.

If I understand it correctly this project aims to build common standards / data exchange methods between different providers all on a foundation that follows European privacy principles.

I mean in practical terms. Are they paying someone(s) to build something. Who? What specifically.

Re: EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

#140

Post by cblconfederate »

WanderPanda wrote: post #14

A great opportunity for Siemens to collect money for their abysmal Mindsphere IIoT platform... I get a feeling the EU is on a very bad trajectory into a more and more planned, copycat economy. Someone develops some product / service (e.g. flexible infrastructure as a service aka "cloud") market decides if it is good. EU falls behind in that category. EU commission throws money at pet projects that in best case will c…

The EU has been in that program going all the way back to agricultural subsidies. I see those subsidies and research funds as the historically first form of a massive UBI scheme, an electorate-friendly scheme. Its just that the Income comes with a lot of bureaucracy and a menial job.

The scheme is not sustainable but at least it prevents social upheaval

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