191–200 of 352 posts
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People in Germany do not pay 50% taxes, not even close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven...
Well, "this BS" is an insignificant part of what those taxes cover. Germany pays about 1/3 of the EU budget, so its share of these 10 Billion is less than a tenth of this year's federal coronavirus relief budget.
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I recently tried out Hetzner Cloud, after using their dedicated servers for years, and have come away positively surprised. It works well, and the pricing is very appealing. But it's not even remotely in the same league as AWS/GC/Azure. All you get is DNS, private networks, load balancers VMs and storage volumes. That's it. Sure, you can self-host Kubernetes, and they even have a CSI driver for mounting volumes and a…
> It works well, and the pricing is very appealing. But it's not even remotely in the same league as AWS/GC/Azure. IMHO Hetzner is far above AWS/GC/Azure in price and simplicity. The only drawback I see in Hetzner is that they don't have a lot of data centers with a relevant geographic dispersion, but that's only relevant for a Unicorn-level scale, or applications that require TP99.99 latency in the lower-end of the…
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You're seriously claiming that the EU cannot compete with US companies because you can't credibly threaten to fire people to show that you're serious about a policy decision?
I think they're claiming that it's important to have a real, credible, well communicated threat of consequences for not following the mandate.
1. In Europe salaries are not worth personal sacrifices
2. No compay aims for IPO, few are public
Maybe, if you'd hire only desperate people from Spain, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Romania, AND they all had a mortgage... then squeeze like this would work.
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You want your access to Google, Duckduckgo, YouTube, Uber, Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Netflix, etc to be blocked?
Yes. I want that. This would lead to a local tech scene, actually REALLY localised products (where you dont have to wait till google decides to roll out features in Germany after 7 years) and best of all: JOBS. This would lead to millions of jobs. It would make Europe super interesting for high skilled labor and bring a nice twist into the migration problem we are facing now. Yes, this would hurt America, but yeah...…
The European telecommunication companies could have built another search engine. Via DNS, the telecom companies had all the server contact knowledge that Microsoft is prying from users' memory with their data collecting.
There was Cliqz, a European search engine, that got dismantled due to Covid, without anybody offering some emergency funding to keep it going.
If a EU firewall is installed, millions of jobs will be created because everything will be done manually again. European companies had the opportunity to create competitive companies, but they didn't. Why should they create a good-enough Google if Google is banned? More likely, they will create a worse Altavista, and they are cut off of all the innovation that builds on Google.
The next unicorns, they don't rely on Google's blessing. Everybody can build them, even a company in Europe. Using their developers to copy Google would be a waste of talent and opportunities. China has to do it to control their news, but why should Europe?
After all, there are no American companies demanding the shutdown of Google just so that they can create the next innovative products. They just create them. If American companies can innovate despite Google, why can't European companies do the same?
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You're seriously claiming that the EU cannot compete with US companies because you can't credibly threaten to fire people to show that you're serious about a policy decision?
I think they're claiming that it's important to have a real, credible, well communicated threat of consequences for not following the mandate.
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Europe doesn't need to create these companies. If Europe used this money to create the infrastructure for smaller companies to work together horizontally and vertically to form similar offerings they could end up with something better, at lower cost. This is a model that worked extremely well in Japan in the latter half of the 20ths century, and was mostly responsible for its economic miracle: https://en.wikipedia.or…
TB approach with „national champions“ can work too and may work better in a situation where there’s competitive market with few dominant players with unlimited resources. Look at Russia: they have achieved very high digitalization of government and society on locally built infrastructure. There are some state actors involved, e.g. Rostech, but large private companies did the majority of work, quite often not being di…
Whenever I think of the EU I can't think of a single tech giant from there, countries that come to mind for me are the US, China, Japan and Taiwan. The only things I know about the EU when it comes to tech is it trying to push massive global regulations around tech. For reference I'm a 23 year old from the US. Nothing I have is made in Europe and I don't deal with any EU companies. Even my bike computer was made by a…
I think SAP would qualify as a tech giant. Not very visible to consumers, but throw a stone at some large organization (state, university, corporate) and you have a decent chance there’s a SAP footprint in their processes.
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Nope. Big IT (which is highly creative stuff) cannot be built top-down, only bottom up. Europe is and will be an IT wasteland.
Depends. It could be argued that DARPA and it's development programs during Cold War were top-down. They were providing a market for the innovators, so they could pop up and do whatever their vision was. But that is something different that taking all the funds by incumbents.
The US didn’t shoot for “building a cloud” with the DARPA investments. The goal of those investments were for very specific projects that assisted the military (short and long term) and the Internet and SV were a side effect.
Trying to build a “Rival Cloud” immediately sets off red flags for me because of how vague it is. What are the concrete goals? To replicate AWS? How much would you want to replicate? Which services? Which features in the services? Why would customers choose this over AWS? How could this organization be run (somewhat) profitably while being useful?
They already have Hetzner. Seems like the EU government could work with them to fund the new services they think are important. Maybe open source the components that they build so other EU companies could build similar services if Hetzner went bust.
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…
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.
Meanwhile in Canada Shopify and Blackberry got together and helped the federal Canadian Digital Service in coding up an app, with the code available on GitHub:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID_Alert
* https://github.com/CovidShield
No money exchanged hands AFAICT.