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

politico.eu

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

#221

Post by bserge »

vetinari wrote: post #181
barrenko wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DARPA literally gives grants to anyone with innovative/crazy/out of the ordinary ideas.

It's the opposite in the EU, big companies get funding to develop something. Startups have no chance, unless someone knows someone.

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

#222

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

WanderPanda wrote: post #22
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.

What afraids me is, that here in Germany nobody seems to care anymore. The big numbers are just thrown around and everyone (especially the younger generation) has lost any sense as the media is just cheering along.

I wish I could upvote you more.

This is what I noticed in Germany as well. The government keeps tooting their own horn on how in every statistic they're the best in Europe and the media parrots that while the younger generations just takes it for granted and doesn't bother questioning the poor decisions the government makes while they spend the public tax money like drunken sailors because hey, "we're Europe's no. 1, what could our government ever do wrong?"

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

#223

Post by pydry »

wrnr wrote: post #98
pydry wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is already how a lot of IT companies in the EU function, someone makes the iOS app, someone the backend, someone the project management, someone the security audit, and someone does the logging of the different services that are analysed by yet another company. It leeds to a lot of backstabbing and over-billing, I don't think we should subsidise this.

I don't think any industries in the EU function like keiretsu, and what you're describing certainly isn't it. It's not the same thing as "just using small companies for everything".

It requires a set of small, interlocking companies, (many of which own pieces of each other and have very tight knit relationships) that form part of a greater supply chain. It requires trust and human relationships.

The set of companies in Shenzhen responsible for the "pearl river delta electronics manufacturing miracle" might be the closest analog we have today.

It is perhaps easier in manufacturing because standardization on interlocking components is easier, but it's by no means impossible in software, and with cloud computing we do have an emerging set of interaction standards (e.g. the S3 protocol).

I don't think that the EU actually will follow this path, because it requires pretty deep technical and economic understanding to follow through and policymakers who are resistant to lobbying from, e.g. SAP, but they certainly could, and the EU has surprised me before with smart policymaking where they clearly listened to experts (e.g. with GDPR).

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

#224

Post by bserge »

the_duke wrote: post #41
juskrey wrote: post #18

BTW Hetzner is a top notch EU cloud with an excellent proposal to finally learn Linux and deploy whatever you want on their industrial grade networking and storage. Instead of feeding an exploding complexities and costs of AWS, Google and Alibaba. I hope they will come to other continents soon.

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…

Yeah, they're really barebones. Do everything yourself, which is nice tbh. Last time I used them though, they had some draconian restrictions on mail lists. A few complaints and your server gets shut down. I was just sending newsletters to subscribers.

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

#225

Post by ClumsyPilot »

tupputuppu wrote: post #178
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, its nicer doing business in a country where you can fraudulently cause global economic meltdown and go on unscathed.

I mut have missed this global economic meltdown you speak of, which was caused by GAFA?

Is lack of corporate accountability exclusive to GAFA?

You can kill ~300 people and noone goes to jail. You can launder money for druglords and just get a fine.

What does a corporation have to do to actually suffer serious consequences, like jailtime or breaking up a company? Something that's not just 'cost of doing business'?

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

#227

Post by vetinari »

bserge wrote: post #221
vetinari wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

DARPA literally gives grants to anyone with innovative/crazy/out of the ordinary ideas. It's the opposite in the EU, big companies get funding to develop something. Startups have no chance, unless someone knows someone.

I agree, DARPA objective was to build industry; EU program objectives are to move tax payer's money into private pockets.

However, my argument to parent was, that DARPA was also top-down, and it was a success.

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

#228

Post by vetinari »

pm90 wrote: post #199
vetinari wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn’t seem like a good comparison. 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…

That's getting into irrelevant details, imho.

The point of EU programs is not to build anything, that's just an excuse. The objective is to funnel tax payer's money to politically well-connected.

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

#229

Post by fvdessen »

nemo44x wrote: post #47
NeoFeznet wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies for the stupid question, as I feel like I’m missing something obvious: why is that? Is it the regulatory environment?

It’s cultural. It’s really hard to get investors to invest in things that aren’t a guarantee. Most potential billion dollar companies. Investors in the USA are fine taking risk investing in them. In the EU you don’t find that culture. Could part of it be regulatory in terms of tax write offs? I’m not sure.

I don't buy the culture argument after looking at the success of China. I think it's a matter of having a big enough internal market to be able to compete with the American monopolies.

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

#230

Post by koonsolo »

88840-8855 wrote: post #70
tachyonbeam wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...…

No, that would basically mean smart people would emigrate to US, in much higher numbers than they are currently already doing it.
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