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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

#231

Post by AdrianB1 »

NeoFeznet wrote: post #39
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…

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

I think one of the reasons, other than legislation, is lack of motivation; it is more or less egalitarian and that promotes mediocrity, not innovation. In US you can become filthy rich relatively fast, not in Europe, so why bother? Just see the IT salaries in Europe vs. Silicon Valley, they are a lot lower, so really good and ambitious people move to SV, don't spend time in Europe.

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

#232

Post by fogihujy »

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 don't think the point is to create new giants, but rather to coordinate smaller players' efforts against the old giants. Obviously, there would have to be innovation taking place for that to happen, but it doesn't seem to be a goal on it's own.

Does anyone know much are European businesses paying for US and Chinese cloud services per year? If we can pay 10B€ in order to move 20B€ of spending back into the EU then I'm all for it, no matter if we innovate or just subsidize existing providers.

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

#233

Post by fulafel »

dalbasal wrote: post #51

What's the actual content of this stuff? The form of this article exemplifies a common problem: Money is only part of the equation. What, in practice, is the money going into? What's supposed to come out?

The mentioned Gaia-X seems to have some. eg https://www.ovh.com/blog/gaia-x-catalogue-search-engine-unde...

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

#234

Post by AdrianB1 »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #26
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 agree and IMO a project like this would probably work better if the rules stipulated that it can only be used to fund startups. Eg: only companies younger than 3-5 years old, with fewer than 200 employees, and less than 100M in market cap. Such rules could help prevent established players from grabbing all the money.

Tax system does not allow for that; employees need to be paid at least minimum wage per sector, not equity, otherwise tax people will shut them down and health insurance will not exist (it is paid as percentage of salary). Every year if you have equity you need to pay taxes on the appreciation of what you own, so if you have a small salary and some equity you have no money to pay the taxes on equity. Good developers will not work for small salaries and the startup will have no money to pay.

And not the least, startups are shots to the Moon with the expectation that most will fail; you cannot do that in this case, if you guarantee the money there will be no motivation, if you don't guarantee any money there will be no funding. Investing is different in Europe, that's why there is no SV here.

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

#235

Post by tupputuppu »

nemothekid wrote: post #148
TMWNN wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>i do not like American products at all. Why? No doubt you'd be the first to howl should an American say "I do not like European (tech) products at all". (Well, if there were any to dislike.) >i would love to see alternatives that actually work and are competitive. Why not ask for the moon and the stars while you're at it? You make it sound like all that is needed to develop (as tachyonbeam pointed out) European equi…

>* You make it sound like all that is needed to develop (as tachyonbeam pointed out) European equivalents to "Google, Duckduckgo, YouTube, Uber, Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Netflix, etc" is to shut down access from anywhere in Europe to and from these companies.* This isn’t far fetched - it’s a well understood result of Chinas Great Firewall. With American companies banned in China, Chinese companies were free to copy…

China is the one example where they've been able to fill the gap. All other markets have failed miserably. And even in China the goal wasn't to create better alternatives (which based on UX or privacy the 100% are not) but for the communist party to be able to control and suppress free speech.

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

#236

Post by keinewasser »

durnygbur wrote: post #179
aflinik wrote: post #36

There has been a similar project developed in Poland already. ( https://en.media.pkobp.pl/78483-strategic-partnership-betwee... ) In practice it's not much more than government-branded version of Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. So far it serves well as a marketing vehicle for a handful of the biggest corporations, but it's barely used by anyone. I can see it could make sense as a solution to some particula…

So they're reselling Google Cloud services? Subsidized by our tax money?

They provide cloud migration services for Polish enterprises and also run their own semi-public cloud infrastructure.

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

#237

Post by tupputuppu »

aden1ne wrote: post #211
worldmerge wrote: post #42

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…

There is a high chance you have been typing that message on a device with a chip that was produced by one of ASML's lithography machines.

Sorry, but even being a Europe an myself, that kind of proves the point.

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

#238

Post by AdrianB1 »

brazzy wrote: post #195
DangitBobby wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're claiming that it's important to have a real, credible, well communicated threat of consequences for not following the mandate.

What kind of shit company culture do people have where you need threats to implement a simple, clear-cut technical decision?

All. I worked with many top tier companies and policy adherence is null without reinforcement; this is the reality, without motivation everyone ignores policies and decisions.

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

#239

Post by DangitBobby »

brazzy wrote: post #195
DangitBobby wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're claiming that it's important to have a real, credible, well communicated threat of consequences for not following the mandate.

What kind of shit company culture do people have where you need threats to implement a simple, clear-cut technical decision?

Some use the carrot, some use the stick, and some use both.

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

#240

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

The cynic in me is reminded of something similar from about a decade ago, european search engine, and so on.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos_Europe

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Mohn

I don't remember the amount of money anymore, but it was huge, and dead for me from the moment of announcement of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertelsmann involvement.

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