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Whenever I read about the EU's struggles to compete with american tech companies (also SAP vs Salesforce), I think of Steve Yegge's rant on AWS, quote: > So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that w…
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One dollar spent in Russia gets you more than in US. You cannot compare household income directly, you must go through PPP (purchase power parity). Even then, you might have expenses that they don't (medical, for example). So in the end, objective comparison would have to go much deeper, than median household income.
There are only so many turnips you can eat but Apple's Stand is $1000 everywhere.
On the other hand, my spending on Apple Stands in the last years was very similar to your personal spending on Russian nuclear fuel as used in US nuclear plants. That being $0. Turnips leads this one :).
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 EU just needs an investor climate similar to the US. The only problem is that investors like the idea of cornering markets, which, due to regulation, is harder in the EU.
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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'?
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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.
because money is the only prime motivator in life? Also, this egalitarianism and promoting of mediocracy you speak of makes no sense in regards to people who want to attain personal growth. Not to mention having a system like the US comes at a massive cost in regards to the wellbeing and welfare of the general population. Innovating isn't just about money. Not to mention a ton of innovators exists in the EU, they are…
The task of a business is to make profit. So yes, in that sense, the money is the ultimate goal and profit is the one and only kpi to look at.
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You skipped over without mentioning the gist of the comment you replied too, which was the large amount of additional services that those other companies offer, but Hetzner does not.
If you're referring to AWS's "serverless" offering, they are mostly managed instances of FLOSS offerings with the exception of dynamodb, and arguably are far from justifying the colossal premium they charge for using them. I mean, does anyone claim with a straight face that without AWS it's practically impossible to get a database or a message broker up and running?
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> Well, it’s pretty close to my salary. But I work in government. Sure. But it's probably nowhere close to your salary + benefits + overhead cost to your employer.
My benefits are lousy but the contractor I work for probably charges my employer, yes. 300 engineer years would still be quite a lot too.
On top of whatever your direct employer charges to the government agency hiring them to cover profit and other costs (management overhead, contracting overhead) associated with your employment, there's also contract management overhead for the government agency. For contractors, the total cost is usually a greater multiple of salary + benefits than it is for direct employees (though if the benefits suck enough, maybe still a smaller multiple of bare salary.)
I feel a lot of anger in this thread, and I share your frustration. Is there anything we can do about this jokers? I feel that the EU is very toxic in the way it tries to make us all work together. Maybe things like FIWARE are, I don't know what is FIWARE? https://www.fiware.org
Another hard earned €10B gonna go down the drain. It's pathetic that people in Germany and other countries have to pay 50% taxes for BS like this.
People in Germany do not pay 50% taxes, not even close.
Ridiculous. You just can't buy innovation. You have to set up the right environment for it
However unfortunately there is a far more realistic chance that most of that money will get lost in management spheres which have never seen a single line of code.