Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
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Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#2Europe's failure to facilitate a competitive tech scene in the early 2000's (and even still ongoing today) will haunt them for decades. Such an enormous fumble that people still celebrate as a win.
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#3AWS had announced a sovereign European cloud, probably to avoid a loss of business in the long term due to these initiatives. But it's questionable whether this would survive strong political pressure from the US government.
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#4Europe's failure to facilitate a competitive tech scene in the early 2000's (and even still ongoing today) will haunt them for decades. Such an enormous fumble that people still celebrate as a win.
EU is in a really tough situation. They're getting squeezed on all sides economically by USA and China while also facing a belligerent Russia on their eastern borders. And their internal politics and governance makes it very difficult to align in a direction that could enable them to start digging out of so much globalized dependence.
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#5Europe's failure to facilitate a competitive tech scene in the early 2000's (and even still ongoing today) will haunt them for decades. Such an enormous fumble that people still celebrate as a win.
"Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity. Yes, we have European Union which helps a lot, but it is not complete (and certainly wasn't in the time when Microsofts and Googles of this world started), making that all-important initial scaling way more difficult than it is in the US.
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#6Is it really that hard to switch to [google|libre|apache|free|etc.|etc.]? It seems like at the university level the ideas are the important part, and the need to write/spreadsheet at the bleeding edge of functionality much less so?
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#7AWS had announced a sovereign European cloud, probably to avoid a loss of business in the long term due to these initiatives. But it's questionable whether this would survive strong political pressure from the US government.
As long as there's any American ownership in the chain, this is not to be trusted.
I'm assuming AWS wouldn't fully divest from this European business unit and split it off as a completely separate entity?
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#8At this point all tech is big business. Microsoft or Apple. Azure or AWS. Google Apps or Office. Even dealing with Red Hat feels like you’re dealing with big tech.
And the thing is 99.99% of the time everything works just fine. I think these governments often struggle with moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want.
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#9Europe's failure to facilitate a competitive tech scene in the early 2000's (and even still ongoing today) will haunt them for decades. Such an enormous fumble that people still celebrate as a win.
"Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity. Yes, we have European Union which helps a lot, but it is not complete (and certainly wasn't in the time when Microsofts and Googles of this world started), making that all-important initial scaling way more difficult than it is in the US.
> "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity
It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it.
Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.
Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?
#10Obviously terrible seeing the US government harm its own international standing for no real gain, but if it results in Europe developing viable alternatives to American big tech services, that'd be fantastic.