71–80 of 383 posts
I feel if the TUs were required to dogfood this, especially if generously funded such that startups could come along and provide the same service and support, that it could be a great positive externality
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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.
Yes. Unfortunately, the EU institutions have been designed during heyday of globalization and neoliberalism. So they are unable to adapt to (or even recognize) the end of it.
Europe'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.
The US is also still cultivating divisiveness, at the EU level, they groom a politically aligned minority that conveniently opposes any long-term improvement (Looking at Meloni's Italy, Hungary, etc.), at the country level, where possible, they again groom divisiveness by propping up yet another sovranist party.
Of course, that's what a "normal" competitor does, and of course China russia are also taking part in it. But the ambiguous situation of the USA-EU friendship needs to be solved.
I don't see how the EU can get out of this without recognizing that the US is not a friend anymore, and enduring a few decades of protectionism at the services level to try to pull a china on key sectors.
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"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.
At 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.
> moving off of them because they find that making the common case worse is not a trade off that most of their users want. Until you have companies trying to intervene. If Universities are publicly funded by the government, and those companies do stuff like spying on, or silencing public officials, then why should the government finance those companies? I think its nuts that the EU has seen spying, access from servic…
When I did a 4 year CS degree at a UK university in the 1980s I don't think I touched anything from Microsoft for the entire time I was there!
I did a 4 year degree in earth science minor in CS graduating in 2019 and had to touch microsoft for arcgis in one class, and an excel spreadsheet in another. Like yeah if you have a lot of pre-existing infrastructure migration can be a pain but MS is not in anyway necessary.
There is a lot more happening in the administrative and infrastructural side of things in most universities that one barely observes as student. So every change needs to take also that into account, the management and maintenance of services and infrastructures that must reliably support thousands of users, with relatively strict privacy and security standards, and their migration.
AWS 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.
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A recent analysis of the Trump Tarrifs on the EU concluded that while “some regions and industries could suffer”, for Europe overall the hit may be “limited but not negligible. The EU is quietly investing massively in diversifying away from the US market. there are trade negotiations or agreements in process (or being advanced) with countries/regions including India, the countries of the Mercosur bloc, Mexico, and Mi…
If that was so easy to do then they would have done it already years ago
When I did a 4 year CS degree at a UK university in the 1980s I don't think I touched anything from Microsoft for the entire time I was there!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.