101–110 of 383 posts
If China can survive — and even start to thrive without ASML and TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe will be able to run a mail server and some office tools. They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.
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.
It feels like an emphasis has been placed more on legislating or policing what other people make rather than making anything of value themselves (as far as tech goes). Being a barnacle on the side of a boat might be a nice free ride for a while until it goes somewhere you don't want to.
There is plenty of European tech success stories, but plenty of them will be mistaken for American ones after Microsoft bought them(and more often than not ruined the product, see Skype for example)
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Push has come to shove and has been shoving for nearly a decade. Europeans continue to be incapable. As a Canadian I wish they were not, but they are.
It's more a risk management issue. A country that wants to do everything by itself (from food, to shovels, to cars, to computers) will not be the most efficient and will loose a lot. Before '90s communist countries were "proud" that everything was produced locally - except many things were breaking or bad quality or unavailable (not all, but many). I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it wa…
Today people are much more reliant on real-time collaboration, polished cloud and mobile experiences. Fractionalized open source software has a harder time competing with this than file based boxed software workflows of the past.
I have found daily-driving Ubuntu at Delft shocking pleasant. Chrome, zotero, obsidian, zoom, and so on all work great. Outlook, teams, and the office suite, and signing pdfs are all the sharpest edges by far. 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
Why would you need Outlook? Can't you use it in a browser?
Apparently the answer is "No." =3
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It's more a risk management issue. A country that wants to do everything by itself (from food, to shovels, to cars, to computers) will not be the most efficient and will loose a lot. Before '90s communist countries were "proud" that everything was produced locally - except many things were breaking or bad quality or unavailable (not all, but many). I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it wa…
Coming from ex-USSR, I can assure you that shortages and shitty quality was not because of closed garden. But because of politics (and corruption) first. And lack of meritocratic natural selection. Many factories were building crap or wrong stuff just because somebody high up in the Party found it convenient for some reason.
Maybe the EU as a whole could pull off being 'fully independent' but it would require way more collaboration between countries than what we currently have.
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.
Moreover, the people working for the teams that should make the migration usually don't want a migration, so you have to perpetually convince them of the future gains.
For the last 10-15 years, very few revolution have been made in gov ICT. Most of the job is usually rewriting existing app in a recent language or creating apps for not critical features.
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.
Governments also don't move to open standards because open standards doesn't have a hospitality suite to invite them to at football matches or Cheltenham. One of the most remarkable things in British politics in the last 25 years went almost unremarked upon, in part because it happened in a reactionary way. Blair/Brown's New Labour got so deeply into bed with Microsoft that it caused the coalition government that rep…
Moving to a different mail server and office suite keeps the ICC working, but does not really protect people at the ICC from US sanctions. Their lives can be made very difficult: https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitall...
I think this bit of the article is a critical problem:
>By outsourcing the management of IT systems, these educational institutions are losing technical knowledge and control. As a result, they are becoming increasingly dependent on big tech, putting academic freedom and independence at risk.
All of this is fixable but its expensive to fix. No one is motivated enough to spend the money.
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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.
Excuse denied. All they had to do was nothing. Instead they over-regulated way too early, before the industries could grow enough to support operating in such an environment. Now they are behind and will likely never catch up. The future of European tech is government handouts/scraps, collected by force from American companies.
Funding opportunities are nearly absent though. And it seems that buying 'local' software has never been a consideration (until now). On the contrary: I've seen many cases where EU/national products were pushed out of the market by US products that came later and were (subjectively) worse. They were way better funded though. And, because of that or because of being American, they were considered to be more serious/trustworthy companies. Also, they could afford to flood the market with dump prices, until local competition was basically gone.
*: Okay, with one exception: hiring employees involves a lot of work and risk, and doesn't allow for fiscally attractive stock plans.
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This is true, but it's also a fixable problem. The issue I've seen is that there isn't really the political will to fix it. Europeans broadly seem uncomfortable giving up national sovereignty when it comes to digital issues (including those that impact scaling businesses), so they implicitly choose the status quo that makes it hard for software/internet businesses to succeed. Literally in this thread you can see Euro…
Digital can probably be fixed easier. Energy independence on the other hand was a more stupid thing not to target (like Germany closing nuclear reactors, then buying gas from people that thought they could do whatever they want...).