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France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

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Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#111

Post by toomuchtodo »

harikb wrote: post #94
cmiles8 wrote: post #70

I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale. The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.

Products don't necessarily win on merit. Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force. You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.

The EU can also ban access to US products, once EU alternatives are available, for example. "National security" or whatever PR is needed to make the case.

I'm unsure the EU could build and require anything worse than Teams, considering the open source landscape for that product category, for example. The primitives exist, scale them up and lock out US companies from the EU market with policy. Recycle the capital internally, just like VC funds do with their portfolio companies.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#112

Post by RockstarSprain »

somat wrote: post #95

For what it's worth, if you want a self hosted replacement for Zoom Galene has worked great for me, The server requirements are remarkably low, especially if you are like me and just need a personal video chat to a few people. I run it on an old apu-2 with openbsd(which is just about the worst combination and it still works great) As a bonus there is no client, that is, the client is just a web page so very low frict…

+1.

I am running a Galene instance via the YunoHost self-hosting package on a small dedicated server (2 cores, 4gb of RAM).

So far it’s much better than I expected, both in terms of latency and the overall video/audio quality. Feels better than Jitsi and even a FaceTime / WhatsApp call.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#113

Post by softwaredoug »

Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy

1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans

2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market

3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology

When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#114

Post by ivolimmen »

idontwantthis wrote: post #13

I wonder if the EU will begin trying to recruit American software engineers. I’d love to move to France.

In the Netherlands we return 30% of your taxes in the first 10. So we welcome you as well. We may pay less compared to the USA but we have health care, better work life balance and we all talk English.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#115

Post by i_love_retros »

lateforwork wrote: post #72

I really hope Marc Andreessen is happy. https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/16/andreessen-horowitz-co-fou...

>The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#116

Post by traceroute66 »

nxm wrote: post #55
eloisant wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes are not really an issue because of the services you get out of it: free healthcare, free education for your kids, etc. But yes, salary before taxes is much lower than in the US. If your goal is to make as much money as possible, either stay in US or move to a different European country (Northern Europe or Switzerland).

As a software engineer in the US you're not really worrying about access to health care, and have access to public schools as well.

> As a software engineer in the US you're not really worrying about access to health care

You're "not really worrying" ... whilst you are in a job.

There fixed that for you.

As I am sure you are acutely aware US is the home of lay-offs and is generally easy to fire people.

If you loose your job in the US it becomes panic stations because you loose that precious employer-paid healthcare overnight.

Meanwhile in Europe ? Take your time job hunting a new job, healthcare is still free.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#117

Post by jorvi »

cmiles8 wrote: post #70

I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale. The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.

The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.

Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.

Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.

Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.

The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?

One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#118

Post by bestouff »

softwaredoug wrote: post #113

Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy 1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans 2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market 3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with Englis…

... and Canada doesn't seem very keen on going on like this.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#120

Post by eigenspace »

cmiles8 wrote: post #70

I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale. The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.

While, there's a real risk of overselling the enthusiasm right now, there's a much bigger risk of complacency making dinosaurs stick their head in the sand and think nothing ever changes.

IMO, if ones thinks the lessons about competition between tech platforms from the previous few decades are 1-to-1 applicable in the current geopolitical, economical, and strategic state of the world, then that person is either not paying attention, or they're in denial.

Companies, governments, and militaries are looking around their office right now and realizing their organization could grind to a complete halt if Trump made a phone call to a very small handful of executives.

That's an existential risk, and organizations absolutely can and do choose products that are on their face inferior if it helps shield them from existential risk. (Western) Tech is one of few industries that has no institutional experience with dealing with geopolitical risk, but it's happening now.

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