Finally the year of Minitel on the desktop!
France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
121–130 of 820 posts
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#122My hope is that all this push towards tech independence (not just from EU) will make the most "basic" tools open-source and they wouldn't suck as much as they do now. What I mean by this is e.g. you can already use Linux on a desktop and it's generally okay (or even good sometimes), however things like LibreOffice are absolutely unusable in terms of performance, functionality and user friendliness compared to e.g. Ke…
As much as I cheer for OpenOffice, it sucks. And it has been decades now. I'm not even an advanced Word / Google Doc user. Are we gonna wait for 100 more years for it to be good?
The latest version of OpenOffice (4.1.x) is over a decode old, aside from security releases with "bug fixes and little enhancements", so it's not surprising that it hasn't improved in the last decade.
LibreOffice is the actively developed fork.
There's a nice diagram on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Forks_and_deriv...
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#123Americans 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.
Yeah, assuming Canada is just going to keep going along buying American software and services seems pretty naive. There's less capacity to build alternatives in Canada than there is in Europe, but as Europe builds out alternative ecosystems, Canadians will likely be just as eager customers as Europeans (if not more eager).
The beauty of so many of these solutions being open source solutions also means that it creates avenues for cooperation between organizations that have no official cooperation agreement.
E.g. The Austrian federal Military, the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the city of Leon have no direct forum for cooperating on software projects, yet all three are contributing to the development and rapid adoption of Nextcloud. Canada can easily get in on this too.
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#124I 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.
It's only recently that the united states has become an enemy of the EU though. I'd say there's much more motivation to move to other software and platforms now.
I don’t think that’s accurate. These issues were always there, but “the sky is falling” rhetoric is all the rage at the moment (in both directions).
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#125I 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 w…
I see a "top-down" approach, actually.
Government and public services change to (ideally) open source, and "impose"/"require" downstream compatibility.
This would create the incentive and make change easier
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#126I 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
Carried interest loophole
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good luck with OVH. Most EU companies, including this one, offer subpar services compared to their American counterparts.
I use AWS and OVH at work and this has not my experience. AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality. I'd love to never have to use redshift or EMR again for instance. OVH is more basic, but what it has tends to work at least.
> AWS has more services, but a lot of those are of dubious quality.
Being cynical AWS has more services because many of those are deliberately siloed in order to create a separate billing item, i.e.:
"You want to use AWS Foo ...great, welcome to AWS ! But unless you want to re-invent the wheel re-programming the standard workflow, you should really use AWS Bar and AWS Baz alongside it. Dontcha' like all the cute names we've given them ? Here are all the price sheets, don't forget to read the small print ... good luck figuring out how much it will cost you".
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#128Americans 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…
India, but many companies aren't willing to price for the market nor respect corporate norms there.
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#129Americans 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.
Canada has roughly the population of California, and Aus/NZ combined have populations less than California. For these types of market analyses, these countries are closer to US states in market potential.
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#130Americans 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…
India, but many companies aren't willing to price for the market nor respect corporate norms there.
I guess the point here is to keep high prices. If you lower the prices, you can try to enter even Africa, but it's simply easier to keep more or less uniform pricing, unless you're Steam-size and are able to spend resources on doing this properly.