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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.

#261

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…

I think it's totally great that competing products get produced in the EU. Not a bad thing from anyone's perspective except the owners of those US companies that will now need to compete.

It’s great yes, but if we in the US weren’t proving so untrustworthy, EU startups and tech giants could focus on building things that actually might out innovate us and everyone else. Which would be a win-win.

Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.

I don’t blame them. There is value in trusting your tools and not risk having them weaponized. It’s just sad all around.

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved my stuff to Hetzner. Obv I have no idea about your situation, but I found it fairly trivial for my stuff. But I can't figure out how to replace GSuite.

Well for one thing, call me a sell-out or accuse me of lacking craftsmanship, but I like my databases managed. Then also storage buckets, IAM, general cloud security and other niceties. And I don't think it's for a lack of skills, I know my way around a Linux box - it's just that I save so much time. I'll occasionally build small projects in a VPS (sometimes cramming the db in there too!) but I don't feel I can do it…

Oh, I wasn't trying to say you're wrong. Just wanted to share that for me, the bottleneck has been elsewhere, and that I personally found GSuite harder than the compute cloud.

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

#263

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…

There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations. As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.

No. No one really gives a shit about AI other than the tech industry and vocal CEO culture which is just using it to bury recession and regular lay offs. Otherwise it's novelty value and frustration but no one is going to use it or pay enough for it to be viable as an economic backbone.

There are many more important things to consider. Like literally everything else society sits on top of.

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

#264
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Canada has a GDP of: Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont put together. That's the equivalent of 18 states. Throw in Aus and NZ too and you add another 7 states -- Louisiana, Alabama, Utah, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nevada and Iowa. Ontario alone has a larger GDP…

I am pretty sure many in Minnesota right now would love to be able to exit the current fascist regime and be part of Canada instead ...

Canada isn't coming to save you. Get your own house in order before it burns ours down.

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

#265
post #74

Gee, if only there had been a European market leader in instant messaging, voice over IP and video chat in the 2000s already. Then we could just use that instead of Microsoft Teams.

Skype wasn't _that_ great at chat especially to be completely fair. But it definitely was okay for everything, that's for sure...

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

#266
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dependencies were always there. But never before (since the forming of NATO) has the US leadership so clearly and concretely distanced themselves from Europe. Before that there was a strong sense of North America and Europe belonging to the same “liberal” world where many things did be relatively cheaply exchanged. The dependencies were therefore seen as a non issue for many. Banks have always been skeptics of th…

This is all a roundabout way to get Europe to step up and do more for its own defense… the current negotiation style leaves much to be desired, but it’s shaking things up as intended.

Yes, it's clearly all 5d chess to manipulate a retarded ally to do what's best for it against it's will, all going according to plan. /s

Good luck meeting China without friends. Clearly brilliant statesmanship. Europe is able to read, the room, the situation, and the National Security Strategy, which makes it pretty clear that meddling with European democracy is a important foreign policy.

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

#267

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…

In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created. We want a strong Europe who can build and innovate instead of regulating and fining. In contrast, we certainly don't want see the disastrous joke like Northvolt. We certainly don't want to see the joke that BASF shut down its…

> In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created.

This is a pretty ridiculous statement.

It is clear that the US under current administration is absolutely hostile to EU, and that the US in general is untrustworthy when a good portion of its people see the actions of the current administration as desirable.

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

#268
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations. As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.

> build a better model with lower latency. That's mighty impossible for the european mindset - people here are not so risk-eager as to through hundreds of billions on infrastructure for something that might return a profit.

This is part of the answer.

I have a theory about the second part; European consumers have an even more suspicious view of "corporate overlords" if they are domestic/European than if they are American. Not because Americans are more trustworthy, but because they see Europeans as "anonymous masses" and are therefore more "neutral" to the internal struggles in Europe.

Signing up to a service owned by a European "dynastic" family, possibly in a neighbouring country, feels like more of a surrender of autonomy.

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

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created. We want a strong Europe who can build and innovate instead of regulating and fining. In contrast, we certainly don't want see the disastrous joke like Northvolt. We certainly don't want to see the joke that BASF shut down its…

Europe will then redirect the 300B euros it was investing in US treasuries annually to Eurobonds, while redirecting the $300M in purchasing from US companies to EU companies. This is biting the hand that feeds the US. Europe will buy LNG from Canada instead of the US, and continue to purchase imports from China. I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the…

lol hahaha Europe will "say" and maybe in a few decades they might get around to starting some of that. Europe still buys gas from Russia; can't even ween itself off it during a war.

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

#270
post #246

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…

Don't take the Canadian market for granted. There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.

It should also go without saying that Canada already had a vertically integrated telecoms giant in RIM/Blackberry that handled end to end smartphone comms globally in the 3G era, right down to compressing emails through their servers so they could be transmitted efficiently over 2G data networks.

Unfortunately Blackberry was heavily dependent on US telecoms and corporations buying their servers and devices to pad their profits. And since then, local engineering talent from the Kitchener-Waterloo region has been siphoned off by Silicon Valley money, mostly to craft elegant solutions to deliver more ads to your devices.

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