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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.

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product. If you are unwilling to follow regulations to sell your hardware here, then it tells me the regulations are already doing its job properly.

The issue was the sheer number of various regulations/standards/(taxes?) changing by country. It was good enough for the US.

> It was good enough for the US

A lot of things good enough for the US are not considered suitable or safe here.

Correctly so, I might add.

If your government is not concerned with public safety, why should the EU adopt the same stance?

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “the sky is falling” rhetoric It's hardly rhetoric, from the European perspective. The EU is already embroiled in a proxy war against a major power in Ukraine, and are now faced with the prospect of their strongest erstwhile ally moving to annex EU territory. Simultaneous war on two fronts, where one opponent is deeply embedded in your supply chains, is an existential threat.

I’ll give you that the current US administration isn’t exactly scoring points for subtle diplomatic negotiation, but remember too that most of the United States was purchased from other countries. It’s not a completely bonkers idea that the US could purchase all or some of Greenland. In the end, we’ll probably just see a strengthening or enforcement of the existing treaty for US military use of Greenland which is all…

This post right here is why the rest of the free world will never trust the US again.

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

#343

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…

What was the last successful French software project in the Telecom or Conferencing space?

This project has been forced into the hands of 40k users, but likely due to a plethora of bugs and user experience issues they are picking a date far in the future for broad deployment.

Belledonne Communications has been actively breaking Linphone, conference calling broke back in August 2023 for example and remains broken to this day.

If we look to Québécoise in Canada, SFLPhone would crash after 2 dozen calls, and Jami (formerly GNU Ring) is still a beta quality product with some neat DHT concepts that I'd love to see work.

The French sphere has a software delivery and quality problem. The user rejection factor will remain high until they choose to fix the bugs that cause users to run away.

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

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This BS should stop (even if you vote for AfD or National front) It is so difficult we still to get a working visa into Western EU. The way this is done is by total bureaucratic nature of Ausländerbehörde. When he was CTO from Netflix, Gaurav Agarwal Could not get a visa to relocate to Germany. (No more with Netflix) So even of one has > €80K salary and working in Apple or MS hq in Munich it is pain in the arse. On t…

Then EU citizens should support undocumented immigrants, as we do in the US. It is inhumane not to give them full welfare.

Sadly I would consider now that America's just not an ideal position for immigration right now and this will remain a scar for America imo.

Many of people I know (or friends of friends/brothers) are migrating from America to either Europe or shifting back to India.

I don't think that America can particularly do something about it. Trust's pretty fragile.

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

#345
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current US administration wants a captive Europe. One that buys its defense, energy and technology products from them. One that sells its territory, regulations and know-how to them. Ask the Department of State if they'd like a European-sized French attitude and strategic autonomy.

Current admin has been on record for years saying the same thing. Warning EU about russia, warning EU about China, warning them about not innovating. I don't know if this was planned internally but it seems the way they figured out how to get EU to actually do something is to make it seem like big bad trump is going to hurt them. Current admin has gotten more out of EU than 20years of asking nicely. Before: US: "plea…

No. The US does not want an independent EU. It wants an EU that lets any US company do here whatever it wants. It wants the EU to split up so it can force bad trade deals on our countries. We don't want a trade deal that lets you sell chlorinated chicken or other stuff that is currently banned here.

The US wants us to spend more on military but not on our own weapons but to spend all our money buying US made stuff. Now what the president of the US achieved is that we want to spend more to develop our own local alternatives and improve them, not buy more from the US. Why would we buy from you if your president threatens to invade Greenland?

Also - military spending was increased not because Trump bullied us into it doing it. It was seen as necessary because of russian attack on Ukraine. Trump was not some genius diplomacy mastermind. He is a man child that is pissed of for not getting the Nobel peace price. How childish is that? This is not some person who can be taken seriously in any way.

Regulation is good, Micro-USB and USB-C for phones and computer chargers is better than the dozens of different chargers that was before. Only Apple was unhappy and didn't want it. We don't want big US tech companies to steal our personal data and do whatever they want wit it.

Also - now trump is pissed off at Canada for trying to get a trade deal with China, when it was he himself who first said Canada should become a part of the US, started with random bs tariffs on canadian goods, etc. What else can you expect from Canada, why should they not try to find a more reliable trade partner? How can it be rational, what Trump is doing?

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

#346

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…

>2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product. The regulations were insane. I imagine software is significantly easier, but there is a mountain of difference when it comes to electrical and plumbing.

We are still making hardware and feel the same way about the US market. The litigation is insane. Meanwhile the Chinese don't give a damn about any of those.

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

#347
post #340

The software part of this would be easy. People will literally write it for free, out of the sheer joy of building Free & open source software. The part the state needs to do is bootstrap a network effect that leads to people actually using it. I guess they’ll need to employ a few engineers to add enough lines of code to rocket.chat to make it competitive with Teams levels of slowness.

Fixing network effect is easy for hegemonies, just ban the competition. You can use national security or save the children pretext in democratic countries.

US took over TikTok forcefully, Europeans are looking into forcing their contenders into domination but if it doesn't look like working they can just use the US tactics.

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

#348
post #297
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You could apply this…

Teams won by being good enough and bundled into O365. There's probably some value in making a product so available that people can use it where normally they wouldn't have the opportunity.

Teams won by being bundled with the rest of the Microsoft stack and shoved down captive (corporate) users throats.

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

#349
post #67

The inertia (or actively maintained status quo) in Europe towards the US platforms is massive. Anecdotally, I recently found myself in the local government building of a small European town. They run several free digitalisation classes for small businesses. The options? Introductory classes to: - LinkedIn - WhatsApp business - Facebook and Instagram ads - Gsuite

It might be worth considering that if those are intro classes, then it's not like they can't be easily replaced: it's not like the audience is wedded to any of those at an introductory level.

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

#350
Non-french might not realize that we have a huge free software community of france, made up in large part of communist state-funded scientists / researchers. They do a lot of cool stuff, you can see a few projects for example on Framasoft who has the explicit goal of un-Googling yourself : https://framasoft.org/en/ https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/

That said, having technical solutions isn't enough to replace USA / private solutions. The answer has to take into account the economical, social and political situation

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