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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.

#351

Post by skeletal88 »

PlatoIsADisease wrote: post #335
surgical_fire wrote: post #276

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.

What was different between countries?

For electronic products, it should be enough to get the CE mark on your product, and it can be sold in any country. That is the point of the EU, that any company can sell it's products or services in the whole union, there are regulations, but they are union wide, not specific for each country.

Unless you were making something very special, that each country wants to and is allowed to regulate separately.

Taxes can be different, the VAT % is different in each country. But so is it also in each county or town in the US, and your people claim that this is the reason why you can't include taxes on prices in grocery shops, which is difficult to believe here for our people. So dealing with different tax rates shouldn't be big news for you? I mean... there are lots of online shops that know about different tax rates, it's not difficult. Or you could let someone else handle it for you.

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

#352

Post by spockz »

cmiles8 wrote: post #234
spockz wrote: 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.

The thing is that the cat is out of the bag now. EU alternatives are popping up. Governmental services are moving to national or regional (EU) services/providers.

There is a difference between a nation (USA) and its president having the theoretical power to shut down whole parts of your infrastructure which everyone agrees “that would never happen” versus it having happened multiple times already. Then the setting up of separate boards, basically retreating from NATO/NAVO, the military threat against Greenland. It doesn’t inspire confidence. He has been breaking with “things that you just don’t do” for a while now.

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

#353

Post by einr »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #288
jshen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear that anything will be kneecapped. You need more than a desire to not use these products, you also need a viable alternative. Using products from China or Russia probably isn't deemed viable if the concern is politics, which leads to a need for Europe or Canada to build alternatives. They have not been good at this for a long time, maybe that will change, but it's not clear that it will.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, Europe has been mostly bad at software and services for a long time now. There's a reason Linus lives in Oregon. There's always this occasional chatter about being more competitive, and certainly some good ideas -- for example, the Draghi Report -- but then nothing happens, or you get a few half measures at most. I guess the one upside of Trump being such an aggressive jackass is…

There's a reason Linus lives in Oregon.

What is the reason Linus lives in Oregon? By his own admission, 90% of his workday is reading and answering email. We have email in Europe, so that can’t be it.

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

#354

Post by PlatoIsADisease »

surgical_fire wrote: post #341
PlatoIsADisease wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Well I am unaware of any deaths or injury from dishwashers in the United States, so it seems those regulations are fine.

Hope you don't accidentally fall off a historical ledge that can't get a handrail.

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

#355

Post by Glawen »

simfree wrote: post #343
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…

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 t…

Impossible n'est pas français !

And you seriously are saying Teams is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Ok I concede the videoconferencing works, but it's quite a feat to make a text chat window so slow and buggy. Sometimes when I type, it is spelling stuff backwards! Message texting is a solved problem since IRC or ICQ

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

#356

Post by prmoustache »

pengaru wrote: post #290
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…

What happened to Jitsi?

It is still a thing. I used it 2 days ago actually.

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

#357

Post by rangestransform »

lm28469 wrote: post #226
PlatoIsADisease wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Regulations are le bad. - signed someone from a country where ~10m people still drink water from lead pipes (the USA)

Lead pipes in Chicago were due to union regulatory capture and not lack of regulations

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

#358

Post by avh02 »

202508042147 wrote: post #296

This is great and definitely doable. It's the initial bit that's hard, people hate switching but then when they get used to it, they won't switch back. What I'd really like to see is a pan-european payment processor, a European alternative to Visa/Mastercard.

was talking to a friend about this, there's wero but i haven't really seen it around (Germany).

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

#359

Post by tick_tock_tick »

beloch wrote: post #246
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…

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.

But they EU doesn't make any software... So unless Canada is willing to go with Chinese software which would kinda invalidate any "moral" ground they have and well frankly the USA wouldn't allow it seems like the USA can take it for granted.

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

#360

Post by [deleted] »

lm28469 wrote: post #226
PlatoIsADisease wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Regulations are le bad. - signed someone from a country where ~10m people still drink water from lead pipes (the USA)

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