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Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

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Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#471

Post by gtech1 »

jeffrallen wrote: post #72
bambax wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have excellent cloud providers in Europe. But most importantly, most businesses using the cloud would be better off with simple on-prem solutions. So much cheaper to operate and control.

Right, but have you tried recruiting someone recently who is capable of running a pair of local servers (including organizing redundant power feeds), upgrading the OS on them with no downtime, and arranging for off-site backups of the enterpris's data? These used to be the skills of a generalist sysadmin for a small-site with on-prem services. Those skills are no longer available on the market. Students in the local…

Just hired a 45yo who excels and loves and thrives doing this stuff. Proxmox, local storage, local backups + offsite backups. 1Pb of data, colocation costs are 5k/month. Guess AWS costs for similar

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#472

Post by tzs »

peyton wrote: post #429
gchamonlive wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on what constitutes far-left political activism?

I don’t know if this counts as activism, but I was at my university’s Faculty Club and a faculty member walked over and immediately started bitching about Donald Trump without introducing themselves. Like, you’re supposed to be in the business of developing people. What a gigantic waste of time and money.

What about that counts as far left activism?

Nearly every Republican who was in Congress in 2014 would have described at least 3/4 of what Trump has done this term as illegal and totally unacceptable, and would have described at least half of the rest as incompetent.

Unless you can make a case that since 2014 the country has moved so far to the right that even 2014 Republicans are now "far left", about the only thing you can infer from someone bitching about Trump is that they are probably not far right. (Even that one is pretty iffy because he's pissed off a lot of the far right now too).

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#473

Post by nottimbo »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #169

I like it how everyone says that, but there is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer. And if you are a start-up and you want to grow, the situation is even more dire. And without a few hundreds of billions of EUR invested _today_ there will still be at least a decade until basic infrastructure will be somewhat on par with current day hyperscalers from the US. And Office suite wise, it took…

> And Office suite wise, it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering.

AJAX did so much heavy lifting here.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#474

Post by akudha »

tosapple wrote: post #432
miohtama wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russian and China are already getting rid of Microsoft.

While they ditch Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle: we still use Linux, Sel4, ASML and ARM. There's lots of interesting stuff to watch out for.

What is wrong with using Linux?

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#475

Post by bornfreddy »

202508042147 wrote: post #419
koe123 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we can tariff digital services. EU is behind partially because US eats all investment. Protectionism is an option.

I wouldn't go this way, at least not now. But the European Commission should mandate the usage of EU based software for every public institution in the EU, at all levels. That means from the European Parliament all the way down to municipalities. So no more Windows, Office, Azure, AWS etc. in public institutions all across the EU.

And in education, please. Very important in the long term.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#476

Post by Archelaos »

Gimpei wrote: post #445

Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.

In global economies, it is a general rule that different regions of the world specialise in their respective sectors. In the IT industry, we generally observe that early innovators can extend their advantage by binding customers to their technology platform. One example of how this also applies to Europe in the IT sector is SAP. Founded in 1972, they were one of the first companies to offer ERP solutions. Their founders initially worked at a German branch of IBM and took over a software product that IBM was no longer interested in. SAP's leading position in this market has been so strong ever since that no US company has been able to pose a threat to SAP. Oracle, for example, has tried.

You can see this mechanism at work in the USA itself. Microsoft tried to get into the mobil market, but gave up. Google tried to build its own social network, but gave up. All other cloud providers are stuggeling to catch up with AWS.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#477

Post by monkey_monkey »

gottorf wrote: post #374
nixpulvis wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. One of the USA's greatest exports is intelligence and higher education, and what has been happening with that and the general anti-intellectual atmosphere is to me the most concerning as an american. Ironically, public education in america has been pretty bad for a while. But I'm going to start rambling here... way too many problems, and no damn leadership.

[flagged]

Couching nonsense in faux-politeness just makes you look even more googly-eyed.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#478

Post by monkey_monkey »

peyton wrote: post #429
gchamonlive wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on what constitutes far-left political activism?

I don’t know if this counts as activism, but I was at my university’s Faculty Club and a faculty member walked over and immediately started bitching about Donald Trump without introducing themselves. Like, you’re supposed to be in the business of developing people. What a gigantic waste of time and money.

> I don’t know if this counts as activism,

I do. It doesn't.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#479

Post by palata »

ben_w wrote: post #437
Throaway3126 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are the red lines. There is no going back. The USA is too dangerous to rely on, that's quite clear. People don't quite realize how big a deal "invading" Greenland would have been. That's literally an act of war! What's next, occupying France? Saying that it's at all a possibility is far beyond any red line that the EU thought it would have to deal with. Not only would the rest of the world ditch the USA, but the…

> People don't quite realize how big a deal "invading" Greenland would have been. That's literally an act of war! What's next, occupying France? Saying that it's at all a possibility is far beyond any red line that the EU thought it would have to deal with. Yes, absolutely, I agree. Thing is, in the end he backed off, so the result was all talk. He TACOed. For everyone's sake (including Americans'), I absolutely 100%…

> Thing is, in the end he backed off, so the result was all talk. He TACOed.

But for a few days (and probably still now), many people considered it was a real possibility.

I don't think it matters whether the US meant it or not. What matters is whether the Europeans believed it or not. Trust is about belief.

Re: Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native

#480

Post by PlatoIsADisease »

tliltocatl wrote: post #151
ArtTimeInvestor wrote: post #47

Can Europe build AI datacenters though? Europe has no wafer production and no companies that produce GPUs. That means it is dependent on Taiwan for wafers and the USA for GPU design. Then there is the question wether there is a will to invest. Gemini gives me this list of publicly traded companies in the US and what they invested in AI infrastructure in 2025: Amazon: $100B Alphabet: $90B Microsoft: $80B Meta: $70B Te…

Do Europe need AI datacenters to survive? AI is immature technology that is not yet critical to anything.

Define 'survive'.

Given Europe's productivity gap with the US, they appear they are becoming even further a vassal. They will survive, but they further lose their leverage with each year. We see this in international politics as the US pivots away from Europe and towards Asia. (Although Russia's decline has also made it less necessary too)

If you want Europe to rejoin 'great powers', as 'survival', yes they need AI.

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