Live data from Hacker News

France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

apnews.com

121–130 of 621 posts

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that bad. It's well integrated into Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office, and does the job. I've used both Slack and Teams and if you're using MS365, then Teams is absolutely the better option.

As someone who has gone from 100% Slack in startups to all-in Teams in big corpo, I disagree. Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app. And if it does it's usually a half-baked browser mess. And don't even get me started on the UX or meeting options or mobile support or the complete lack of a dedicated Linux client. I don't need one app to do everything half-assed,…

It’s not why your big corp chooses teams and the msft suite. From a corp perspective they don’t care about your edge case. There’s only - is it good for 90% of my use cases across the enterprise? And - do I get a bundle discount? Last but not the least - do I need to expend developer resources on it vs anything else?

Yeah, there is half assed stuff. But it’s not what most of the big corp uses anyway. So your little dev specific use case isn’t going to get much traction.

Teams does one thing well. It can do group chats and team calls. That’s most of what people use it for. And your corp gets a discount bundle.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#122

Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions. Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.

Shame that so many EU citizens do not see the ramifications of theirs . EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies. They have elected leaders who were until very recently heavily dependent on Russian energy. As a result, EU dependence on US tech is near-total. I remember hearing a few months ago…

Europe's main strategy these days seems to be blaming others instead of looking at themselves.

For example, they blame America for their own issue of lacking tech companies, despite Europe taking credit for having fewer work hours, more 'equitable' societies, etc.

They blame China for their own issue of lacking domestic manufacturing, despite their pride at having strong unions, supposedly good labor protections, and vacations.

They blame India for the bogey of 'buying Russian oil', instead of blaming themselves for being the LARGEST purchaser of refined oil products from India. As if India, one of the hottest countries on the planet, actually needs heating oil.

At this point, which country / region does Europe not blame? It's always someone else's fault. No one even thinks to look inside themselves.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#123
post #43

It's all fun and games until there's an outage, nothing screams efficient like a state-owned tech company

Oh wow how did I not know it was state owned! The article keeps referring to "sovereign tech" which I assumed meant sovereign tech companies. I'm all for hating on teams (and sharepoint) but a state owned tech company sounds like an apocalyptically bad idea, and since it's state owned it can't really migrate to other industries/countries, and they likely won't update as quickly as they should as new technologies come around. I get the sharepoint/teams hate but I'm surprised a startup form isn't making more fun of France for this

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#124
post #55

Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.

I couldn't agree more with this. Teams somehow managed to supercede my other microphone preferences when I'm not even using teams (took me a while to figure out). It might be one of the apps I detest the most. There is very little satisfaction with it and much annoyance.

By default, Teams never releases your audio input channel, even when you close it.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#125

Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions. Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.

Shame that so many EU citizens do not see the ramifications of theirs . EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies. They have elected leaders who were until very recently heavily dependent on Russian energy. As a result, EU dependence on US tech is near-total. I remember hearing a few months ago…

leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies

Remarkable how it is the politicans who should have been doing this when it doesn't get done, and how everyone is quick to complain if politicians meddle in what the private sector should have been doing. This is a recurring theme in a lot of debates. And I think it has to do with our need to blame someone but ourselves.

Yes, one could solve this through procurement rules that favor domestic or regional products. And there are sometimes procurement rules that state that domestic vendors should be preferred. But I have seen that in practice and it doesn't actually work. One one project I worked on decades ago the military was sourcing a system for "local administration". A company that was effectively bankrupt, had the weirdest OS I have ever used, and the worst office support systems I've had the misfortune of trying to use, was the only domestic candidate. Yes, it did check the boxes in the procurement process, but everyone knew it was never going to happen.

Interoperability, product maturity, familiarity, feature completeness, quality etc tends to win out.

I think we have to realize that this has almost nothing to do with our political leaders and everything to do with our inability to create software businesses in Europe. We need to figure that bit out. And perhaps this is the kick in the behind we needed to get our act together.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS software is also mostly owned by the US. This entire thing of 'replacing' American software with American software under a different commercial model is so silly.

That's not true. For instance in the field of video pipelines ffmpeg is the standard, and was started by an European (French) person. Runs on Linux of course, that ..., and so forth. Do you really believe in Europe there is no the tech capability to recreate the tech stack? This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get…

And who is the largest contributor to ffmpeg? These sorts of things are so silly. By and large, open source software is worked on by companies who are paying contributors because the project provides them some value. Most of these are American companies, which means they exert control, whether you like it or not.

In the case of ffmpeg, about a decade ago, I worked at a company who made substantial contributions to it, and employed many significant contributors. You guys live in fantasy land.

Linux is also an American thing. The benevolent-dictator-for-life of Linux lives in Portland, OR. Intel (also in Portland mostly) is one of the largest contributors, along with AMD. We can go on and on. this is obviously going to be the case when the main CPU vendors are American.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#127
post #43

It's all fun and games until there's an outage, nothing screams efficient like a state-owned tech company

Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s. To this day some of the largest telecommunications companies in Europe are still state owned, partially, and in some cases in full.

Growing up in Iceland where we had a state monopoly on telecommunications until the late 90s, I don‘t remember a single telecommunication outage. In fact, after moving to America where I have a private internet provider, I have experience quite a few internet blackouts actually.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#128
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Voting for a traitorous convicted felon is why I can't stand federal level Republican voters. What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem? For the record, I abhor my non federal level Democrat leaders, and vote Republican on the state and local level (because they are less crazy than the Democrats at this level).

> Voting for a traitorous convicted felon

The Epstein revelations show that pretty much everyone that could make it to the ballot list has skeletons in their closet. The only difference is that some of them manage to hide it better than others.

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#129
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Voting for a traitorous convicted felon is why I can't stand federal level Republican voters. What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem? For the record, I abhor my non federal level Democrat leaders, and vote Republican on the state and local level (because they are less crazy than the Democrats at this level).

> What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?

If your position is that racism and sexism are the root of the problem — which I am not contesting — how wise do you think it was for the Democrats to try running with a black woman?

Re: France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. For instance in the field of video pipelines ffmpeg is the standard, and was started by an European (French) person. Runs on Linux of course, that ..., and so forth. Do you really believe in Europe there is no the tech capability to recreate the tech stack? This is an extremely naive way to put it. US tech is much more developed because of money infusion even on companies that take 10/20 years to get…

And who is the largest contributor to ffmpeg? These sorts of things are so silly. By and large, open source software is worked on by companies who are paying contributors because the project provides them some value. Most of these are American companies, which means they exert control, whether you like it or not. In the case of ffmpeg, about a decade ago, I worked at a company who made substantial contributions to it…

> which means they exert control, whether you like it or not.

I don't think you and I use the same definition of open source software. Controlling the upstream is absolutely not equivalent to controlling the software, nor is being a majority contributor. These things are very obvious to anyone that regularly works with FOSS in a professional capacity.

Post reply on HN