Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#161

Post by PeterStuer » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 10:57 AM UTC

The problem with European software plays is a monetary problem. EU capital is much more expensive than US capital (ultimately due to the latter's status as the 'world reserve' currency due to the enforced petro-dollar regime).

This is why Europe's IT sector is much more focused on B2B servuces/bespoke developments (low risk business models) and hardware/infrastructure (historic manufacturing/telecoms legacy).

in terms of software products/B2C/SaaS high risk/hit businessmodels the US can relax and cherrypick from the European R&D knowing they can buy out any local player due to cheaper money.

The EU has in the past always declared IT and the Knowledge Economy as 'strategic', but has never protected the sector from US appropriation.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#162

Post by skissane » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 10:59 AM UTC

germanier wrote: post #159

foepys wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter example: Lidl tried SAP and scrapped the project after they already invested 1 billion Euro.

On the other hand, Aldi Nord now successfully runs SAP HANA/Retail. The at the same time attempted (and internally highly fought against) move from decentral to central organization is probably what killed Lidl's SAP project.

[1] suggests that part of the problem is that Lidl's business processes were non-standard, and Lidl decided, rather than change their processes to match what SAP's solution supported, to instead customise SAP's solution to support their non-standard processes – and that was the point at which the project came undone, the SAP customisations couldn't scale to high turnover (but surely vanilla/uncustomised SAP Retail would not have had this problem)

Lidl's non-standard processes may well be a big part of their business success. But maybe that was a sign they shouldn't have gone with an off-the-shelf solution like SAP, and should have stuck with their legacy in-house system, or tried to build a custom next generation in-house system. And their experience isn't necessarily transferable to another business whose processes might be more standard, or who might have more flexibility to alter their processes to meet the needs of an off-the-shelf solution. And if they'd gone for some other off-the-shelf solution instead of SAP (such as Oracle or Infor), they might have had just as many problems – the more customisation heavy an ERP implementation project is, the greater the risk of failure.

[1] https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d...

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#163

Post by heavenlyblue » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 11:03 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #151

Nextgrid wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason why the engineers from poorer countries will emigrate to France instead of the better-paying countries?

Romanian programmer here (I still live in Romania), I would choose another European country over a well-better paid job in the US in almost all cases, the reason being that that way I'd be closer to home, we actually have decent healthcare in Europe and the social contract as a whole is more robust compared to the US (it mentally helps going out on the street and not seeing the multitude of homeless people that I've…

I think it’s UK/Germany vs France rather than US vs France

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#164

Post by heipei » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 11:04 AM UTC

As a German who's been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, there's so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit:

- Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, "sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales", from your home!

- When I tried to read or watch reviews about SaaS solutions for invoicing / bookkeeping for German companies, the first half of the review is usually spent trying to convince people that moving off paper-based invoices and folders to all-digital is a good idea in the first place.

- University-educated people in my social circle are often woefully unaware of economic trends that have swept the US, be it the gig economy, X-as-a-service, the nature of Venture Capital, the idea of scaling a company aggressively, the value of information, mobility of labor and paying market rate for experts, the high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a German industrial company, etc. None of these things bode well for the best talent in Europe working on anything remotely resembling an innovative European tech company. Not even saying we're worse off for it, but the reality is that any European who truly grasps the pace of the US tech industry would rather go there directly than work for a Franco-German government moonshot and hope to be paid maybe a 10% premium over their regular European salary.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#165

Post by flyinglizard » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 11:05 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #151

Nextgrid wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason why the engineers from poorer countries will emigrate to France instead of the better-paying countries?

Romanian programmer here (I still live in Romania), I would choose another European country over a well-better paid job in the US in almost all cases, the reason being that that way I'd be closer to home, we actually have decent healthcare in Europe and the social contract as a whole is more robust compared to the US (it mentally helps going out on the street and not seeing the multitude of homeless people that I've…

San Francisco’s homelessness situation is an exception, certainly not the rule. It’s an entire industry in SF with a turnover of $xxx million.

Other cities in the US are much more in line with the big EU cities in that regard.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#166

Post by tannhaeuser » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 11:07 AM UTC

thiht wrote: post #124

tannhaeuser wrote: post #59

Does anybody have any technical details to share about Gaia-X? I mean service discovery, interchangeable services/interfaces, etc. has been around since the SOAP days (~ 2003) at least. Cloud can mean many things. Does there exist anything at all or is it just talk at the political level atm? Do they intend to fund new research into bringing these things, or will they pick existing tech?

This was published today: https://www.ovh.com/blog/gaia-x-catalogue-search-engine-unde... Apparently more posts are coming.

That's at least something. Unfortunately, this reads more like a program to keep academic research institutes busy and rehashes phantasies of dynamically matching service providers to consumers and policies, something that was a hot topic in academia, and academia only, during the SOAP times, but wasn't used at all in practice (even today you're using lots of yaml to bind stuff on clouds). Moreover, it doesn't use any established logic programming paradigm and re-invents an ad-hoc service ontology/taxonomy and query language (this after the EU spend lots of money in the last decade to fund research on SemWeb ontologies) and they're just using Neo4j (which is fine as a graph DB but not a standard by any means). On top of that, they're using OpenAPI and JSON payloads; this isn't a good fit when the majority of established protocols one would like to use (and that have been created by lots of EU money) are based on WSDL and XML (payment protocols) or even EDIFACT (logistics). OpenAPI/SmartBear has certainly sold their primitive JSON Schema thing well I guess (that just exists on paper or in the form of broken Swagger Java apps). Didn't they want to push European tech? Then why are they promoting gitlab and k8s? I could go on and on, but this doesn't look promising. Tbh, making an undergrad project out of this is embarrassing for French academia who has produced some of the best work in the field.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#167

Post by hackissimo123 » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 11:10 AM UTC

allendoerfer wrote: post #83

pyvpx wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

competence at what, exactly?

They are not shielding their market, putting everything behind a firewall, requiring joint ventures. Instead they actually respect human rights and the power of law. They don’t even use a non-latin language.

I think the residents of Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and the entirety of central and eastern Europe (except Romania) would be surprised to hear that they don't speak a Latin language.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#168

Post by imtringued » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

ReticentVole wrote: post #22

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #19

I wonder how much they will be paying their software developers. Right now, a senior developer that really understands cloud and distributed computing can make more than $500,000/yr at Amazon, Azure, or Microsoft. If they want to attract the talent to build this, they are going to have to pay a lot more than they are used to paying for software engineers.

USA Payroll tax: 15.3% combined, first $127,000 only (3.89% effective) France Payroll tax: 20% for salaries over €151,965. USA Income tax: 42%, including State (CA) and Federal, excluding deductions France Income Tax: 50%. So the labour cost will be a lot higher due to payroll taxes, and the employee will take home less due to income taxes. High VAT (20% in France, 8.5% in SF) means consumer purchases are also more e…

Unless you are earning above 400k€ per year your income taxes will be less than 42% of your income in Germany. Lets say you are earning SF type salaries in Germany. Something like 150k€ per year. Your income tax will still only be 30% of your income. So why are only 90k€ arriving on your bank account? (60% of your salary). Because medical, unemployment, long term care insurance and pensions are mandatory but also provided by the government in Germany. The effectiveness of these insurances is much lower if only a minority is taking advantage of them.

Imagine extreme examples like everyone who signs up for unemployment insurance is freshly unemployed and once they find a job they cancel their insurance. There is no way to make it work without the government.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#169

Post by holstvoogd » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

speedgoose wrote: post #112

piokoch wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very true. Another thing is that it is not like EU is somehow very far behind the US in terms of services hosting or "the cloud". There is French OVH provider and there is German Hetzner. While the former has an opinion of being cheap but no so great (especially in terms of support), the Hetzner really shines. Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especiall…

OVH's support is not great but at least it's cheap and they have some transparency. Azure and AWS have shitty support too for small customers but they are expensive. Hetzner is nice. We also have Scaleway in the same category.

> Azure and AWS have shitty support too for small customers but they are expensive

oh yeah, AWS is terrible with support! I have to rely on their support forum for any support as 20% of our spend for crappy support is just not feasible. I.e. I get no support whatsoever. You can trick them a bit by wrapping it up in a sales inquiry though.

Re: Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’

#170

Post by 9q9 » Fri, Jun 05, 2020, 11:18 AM UTC

jansan wrote: post #100

thamer wrote: post #14

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to…

Europe: Politicians want "something great", so there is a verdict that "something great" will be developed. A huge budget is provided, but it must be ensured that the usual suspects (public or semi-public research institutions) get most of the share. The whole project structure becomes fragmented beyond believe, nobody cares about commercial success. The project fails, but not in the eyes of the researchers, who clai…

   "something great"

Also: this "something great" must be something they (EU politicians deciding about funding) have heard about! And what have they heard about? Something US companies have already been commercialising, hence started a big PR offensive.

That's why the EU started big funding of research on cloud computing after Amazon made money with it, started big funding of research on search engine when Google made money with it, started big funding of research on AI/ML after Google made money with it ...

I predict that the EU will go all in on supporting research on quantum computing when Google sells it in a big way.