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

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

#161

Post by pelagicAustral »

tartoran wrote: post #70
pelagicAustral wrote: post #2

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.

Teams is the bane of my existence. Oh well, one of them at least and am forced to use it for the time being. Europeans may get lucky with some sane software or get something even worse than Teams. It remains to be seen how they do. If their software is starting to get better, perhaps US software will get better too because they can no longer justify the junk they're pumping out on us.

> get something even worse than Teams

I'm not sure that's actually possible, you know...

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

#162

Post by procflora »

jl6 wrote: post #89
Banditoz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every Teams team is backed by SharePoint, unfortunately.

Teams, Sharepoint, Exchange, and OneDrive seem to be connected by a maze of dark twisty integration passages which no single human has mapped fully.

Somewhere, in the deepest bowels, Skype still lives. I'm sure of it.

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

#163

Post by elzbardico »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #2

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.

You kids have it easy.

Once I worked in a company with two brands after a fusion, and all of us had to use both Exchange and Lotus Notes. And I was almost forgetting SharePoint.

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

#164

Post by wrs »

andix wrote: post #155
dgxyz wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just shot Slack and moved to Teams only here. The company is falling apart so quickly they are going to have to pay up again before the end of the month.

Because slack startet to extort their customers. I guess many moved away, to be prepared if slack decides to push their prices even further.

Though, if your choice is between Salesforce licensing and Microsoft licensing, at least it’s possible to understand Salesforce licensing.

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

#165

Post by ReptileMan »

runarberg wrote: post #127
jgbuddy wrote: 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 m…

>Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s.

Early 2000s were the times when 50Mbit in Eastern Europe when it was the wild west cost 10eur/month through lan cable and in Western Europe ADSL and ISDN cost multitude of the cost for fraction of the speed.

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

#166

Post by NicuCalcea »

guywithahat wrote: post #123
jgbuddy wrote: 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…

The first sentence of the article:

> In France, civil servants will ditch Zoom and Teams for a homegrown video conference system.

I don't see an issue with government workers using government software. They are not licencing it to businesses or consumers, although with it being open source, I'm sure some will use it.

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

#167

Post by input_sh »

Worth pointing out: France is not adopting existing open source software, they're building their own software and releasing it under the MIT licence. Most of it (or all of it?) is Django backend + React frontend (using a custom-built UI kit).

Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/

Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suitenumerique/

Dev handbook (in English): https://suitenumerique.gitbook.io/handbook

Not French and I can't say I personally tried deploying any of them, but I've been admiring their efforts from afar for a while now.

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

#168

Post by Barrin92 »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #111

This needs to go much, much further before it is even mildly effective. The EU has a population of ~450 million (more than the US) and no significant large technology companies. They are largely dependent on US Big Tech as a population. I love that there is a lot more enthusiasm about OSS adoption within EU software devs, but at a population or government level there doesn't appear to be any coherent strategy to grad…

>and no significant large technology companies

I have to do my patriotic duty to remind you that SAP is the 6th/7th largest software company in the world by market cap. I know not as exiting as notepad with AI but they do exist.

That said US software giants are a disease for democratic societies. If Europe wants software sovereignty we don't need "significant large software companies" we need a hundred medium sized ones that reflect the diversity of the dozens of nations on the continent. We don't need gilded age robber barrons owning the largest communications network shaping politics. We need a democratic genuinely market respecting solution, we don't need to emulate the techno-feudalism of the US or China.

Europe needs in fact to be more ambitious than to build its own Microsoft. We need a genuinely open ecosystem which is not going to have as its goal to extract value out of its users.

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

#170

Post by bborud »

stronglikedan wrote: post #72

lol, "Europe" isn't seeking anything of the sort. France maybe, and a couple other countries, but very, very far from the whole of Europe. And even then, only a handful of people relative to the whole country. This won't even cause a blip on a balance sheet. What are they gonna switch to? I'll bet it ends up being a fork of Zoom or Teams. It's all just theater.

Actually, video conferencing systems aren't that hard to build anymore. But it is hard to grow them as companies.

Just among my circle of friends there were two startups that made video conferencing systems. One generic, and one for uses that required a higher degree of security. If we move one stratum out, there are about half a dozen startups where friends of friends take part in developing smart cameras for video conferencing as well as industrial uses.

And then there was the Tandberg video conferencing platform which was acquired by Cisco in 2010. (That entire stack was designed and engineered in Norway. From low level DSPs to software).

There are dozens of companies that could make a video conferencing system in Europe today that would be no worse than what you find in Zoom, Teams etc. But since it is a crowded field, they haven't had the muscle to compete.

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