That is a quite apt way to put it.
The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary
21–30 of 137 posts
Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary
#22The challenge with Microsoft in Europe is that it is so convenient, it doesn’t make business sense to consider alternatives. See how easily MS won market share over Slack (MS Teams) and PowerBI (Tableau / Qlik). They have such a big bundle of services that any single player has to be either amazingly good, or specialized, to win maybe 1-2% of market share. The only way I see Europe doing something about it is antitru…
The end of Microsoft in Europe will be its poor security.
These massive integrated bundles of fluffy convenience are cybersecurity death-traps that leak personal data like a rusty bucket. Firms are rightly getting very nervous about massive fines, and blaming MS is not a get-out. With Microsoft unable to reign-in the complexity of their own products they'll lose market share to smaller, more specialised but more secure systems.
Ironically the path to better security for Microsoft would be to partition/split their own products as the anti-monopolists would have them do.
Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary
#23The challenge with Microsoft in Europe is that it is so convenient, it doesn’t make business sense to consider alternatives. See how easily MS won market share over Slack (MS Teams) and PowerBI (Tableau / Qlik). They have such a big bundle of services that any single player has to be either amazingly good, or specialized, to win maybe 1-2% of market share. The only way I see Europe doing something about it is antitru…
The convenience and business sense argument could make sense if the value of a communication platform was small and close to its cost. But it's not. Similarly as it doesn't make business sense to rent the cheapest or easiest to lease office exactly because a good office to your company is more valuable than its cost. People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality, effecting a large drag on communication. It's a…
> People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality
People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office (but I personally hate LibreOffice).
> calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions
What? Where? Is this about the list of other calendars defaulting to showing people under the same manager?
> information is siloed to only meeting participants
You can configure it to show meeting titles to everyone (the company I work for expects everyone to do so), and the new Outlook even showed me the meeting description and participants when peeking at someone else's calendar.
Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary
#24Come on, let's not go down this rabbit hole. We have real problems in this world: WW3, Climate Crisis. The West has to be comfortable trusting each other. Microsoft is by the way more trust worthy than European governments!
Ever heard of Edward Snowden by any chance?
Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things seem to change in France though. It's relatively easy to open a startup and get tax discounts for research and innovative work. Then you fly-in employees (I'm one of them) on passeport talent which is very easy to get and lasts 4 years. Average IT salaries in Europe are much lower than in US, which is unpleasant but allows to run an IT startup with less funding and healthier economics. However the gap to close…
So you say the best thing about France is that we can hire someone else than French people. And you are kind of right: We have a thing against companies with large high-low salary difference (something like a rest of revenge against the rich), and make them simply not possible, hindering the ability to build megacorporations. Apple wouldn’t have been possible here. We simply halt growth at median size and earn a good…
The problem is product/market/financing; not in personnel or organisation.
Airbus and Dassault are doing fine because they have well defined stable markets and (probably) government funding.
Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
The convenience and business sense argument could make sense if the value of a communication platform was small and close to its cost. But it's not. Similarly as it doesn't make business sense to rent the cheapest or easiest to lease office exactly because a good office to your company is more valuable than its cost. People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality, effecting a large drag on communication. It's a…
> People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office (but I personally hate LibreOffice). > calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions What? Where? Is this about the list of other calendars defaulting to showing people under the same manager? > information is siloed to only meeting participants You can configure it to…
I absolutely cannot stand Office. Word is basically acceptable, but I refuse to use PowerPoint unless absolutely forced to. The major problem though is that every single component is blighted by the Ribbon, which among all the bad things that Microsoft has done is the worst.
Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary
#27Come on, let's not go down this rabbit hole. We have real problems in this world: WW3, Climate Crisis. The West has to be comfortable trusting each other. Microsoft is by the way more trust worthy than European governments!
Ever heard of Edward Snowden by any chance?
Yes, I don't trust the state's either. But we have to keep things in proportion. Europe can't throw its efforts and forces now at trying to become independent from the US.
We first have to defeat Russia, China, etc. Become independent of them and even defeat them before we start trying to peel off dependency on the US.
US is an ally, and in the near future we have to rely on them. That's it.
Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
The convenience and business sense argument could make sense if the value of a communication platform was small and close to its cost. But it's not. Similarly as it doesn't make business sense to rent the cheapest or easiest to lease office exactly because a good office to your company is more valuable than its cost. People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality, effecting a large drag on communication. It's a…
> People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office (but I personally hate LibreOffice). > calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions What? Where? Is this about the list of other calendars defaulting to showing people under the same manager? > information is siloed to only meeting participants You can configure it to…
> People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office
They absolutely do. Many people hate the office suite in its entirety, lots of people hate some program in particular (I particularly despise Word). Most people are indifferent and have accepted that $Program is what they are using in $Job
Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary
#29What viable European alternatives to Microsoft Office are there? Google Docs is also a US-based cloud service. LibreOffice is ugly, its UX is sometimes worse than Office 2003 (especially Calc, where pivot tables have to be blindly configured in a modal dialog, and there is no equivalent to the Table feature from Excel), and they still haven't implemented automatically downloading updates.
Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary
#30hot news - microsoft is a monopoly