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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

#211

Post by quadrifoliate »

GaryBluto wrote: post #177
tyre wrote: post #23

As an American, this is awesome to see. We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat. We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, b…

It's so strange reading all these comments from Americans begging to be punished for collective misdeeds. It reads as unsettlingly masochistic.

From a less masochistic and more self-interested perspective, it's not a good long-term thing for American corporations to thrive purely due to corruption and throwing around political weight.

We as consumers (and for that matter, aspiring businesspeople) all benefit when we have more entrants to the market that are challenging the existing monopolies. And to be honest I don't think the EU has the incentives to pull this off anyway, these are manufactured headlines around what's a minor blip in the vast coffers of American corporations. I'm sure zero alarm bells are going off in Redmond because some EU bureacrats wrote a headline around switching to a Django app built in a hackathon.

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

#212

Post by derektank »

shevy-java wrote: post #192

Makes sense. This software dependency that Europe has on the USA is very, very bad - no just with regards to Zoom, but literally anything. The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government, and the current US government will remain hostile as long as it is in charge; but even afterwards it is quite logical to assume that any follow-up government will prioritize US…

>For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does

I don’t see what’s surprising about this. In the post-war period, most of Europe was hostile to German empowerment, from initial opposition to West Germany’s inclusion in NATO to later resistance to German reunification. The presence of tens of thousands of US troops in Germany also required more diplomatic communication and alignment to maintain status of forces agreements.

The status quo has only really changed in the last twenty years.

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

#213

Post by mystifyingpoi »

dijit wrote: post #188
tedggh wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by i…

"I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988? Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people…

> and lag constantly on modern hardware

This. Opening a chat for the first time in the morning consistently takes 5-10 seconds. Opening subsequent ones takes 2-3 seconds. That is, if they contain plain text. If not, UI keps reflowing and jumping while thumbnails and silly gifs are loaded async, so you cannot even reliably click.

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

#214

Post by cbolton »

macspoofing wrote: post #31
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.

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.

Sharepoint... the only webapp I have to use that feels worse than Teams. I swear when I open the intranet landing page, the loading, reloading, resizing, rereloading, re-whatever takes at least 10 seconds to settle. How can engineers build something be so inefficient?

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

#215

Post by boringg »

PeterStuer wrote: post #124
boringg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would they do that? So annoying.

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

#216

Post by x0x0 »

creamyhorror wrote: post #202
x0x0 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The children who write Teams cannot reliably deliver notifications on my mac without me restarting Teams every morning. I've spent a full day attempting to send a webhook in. Teams used to work like slack (a channel admin can create an endpoint; you post to it.) Microsoft deprecated that because it worked. It's now a maze of permissions and it silently fails with no error messages at all. Scrollback regularly fails a…

> I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop Yup, we struggle with this. Seems to have to do with needing to pay for seats in order to have file-sharing allowed (but you can still paste Sharepoint/Onedrive links). Can't share files if there's even a single external person in the chat/channel. Forced us to buy another seat subscription. It's great!

That kinda makes sense (and thank you!), but I think the comprehensive incompetence is thus:

1 - fails 2 - w/ no useful feedback to user; 3 - I couldn't get support to tell me why (fine, small account), but the customer with 900 licensed seats couldn't either

Fortunately, said customer has come to the realization of how very bad it is and is hopefully migrating to Slack.

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

#218

Post by input_sh »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #203
input_sh wrote: post #167

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/suit…

Gotta give them props for all the English. I know that can't have been easy. Now they just need to change the name so it's not so obviously French, and invite collaboration from the other large EU countries. I wonder how many Dutch or German will think of "La Suite Numerique" as an EU-wide office suite.

That website is specifically to explain it to French audiences.

German version is here, but unlike France they're mostly boosting already-existing German open source software (like Nextcloud and Open Xchange): https://opencode.de/en/home

I don't know how the Netherlands really fits into all of this, but I know they're one of the biggest funders of open source projects in general via NLnet. Seriously, their list of projects they've given money to is ridiculously comprehensive, you're going to struggle naming some that are not listed here: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html

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

#219

Post by tyre »

melesian wrote: post #54
tyre wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US hegemony has been a tremendous boon to the world. Yes, the US has done terrible things (lots in South America, Vietnam, genocide in East Timor, failed nation building and war crimes in the Middle East, support for genocide in Palestine, etc.) This isn’t to minimize that. But the reality is that the US benefits immensely from free democracies with rules-based open markets and international order. Again, do we b…

The absence of war in Europe is more down to the EU than the US. Polls do not consistently show anything of the sort.

Yes, they do:

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/international-...

People globally have routinely acknowledged that:

1. The US is a hegemony that meddles in others’ affairs

2. It does so selfishly, despite the high flying rhetoric about freedom, democracy, etc.

3. This is good

The preconditions for absence of war in Europe came before the EU existed and has to do with the post-WWII balance of power, which was heavily driven by the United States.

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

#220

Post by tyre »

GaryBluto wrote: post #177
tyre wrote: post #23

As an American, this is awesome to see. We should pay penalties for our abandonment of good faith global engagement. And economic damage really is the key to the heart of these United States of Three Corporations in a Trench Coat. We’ve seen companies and CEOs paying millions in bribes to be close to the president. Now this aligns their financial interests with shifting our foreign policy. Not how it ought to work, b…

It's so strange reading all these comments from Americans begging to be punished for collective misdeeds. It reads as unsettlingly masochistic.

It’s in the US’s best interests to be a rule follower. It maintains our status as a global reserve currency. It gives our passports access to almost every country without visas. It attracts foreign investment.

As a US citizen, it is incredibly in my selfish interest for the US to not be a shitty friend. Just as it is in our selfish interest to promote democracy, less corruption, and free markets.

While I agree with those things, morally, they are also in the pure self-interest of the United States.

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