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The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

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Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#31

Post by yobbo »

Barrin92 wrote: post #15
roenxi wrote: post #2

One of the interesting things about real colonialism is that the Europeans had wildly better legal infrastructure, that supported wildly better economic infrastructure, which supported wildly better military technology, which supported colonies. The proof in the pudding is that Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that, they…

>Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft Nah, what hinders software development at that scale is literally just... scale and network effects. Europe has a significantly better legal infrastructure than Russia or China (which routinely kills entire sectors for random reasons) but Europe is not a homogenous isolated market of hundreds of millions…

Also; there might exist a phenomenon such that MS products allow "consolidation" of influence/power in big/old organisations. For example, Slack would need to be a bottom-up initiative in most organisations, whereas MS Teams is a top-down initiative.

MS Teams is lower risk from the perspective of management as it creates less of an alternative "center-of-gravity" for power.

Maybe it's more common in Europe for prestigious positions/roles (as opposed to compensation) to be used as reward/incentive (as opposed to a tool for change). Not sure.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#32

Post by the_cramer »

moooo99 wrote: post #28
Kwpolska wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

This is worthy of some sources, no? People on HN, technology professionals, might hate office. But we're not majority and I've never seen researched/polled numbers about hating office...

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#33

Post by sharpneli »

roenxi wrote: post #2

One of the interesting things about real colonialism is that the Europeans had wildly better legal infrastructure, that supported wildly better economic infrastructure, which supported wildly better military technology, which supported colonies. The proof in the pudding is that Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that, they…

Another issue are non competes.

Everyone wants to get a tech sector like California but insist on having non competition agreements being either valid or conditionally valid meaning there is a gray area that stifles innovation.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#34

Post by eastbound »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #13
eastbound wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Silicon valley was largely built by immigrants too. I believe in this concept, people who have enough determination to move are already above some potential energy threshold. And this threshold despite being relatively low still cuts off a huge part of local population who didn't have to pass it. I've seen it at work both for internal and international moves.

By focussing on immigration, you missed the main point. I’ll simplify as: French people eat the rich.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#35

Post by LtWorf »

personomas wrote: post #27
wazoox wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

US isn't an ally… They do their best interest and nobody else's.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#36

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

Kwpolska wrote: post #29

What 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.

LibreOffice isn't going to win any beauty pageants, but it does everything you need in an office setting.

Some specialists can't live without MS Excel and all of its extensions (banking), but that's not the common case. Common case is word processing, slide presentations, and task management (in spreadsheets).

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#38

Post by personomas »

LtWorf wrote: post #35
personomas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

US isn't an ally… They do their best interest and nobody else's.

That's utter nonsense.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#39

Post by Chiba-City »

dijit wrote: post #14
oneshtein wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that when data is stored in the cloud, I don't have full control over it. My data hold as hostage against me. We need to break up data storage from data processing. Imagine if all your data was stored in a secure, independent location, like a large vault. You could then choose which services could access your data, allowing you to use multiple services simultaneously. Better, if this will be on browser…

How would that even help? Are we forgetting decades of office suite incompatibility? The main reason most european companies use Office365 over alternatives is: 1. Fear of retraining 2. Fear of untrodden path but most crucially: 3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses

[dead]

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#40

Post by inglor »

oneshtein wrote: post #6
kfk wrote: post #5

The 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 problem is that when data is stored in the cloud, I don't have full control over it. My data hold as hostage against me. We need to break up data storage from data processing. Imagine if all your data was stored in a secure, independent location, like a large vault. You could then choose which services could access your data, allowing you to use multiple services simultaneously. Better, if this will be on browser…

Hi, I work for Microsoft (just a dev), all (most?) our apps are actually designed to work with third party compliant hosting with an open protocol called WOPI.

So for example you can use Excel online with Sharepoint/OneDrive (two different hosts btw) but you can also use many maany third party hosts.

Additionally third party tools can programmatically access the first party hosts (like sharepoint).

I don't like Microsoft-esque APIs and the company sure has issues here and there but I doubt you'd get the same level of data privacy with a startup (e.g. everything goes through privacy review, security review, devs can't access customer data, data is separated by region etc)

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