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Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

theregister.com

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Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#41

Post by Mossy9 »

incomingpain wrote: post #37

Microsoft either has a good product that is wanted or it doesnt and was anticompetitive. cough cough. The EU absolutely should try to stand up their own tech infrastructure. Entire supply chain. chips, software, everything. Absolutely needs to happen eventually. The problem with the EU is singlular; there has been loads of anti-microsoft folks attempting to beat them for basically forever. Unsuccessfully. They dont h…

I'm very hopeful that https://www.euro-stack.info will not be a pipe dream, but actually produces results

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#42

Post by ekianjo »

noosphr wrote: post #19
philipallstar wrote: post #2

I think this is long overdue, just like Europe's sudden investment in militaries to pull its weight in global defence. More competition is better.

Global military competition is usually called a world war and is generally a bad thing.

A single superpower is called living in servitude so pick your poison

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#44

Post by jajko »

noosphr wrote: post #19
philipallstar wrote: post #2

I think this is long overdue, just like Europe's sudden investment in militaries to pull its weight in global defence. More competition is better.

Global military competition is usually called a world war and is generally a bad thing.

Well if one big dictatorship bully starts attacking around for made up reasons, stating wiping out half of continent with nuclear strikes repeatedly, or just roll over the place with a massive conventional army to enslave its population... only a fool remains still.

And worse than fool in case of said dictatorship which already enslaved half of said continent for decades in the recent past, infecting those societies with their corrupt ways of life, terror and ruling that still affect those places to this day very negatively.

I know about this a bit since I was raised in one such place and saw it all before, during and after fall of Iron curtain. Russians/Soviets were feared even when they were liberating these lands from nazis - they stole everything they could from common folks (soldiers carrying many watches on their hands that needed to be removed in propaganda photos later) and raped whom they could. Not all of them just to be clear, but many many (stories of my grandparents).

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#45

Post by agumonkey »

apatheticonion wrote: post #20

I'd love to see the EU aggressively expand investment in the Linux desktop. I'd absolutely drop my job and jump on FOSS projects if there was financial incentive to do so - I'd even take a hit on compensation to participate.

Windows is making people annoyed more and more (saying this as a guy who grew up with it and is still not anti windows) and with the recent trump 2 / use-european-tech .. it might be a clear enough narrative for people to try linux distros. Fedora 41 on a 2015 laptop is lean and cute.. enough for most normies IMO. It could be a boost for everybody, no need to buy a new laptop, simpler times without Microsoft pulling shenanigans every year, more open source market share.

ps: just in time for https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1kc074t/linux_us_mar...

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#46

Post by Mossy9 »

cruzcampo wrote: post #40
Mossy9 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First order of business should be to detach the governments from Microsoft. Probably the hardest part of this whole tangle is that the governing bodies are so bound to MS that any move can hit back twice as hard. It's easier to legislate the consumer side, since it's not directly affecting the efficiency and budgets of the organizations making the legislation. Thankfully, it seems that a movement from inside governme…

Are there any specific Microsoft products you would prioritize? I'd envision building a plug-in replacement to facilitate switching.

That's a tricky one. From my bubble, the first thing I would to is to stop digging the hole any deeper - stopping any ongoing Azure (and other US cloud migrations), not buying into new products such as MS Fabric etc.

But what really would rock the boat would be a MS 365 competitor, since that's currently suffocating everything, because everything is included: email, files, office suite, chat... None of these have to be the Same Product (and I'd prefer specialization), but the integration between different apps should be painless. So, protocols.

If nation states could onshore that package, it would even out the playing field for the other, more optional applications

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#47

Post by pjmlp »

pjc50 wrote: post #3

> "The Cloud Act grants US authorities access to cloud data hosted by US companies. It does not matter if that data is located in the US, Europe, or anywhere else." Exactly. So long as that is true, the idea that an EU datacenter run by Microsoft can be "sovereign" is nonsense. Having an in-EU owned cloud becomes a national security issue. Tech independence is a long way off though. I wonder if, like the carbon trans…

To fully achieve independence, we need to move away from US based operating systems, and programming languages that aren't under independent foundations or international standards.

Long way indeed, but how knows it could be the year of SuSE desktop or something like that.

And naturally Siemens and Nokia could have another go at phones, or maybe everyone should get a Jolla one.

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#48

Post by impossiblefork »

graemep wrote: post #34
cruzcampo wrote: post #21

What would said tech independence actually take? Which American services would be highest priority to replace? In other words, if I were an EU startup, who should I compete with/try to clone?

Two different questions. From a public interest point of view I would say AWS, GCP and Azure From the likelihood of a business being successful probably less well entrenched services, and ones politicians understand - so probably things directly used by consumers and very visible. Probably SaaS of some kind. Also, its not just the EU (which is what the article is about). Non EU European countries, and the rest of the…

My hope was that this would allow us to move away from SaaS, get a fast native software ecosystem where you store the data on your own machines.

Going back to the old ways, where software was shrink wrapped, fast and local. So if that's where we end up I think we failed to make use of the potential in this forced decoupling event.

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#49

Post by mattlondon »

Related: https://www.s3ns.io/en

This is GCP run in an independent, non-google-owned air-gapped data center, operated by local employees in France. No US connection at all - Google just license their software from what I understand, and have no remote or physical access, so even if they did get a secret order to do something, they couldn't.

This sort of thing is the way to go

Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

#50

Post by kubb »

cruzcampo wrote: post #31
kubb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... If Europe has no industry, how do they pay for American Clouds?

If Europe has no industry, why is Trump so upset about the trade deficit in goods?

Property 8: at the same time too strong and too weak
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