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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

#51

Post by mawadev »

Prunkton wrote: post #18
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…

I dealt with a EU//German regulator in the past about this very topic in a finance context. This behavior is peak willful ignorance. Its sold as risk planing by EU entities but after all its just liability planing. What I mean by that is, for convenience reasons everyone goes along with US Clouds knowing it is technically absolutely possible to access the data but as long the contracts are clean and state they are fo…

The entire chain of command just diverts responsibility wherever they can and then base it off of some paper that has no meaning. In the end, the volume of data that is put up there would cause so much damage, you cannot really hold anyone accountable if stuff goes wrong. Sure a company may vanish or some money moves from A to B, but the damage remains. The entire concept of trust is flawed.

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

#53

Post by diggan »

yardie wrote: post #9
rikafurude21 wrote: post #4

Anyone else see the parallel to the Trump-Tarriff debacle that has been going on - Where are the european hyperscalers? If europe cared so much about tech independence they should have invested in their own homegrown tech ~15 years ago. Sounds alot like outsourcing everything to chinese manufacturing and then complaining about being dependent on china, which is unfair! At the very least europe has noticed a problem a…

2 things happen repeatedly in the European tech scene: you get large enough to be noticed by Google, MS, Amazon, and they acquire you. Or, in order to continue to scale you move the entire company to SV, ie Spotify. If the EU stepped in to block the acquisition or corporate move, in order to keep their tech homegrown, it would be seen as government overreach and not respecting the free markets.

> scale you move the entire company to SV, ie Spotify.

AFAIK, Spotify doesn't have any presence in SV, but the US part is in NYC, besides the presence in Stockholm (obviously) and the holding company in Luxembourg.

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

#54

Post by jajko »

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…

This could be the ultimate push to open source, pushed by most if not all non-US governments globally.

As for services/products - cloud and MS. From MS - Active directory, Exchange, Outlook, Word, Excel and probably Powerpoint in no particular order. The key is not to have something basic cca working, we have those for decades and they are pretty fringe. Walking the last mile, the hardest part of smoothing integration, ironing UI, responsiveness. This would be a massive task, but worth it.

You have this, you don't need to look back at questionable US products anymore, at least not until they ship as bunch of code that you build and review locally. Goodbye NSA, back to cutting fiber optic cables on the bottom of the sea.

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

#55

Post by TowerTall »

agumonkey wrote: post #45
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…

Yes, the are making consumers more and more annoyed. The are not making enterprises annoyed. All the bloat and ads that we hear about again and again is not present in their enterprise offering.

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

#56

Post by apatheticonion »

edhelas wrote: post #33
cruzcampo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, I'd love if the EU sponsored the development of open source alternatives. I'm tired of the American tech industry and how it's towing the (anti-European) party line - just give me a way to make a living while building competitors!

They do https://nlnet.nl/core/ with https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101092990

What they already contribute is amazing, honestly. My concern is that, in order to build a genuine competitor to Windows, investment needs to increase substantially.

As it stands, getting into kernel development or working on something like a desktop environment (or adjacent software like Firefox or Chromium) is quite difficult in a way that supports you financially.

I mean, as individuals, we still invest personal time into public domain projects because we love to tinker and build stuff - but sadly we can't afford to do that full time.

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

#57

Post by cruzcampo »

apatheticonion wrote: post #56
edhelas wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do https://nlnet.nl/core/ with https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101092990

What they already contribute is amazing, honestly. My concern is that, in order to build a genuine competitor to Windows, investment needs to increase substantially. As it stands, getting into kernel development or working on something like a desktop environment (or adjacent software like Firefox or Chromium) is quite difficult in a way that supports you financially. I mean, as individuals, we still invest personal t…

This is where governments need to step in. We need grants to open source contributors as a national security priority. If you're helping build alternatives to American Big Tech, the state should sponsor that.

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

#58

Post by graemep »

impossiblefork wrote: post #48
graemep wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I would prefer that, but the GP was asking what a startup should try to do, and I think trying to get people to go back to using their own machines would be an additional barrier.

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

#59

Post by pabs3 »

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.

They are investing in FOSS, it just needs Linux desktop folks to apply for funding from them, which is happening to some extent.

https://nlnet.nl/ https://www.sovereign.tech/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

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

#60

Post by cruzcampo »

graemep wrote: post #58
impossiblefork wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. I would prefer that, but the GP was asking what a startup should try to do, and I think trying to get people to go back to using their own machines would be an additional barrier.

I do wonder if building software that runs on your own machine would be a market advantage in the EU.

One could market strongly with the data privacy / sovereignty angle that resonates a lot more in Europe than the US.

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