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France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

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Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#571

Post by jillesvangurp »

beloch wrote: post #246
softwaredoug wrote: post #113

Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy 1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans 2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market 3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with Englis…

Don't take the Canadian market for granted. There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.

With 40M people, Canada is about half the size of Germany in terms of population and GDP. Also smaller than France. Canada is more similar in GDP to countries like Italy. The Spanish economy is a bit smaller but it has slightly more people (48M). The EU + UK is a bit over half a billion people.

The thing with Zoom, Meets, Teams, etc. is that these aren't that hard to replicate. There is not much of a technical moat. It doesn't take a very large startup to create your own version of that. And given what a basket case teams is, it's also not that hard to do much better. There have been plenty of alternatives over the years. Network effect is what drives the growth there, not technical quality.

So if the French want to use something else, all they have to do is pick something and they might get the network effect through mass adoption. That would work better if the whole of the EU does it of course. We'd still need a solution if we want to talk to people in the US. The reason why US drives the network effect traditionally is its trade relations. It's convenient for everyone to use the same tools and solutions.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#572

Post by palata »

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #545
alopha wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something tells me when the 'something' is a major trade deal with China suddenly it'll be 'oh my god how could you'. The US wants a EU vassal, what they're going to get is an EU that realigned itself to be politically and economically equidistant from the US and China.

EU aligning heavily with China is a fantasy. You really think EU is going to ally with China over japan, south korea, philipines, and Australia? You really think Russia's current number 1 ally is all of a sudden going to be best friends with EU? China and North korea are ACTIVELY supporting a war in Europe! China has openly threatened Australia. There are literal north korean troops shooting Europeans right now. Who…

They said "to be politically and economically equidistant from the US and China".

I don't see any mention of being "best friends" with China. It's not like if the US was exactly a "friend" at all these days.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#573

Post by watwut »

xp84 wrote: post #458
ryandrake wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Trump is just a symptom. If he disappeared tomorrow, the people who elected him are still here, and they still want the same things: Belligerence, Cruelty, Isolationism, and lots of other terrible things. When Trump is no longer in the picture, they'll find a new candidate who offers this.

You don't have to convince every Trump voter. The margin who swung from Biden to Trump and elected Trump aren't all those things. They just don't want what the Dems were selling in 2024, specifically: the dems' adopted ideology surrounding gender, plus using race and gender to pick who gets jobs and into schools, rather than merit. If they removed just those two planks from the DNC platform, (1) Harris would have nev…

> They just don't want what the Dems were selling in 2024, specifically: the dems' adopted ideology surrounding gender, plus using race and gender to pick who gets jobs and into schools, rather than merit.

Except that, none of this is true. Democrats did not run on such policy at all. They heavily tried to appeal to center.

Republicans run on culture war. And won, because it literally did not mattered what democratic party run on - republican lies won. And they will win again with the same tactic.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#574

Post by palata »

Epa095 wrote: post #258
SirMaster wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck getting the EU off Android and iOS?

It would take Samsung (or what's left of Nokia) a whole 10 seconds to produce a Google-free phone based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) if there was a market for it. Which it might soon be.

They "just" have to make a phone that can be supported by GrapheneOS.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#575

Post by oblio »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #543
oblio wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> US: "stop killing innovation" EU: " more regulation" Have you ever stopped to think that maybe a large number of Europeans look at the lack of US regulation with disgust?

And a few innovative Europeans look on EU regulation with disgust and leave, taking their companies with them.

It's not ideal, but the EU has 450 million people. It can probably survive.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#577

Post by microtonal »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #269
toomuchtodo wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe will then redirect the 300B euros it was investing in US treasuries annually to Eurobonds, while redirecting the $300M in purchasing from US companies to EU companies. This is biting the hand that feeds the US. Europe will buy LNG from Canada instead of the US, and continue to purchase imports from China. I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the…

lol hahaha Europe will "say" and maybe in a few decades they might get around to starting some of that. Europe still buys gas from Russia; can't even ween itself off it during a war.

lol hahaha Europe will "say" and maybe in a few decades

In the local harbor, they built an LNG terminal in 6 months (Eemshaven, NL).

The Russian invasion was on February 24, 2022. They opened an LNG terminal on September 8, 2022.

My primary lessons of previous crises (2008-2010 financial crisis, COVID, 2022 invasion) is that under pressure EU/EU countries can do things very quickly and do things well. The pundits always say the next crisis breaks the EU, but it always ends up with the EU being stronger and more unified than before.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#578

Post by davkan »

nunez wrote: post #294
Synaesthesia wrote: post #11

We need more like this. Europe is totally dependent on US companies for cloud computing.

I don't think a cloud provider that is _just_ a cloud provider exists. All of the cloud providers I can think of (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Baidu, etc) are subsidiaries of larger corporations whose profit centers are elsewhere. The capital requirements needed to spin up a public cloud and the services that come with that are absolutely massive. It makes me think that cloud computing, despite the gigan…

For what it’s worth, Amazon’s largest profit center is AWS. Likewise for Microsoft and Azure.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#579

Post by microtonal »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #414
FpUser wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure)." So after Russia fails "a strong EU" is no longer needed? Also waiting for Russian economy to fail may prove to be forever and not even desirable. Changing the system of government to one that treats people like it should is much better goal

Putin will need to die for Russia to change. Change is not possible in Russia until then. A strong EU is required post Russia. Until then, starve the Russian economy of fossil fuel export revenue (which funds their war efforts). They have liquidated a majority of their gold reserves and have exhausted a majority of their military hardware stockpiles. If we wanted to wrap this up, we’d be bombing their oil and gas exp…

If we wanted to wrap this up, we’d be bombing their oil and gas export facilities, but it appears we haven’t made it to that milestone yet.

Ukraine seems to be doing that pretty well.

Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.

#580

Post by palata »

astrolx wrote: post #291

I work at a French research institute and our Zoom contract ends soon so we get to switch to Visio. It's not too bad but quite tier below Zoom. Noise cancellation is not great, being browser based also comes with limitations, in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam ...

> in half my meetings people don't manage to find the permissions to allow mic and/or webcam

They will learn :-)

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