Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 820 posts

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

#641

Post by ares623 »

natas wrote: post #637

> France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc. The odds that France will provide a competing offering is pretty high, because, in this day and age, and with AI, it's fairly straightforward to do so. The problem is adoption, do you think people in the USA or elsewhere will install it? Does that mean that only French companies and the French will be able to talk to eachother? Seems somewhat limitin…

France’s govt can probably mandate adoption in the guise of national security (which would be true tbh) and with the current rhetoric their people will be welcoming of it. It’ll probably suck but the tradeoffs could be worth it, not too unlike rationing during WW2 times. And I’m sure there are a lot of engineers and companies looking forward to getting that sweet govt contracts.

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

#642

Post by tanganik »

ornornor wrote: post #348
XorNot wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams won by being good enough and bundled into O365. There's probably some value in making a product so available that people can use it where normally they wouldn't have the opportunity.

Teams won by being bundled with the rest of the Microsoft stack and shoved down captive (corporate) users throats.

I was going to comment that teams doesn't have threads and slack may still win long term, but turns out teams added threads in the last couple of months(1). So yeah.

1: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoftteamsblog/...

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

#643

Post by mlrtime »

ninalanyon wrote: post #587
jillesvangurp wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

We need the EU to do for software what it did for device charging and require interoperability. There used to be several 'universal' chat clients, for example Pidgin.

Bring back ICQ!

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

#644

Post by mlrtime »

mmasu wrote: post #608
kettlecorn wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decades long level of trust in the US and its institutions was unprecedented and built off of the tremendous goodwill and momentum post WW2. It was an unusually high degree of trust, and now it's unusually low. Even if the US reverses its policies it will take a very long time to rebuild trust, and even then the historical warning marker of the Trump admin will be studied as a reason to never return to the prior…

yesterday in an article here on HN i read a wonderful dutch proverb: “trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback” seems it’s applicable to this case too. Sad to see decades of work being tore apart in a few months.

Where does money land on that proverb?

Meaning people have very short term memories when some sort of financial incentive is inserted.

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

#645

Post by jillesvangurp »

storystarling wrote: post #609
jillesvangurp wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I'm not sure I agree about the lack of a technical moat. While spinning up a basic WebRTC wrapper is trivial, the real challenge is the global distributed systems engineering required for low latency and reliability at scale. You need a massive edge network to handle routing, jitter buffering, and packet loss effectively across continents. It seems like the hard part isn't the client, but ensuring it actually works r…

This stuff was state of the art 15-20 years ago, it's more of a commodity now.

That doesn't mean it's easy or cheap. The moat is more in the installed base of data centers, edge networking, etc. US cloud providers undeniably have a bit of a head start there.

But the EU has a lot of domestic infrastructure as well. And the US outsourced a lot of things as well. E.g. mobile infrastructure and networking is now dominated by Chinese (Huawei) and European companies (Ericson, Nokia). Former telecom giants like Motorola seem to have faded away. Nokia actually owns Bell Labs currently. And of course a lot of the software involved is open source with a very international developer community. The hardware comes from Asia or in some cases Europe. ASML is Dutch, ARM is nominally still headquartered in the UK. Ownership of these companies is of course more complex.

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

#646

Post by mlrtime »

ropable wrote: post #511
xp84 wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> weaponized against us I take a more optimistic stance here. Trump can only live so long, and everybody except basically Trump and John Bolton knows that the majority of his idiotic tariffs (and nonsensical belligerence like pretending NATO control of Greenland doesn't meet all our defense needs) are wealth-destroying on net, as well as wealth-destroying for at least 10x the number of people than they help (many of…

Trump has done/is doing generational harm to the perception of the US worldwide, to say nothing of US soft-power influence. It's going to take decades to rebuild that trust after he's gone, and we still have a couple of years of his term to run yet.

> It's going to take decades to rebuild that trust after he's gone

I see this over and over again, wish there was some way to bet on it. But it would be difficult in 10 years to say cause and effect.

People have short term memories unless harmed very specifically / directly. Not indirectly affected.

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

#647

Post by mlrtime »

JCattheATM wrote: post #518
terminalshort wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who was the moderate candidate? We had Trump and a candidate who wanted to continue the open borders policy and racial quota system in hiring and university admissions.

Moderate/smoderate. There was an insane choice, which people chose to vote to the detriment of most, and a sane candidate, which people rejected due to misinformation and bigotry.

>misinformation and bigotry

Please don't keep repeating this, this is why Democrats lost. Being out of touch.

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

#648

Post by DFHippie »

joe_mamba wrote: post #619
watwut wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[flagged]

This is what you were told the Democrats ran on, not what they ran on. You got all your information from partisans who lied about the other party.

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

#649

Post by balamatom »

mlrtime wrote: post #644
mmasu wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yesterday in an article here on HN i read a wonderful dutch proverb: “trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback” seems it’s applicable to this case too. Sad to see decades of work being tore apart in a few months.

Where does money land on that proverb? Meaning people have very short term memories when some sort of financial incentive is inserted.

Well, ask yourself where'd it get the horse

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

#650

Post by card_zero »

TheRoque wrote: post #461
cmiles8 wrote: post #70

I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale. The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.

> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking. Classic neo-liberalism BS (pardon my french). Markets are not some natural law written in the atoms, it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want. Countries can create or destroy markets just with laws, you put a tax here, you put a legal req…

> it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want

That's a category error. It's a social construction, a thing that emerges from the interactions of many humans. "We", an authority nominally working for the citizens, can shape it by using the law, a blunt instrument. It's like how you can shape the development of a musician by using threats and a baseball bat.

Post reply on HN