Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current US administration wants a captive Europe. One that buys its defense, energy and technology products from them. One that sells its territory, regulations and know-how to them. Ask the Department of State if they'd like a European-sized French attitude and strategic autonomy.
Current admin has been on record for years saying the same thing. Warning EU about russia, warning EU about China, warning them about not innovating. I don't know if this was planned internally but it seems the way they figured out how to get EU to actually do something is to make it seem like big bad trump is going to hurt them. Current admin has gotten more out of EU than 20years of asking nicely. Before: US: "plea…
France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
661–670 of 820 posts
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 dominate…
For Slack and Teams, I'd say not even that is necessary. They're not meant as broadcast tools, even if they could be used as such, they're tools for… well, for teams. Either within a single company or B2B stuff. Given how powerful all the client devices are, the remaining work of the server to coordinate them all should, in 99% of cases, be so low that you can offload it to someone's bluetooth earbuds (as per recent story of Doom being ported and the conversions it led to about the typical modern embedded processor, and what we could do back when servers were that powerful).
It's not like every Slack/Teams instance is also running some clone of Google's Page Rank indexing of the entire internet locally.
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#663Earlier 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.
The higher the risk of e.g. a loan, the more interest it has to pay out to be worthwhile. The exact amount* is, as I understand it, governed by the Black–Scholes model.
* probably with some spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum assumptions given how the misuse of this model was a factor in the global financial crisis.
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone is optimizing for total comp. Some are optimizing for better lives. It's not a wild concept considering how many people get pulled into startups, 90% of which fail, under the guide of "mission" and lower market comp. Do you pick a mostly assured better quality of life? Or an equity payout lottery ticket/fairy tale? Certainly, there is a minority of folks making wild comp at FAANG, but that is a privilege…
> Some are optimizing for better lives Of course. I just hope these people know that for example healthcare in Europe is by no means free.
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#665Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not clear that anything will be kneecapped. You need more than a desire to not use these products, you also need a viable alternative. Using products from China or Russia probably isn't deemed viable if the concern is politics, which leads to a need for Europe or Canada to build alternatives. They have not been good at this for a long time, maybe that will change, but it's not clear that it will.
India. Today India invited President of EU commission on its republic day & I feel like there are discussions on signing free trade agreement. I was in my car watching it live when I recognized the President of EU commissioner and I was like hey!! I feel like friendly relations of EU and India are definitely on the rise & I have said this previously as well and talked to my other cousins/family who works in Coding an…
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source. Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc. Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the w…
The problem is that european politicians don't want to kill the tech $$$. They just want to bring the revenue home. They don't understand that they will never make EU big tech and that their only feasible path forward to get rid of US tech is also the path that kills the goose. But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardw…
Not necessarily. Red Hat is a billion dollar company just on FOSS support services and consulting. And if you put hundreds of thousands of clients on a completely novel FOSS stack, you're going to need several of those.
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#667> 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…
So I've opened their AWS replacement website (Outscale), Computing page. No dedicated servers (VM only). Ok let's check VM price https://en.outscale.com/customized-virtual-machines/ Press the "Do you have a Cloud Project?" which is the only button? Oops! Something went wrong here. Is this supposed to be an AWS replacement?
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#668They should probably fund their military first. It’s petulant the way the EU is throwing a hissy fit after we’ve had lop-sided trade deals for years and funding the entire NATO alliance ourselves. They act like we’re going to war with them when we’re asking for parity and for their self reliance to increase.
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
Germany elected Hitler and we pretty much trusted them again in less than 20 years.
That is a sound point. I don't think your comment should be grey. In practice, I don't think geopolitics is played in the style of "Yurusenai!" that a lot of online commenters make it sound like. The world wasn't in some benevolent kumbaya between the various players involved here. America perhaps pioneered the mutual-defense agreement as an expansion of de-facto borders. America can attack you if you attack any of i…
1. Suez Canal: UK, France, and Israel attacked Egypt for control of that. This stopped very quickly once the USA threatened to turn off the money, and by some measures marks the point where the British Empire became obviously a paper tiger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis
2. Iraq/Afghanistan and Americans pretending to be Canadian: yes, I remember this too, but this time Europe and Canada are worried about taking the role of "target", so it hits harder.
The USA can only be trusted by its allies* once again *when we are confident the USA won't turn against us, your allies*.
* NATO and EU definitely; and I assume similar feelings in Japan, Philippines, Australia, South Korea etc.
Re: France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
#670Earlier 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…
My fear as a Briton and European is that even when Trump departs, the distrust remains so long as the US continues to be so politically divided. The chance of Trump being replaced by someone similar or worse will make most European politicians (incl UK ones) throw their hands up in despair.
But the problem is, internationalist Democrats are not the whole story of the US. There's another faction, one which our allies used to be able to work with. But that half of our nation's politics has been on a long, ugly moral slide. We are imposing ridiculous and destructive tariffs based on the personal grievances of one man. But a duly-elected Congress absolutely refuses to stop him. We are still covering up massive amounts of information about pedophiles in positions of power, but Congress hasn't done more than hold a vote and refuse to follow up. And we now have masked Federal police just murdering people in our streets for peacefully exercising their 1st and 2nd amendment rights, but a significant minority of voters are still cheering it on. If the moral trajectory sinks much lower, I'm not sure there would be any sins left to commit except public devil worship.
So no, you really can't trust the United States. Not because nobody here understands honor, alliances, or even practical business. But because that's not the whole story of the United States right now. We can't even get the Epstein files released. Which, admittedly doesn't affect you much. But it's clear sign of who we're becoming, and what a critical mass of our voters will ultimately accept.