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The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

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Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#71

Post by silvestrov »

roenxi wrote: post #2

One of the interesting things about real colonialism is that the Europeans had wildly better legal infrastructure, that supported wildly better economic infrastructure, which supported wildly better military technology, which supported colonies. The proof in the pudding is that Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that, they…

The Elephant in the room: all the different languages in Europe and it is only recently (past 10-20 years) that English proficiency has become high enough. This made communication difficult and still makes it very difficult to get people to move to another country. (edit: you need to know the local language to get any kind of social life).

Compare getting someone to move from Chicago to San Francisco (same language, same culture) versus getting someone to move from Norway to Italy (completely different language, very different culture).

So USA had a much larger effective work force when a company wanted to hire developers and much easier marketing of the products.

Europe had a lot of computer hardware companies in the 1980's but they were never able to capture the full European market. So they died out due to lack of scale.

There is also the problem of every single country wanting to be a king, so there was no political will to say "we need to join forces and create one single SV" (or one single unix company).

Still today EU can't create an European Silicon Valley as you don't get a SV by saying "we want a SV here", you get it by saying "everywhere else is NOT going to be a SV".

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#72

Post by oriolid »

croes wrote: post #54
dijit wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that even help? Are we forgetting decades of office suite incompatibility? The main reason most european companies use Office365 over alternatives is: 1. Fear of retraining 2. Fear of untrodden path but most crucially: 3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses

>3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF. Most of Words featured aren't used anyway because most people don't know them. The rest is some Excel tools somebody once created which heavily rely on VBA but nobody can support them because they guy who made them already has left the company. Have seen that…

> That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF.

PDF embedding attacks have been a thing for years.

Personally I think that the culture of sending everything as a Word or Excel attachment has a lot to do with the dominance of MS office but if you can't avoid Office-like applications the other options are even worse.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#73

Post by oezi »

fulafel wrote: post #11
kfk wrote: post #5

The challenge with Microsoft in Europe is that it is so convenient, it doesn’t make business sense to consider alternatives. See how easily MS won market share over Slack (MS Teams) and PowerBI (Tableau / Qlik). They have such a big bundle of services that any single player has to be either amazingly good, or specialized, to win maybe 1-2% of market share. The only way I see Europe doing something about it is antitru…

The convenience and business sense argument could make sense if the value of a communication platform was small and close to its cost. But it's not. Similarly as it doesn't make business sense to rent the cheapest or easiest to lease office exactly because a good office to your company is more valuable than its cost. People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality, effecting a large drag on communication. It's a…

People don't hate Teams. It is competitive enough against Zoom and Google Meet (which is the worst of the three) for people to use it for video conferencing.

As a slack competitor Teams is arguably worse, but for people who haven't used Slack the difference is hard to justify switching.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#74

Post by relistan »

rurban wrote: post #53
sharpneli wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another issue are non competes. Everyone wants to get a tech sector like California but insist on having non competition agreements being either valid or conditionally valid meaning there is a gray area that stifles innovation.

> gray area that stifles innovation Innovation by theft? Well, California is a very special outlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause

Many other places would like to be an outlier like California. Paying more attention to what makes it that way is probably a good place to start.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#75

Post by Rinzler89 »

maigret wrote: post #49
yobbo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is product/market/financing; not in personnel or organisation. Airbus and Dassault are doing fine because they have well defined stable markets and (probably) government funding.

This doesn't fit LVMH which had tech-like growth in the last decade.

Veblen goods aren't like tech products.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#76

Post by SllX »

Barrin92 wrote: post #15
roenxi wrote: post #2

One of the interesting things about real colonialism is that the Europeans had wildly better legal infrastructure, that supported wildly better economic infrastructure, which supported wildly better military technology, which supported colonies. The proof in the pudding is that Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that, they…

>Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft Nah, what hinders software development at that scale is literally just... scale and network effects. Europe has a significantly better legal infrastructure than Russia or China (which routinely kills entire sectors for random reasons) but Europe is not a homogenous isolated market of hundreds of millions…

> Looking at it another way, what's the American competition for Microsoft?

Computers: Apple and Google (Chromebooks are big in education). Server operating systems: various flavors of Linux, but I guess basically IBM since they bought Red Hat. Cloud services: Amazon. Office software: Google. Databases: Oracle. Name some slice or segment of all of these companies and there’s usually (though not always) a direct American competitor worth naming in the same breath even though each has their own specialty and none compete in their totality with each other.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#77

Post by Rinzler89 »

impossiblefork wrote: post #43
Kwpolska wrote: post #29

What viable European alternatives to Microsoft Office are there? Google Docs is also a US-based cloud service. LibreOffice is ugly, its UX is sometimes worse than Office 2003 (especially Calc, where pivot tables have to be blindly configured in a modal dialog, and there is no equivalent to the Table feature from Excel), and they still haven't implemented automatically downloading updates.

I like plaintext documents. I think it's the future, since it's compact and LLMs can consume it without having to consume strange tokens. For typesetting and presentations that have be 'nice' I use TeX and beamer. For the kind of stuff MS users use Excel for I use R. For presentations that don't have to be nice I use nano, plaintext and then just scale up the text.

>I like plaintext documents. [...] I use TeX and beamer

He probably meant an alternative to Office for companies and average people not tech enthusiasts. Nobody is gonna switch to raw text files and TeX.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#78

Post by usr1106 »

personomas wrote: post #64
mordae wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually spot on. We are all looking pretty nervously at the possibility of Trump's return. He'd be definitely willing to throw us under the Putin bus for a couple million USD laundered through his golf club or hotel bookings. And you wouldn't actually revolt and do anything about that. So, on a whole, not really allies. Just other people who individually may or may not be our friends.

I don't support Trump, I don't like Trump; however, although Trump says a lot of shit, he's no where near the level of Putin or Xi in terms of what he actually does. Even under Trump, America would still definitely definitely be an ally.

Trump is nowhere near the level of Putin or Xi in following evil goals or keeping his office organized and loyal.

But in the role of US president he would be able to do equal harm, just by acting like a 5 year old.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#79

Post by Aerroon »

Barrin92 wrote: post #15
roenxi wrote: post #2

One of the interesting things about real colonialism is that the Europeans had wildly better legal infrastructure, that supported wildly better economic infrastructure, which supported wildly better military technology, which supported colonies. The proof in the pudding is that Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that, they…

>Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft Nah, what hinders software development at that scale is literally just... scale and network effects. Europe has a significantly better legal infrastructure than Russia or China (which routinely kills entire sectors for random reasons) but Europe is not a homogenous isolated market of hundreds of millions…

Are Russia and China actually worse on legal infrastructure when it comes to building software? Because I seem to use more Chinese software than European ones.

Re: The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

#80

Post by pjmlp »

heyycppl wrote: post #66

Linux on the desktop is utopian. Even in 2024, it is plagued with millions of bugs. I can't use Linux for an hour on a desktop PC without encountering some issue. On the other hand, MacBooks and Windows PCs just work seamlessly, without any problems whatsoever. This is solely the fault of Linux developers, who, instead of developing one system well, create dozens of half-baked package managers, desktop environments,…

As someone that learned UNIX when Microsoft still sold Xenix, and used multiple flavours of it, was a Linux Journal subscriber since its early days, I occasionanly go down into one of those Desktop Linux rabbit holes only to repent myself afterwards.

Latest adventure an UEFI only motherboard (no BIOS backwards compatibility available), that no matter what, refuses to reckognise SSD NVMe that hold Linux instead of Windows.

Yes, one can complain the pesky OEMs still not being Linux Desktop friendly after 30 years, which in pratice doesn't matter to the regular consumer.

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