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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

#81

Post by Aerroon »

ratg13 wrote: post #63
troupo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that You're phrasing it in a way that makes this scale seem like a good thing. Is it? I'm not convinced that the scale of supranational grow-at-all-costs uncontrollable corporations is good

The complaint that because Europe doesn’t support monopolies as well as America that makes them “behind” is likely the silliest argument I will read today. Yet, here it is the top comment. It reflects strongly on the American audience here.

It reflects the importance of software. It's not like Europe foregoes using this software. No, we just use the American/Chinese software instead and become dependent on it.

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

#83

Post by impossiblefork »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #77
impossiblefork wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did use this for actual work at a major European software/technology firm though, and nobody complained.

That is, actual presentations made from scaled-up nano, mini-manuals for the team written in plaintext, etc.

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

#84

Post by kaliszad »

inglor wrote: post #40
oneshtein wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that when data is stored in the cloud, I don't have full control over it. My data hold as hostage against me. We need to break up data storage from data processing. Imagine if all your data was stored in a secure, independent location, like a large vault. You could then choose which services could access your data, allowing you to use multiple services simultaneously. Better, if this will be on browser…

Hi, I work for Microsoft (just a dev), all (most?) our apps are actually designed to work with third party compliant hosting with an open protocol called WOPI. So for example you can use Excel online with Sharepoint/OneDrive (two different hosts btw) but you can also use many maany third party hosts. Additionally third party tools can programmatically access the first party hosts (like sharepoint). I don't like Micro…

That doesn't seem to be accurate. [0] [1] Microsoft consistently does mistakes that put its customers at risk, like being unable to secure their development environment so that when encryption keys leak in a badly sanitized dump into the dev environment they are almost immediately misused by other state actors against the US federal agencies. [2] How can you trust anything that comes out of the development if you cannot be reasonably sure about the security of it? And we cant really trust Microsoft reports either because of "Inaccurate public statements" (euphemism for lying). [0]

And if you argue with Andres Freund and the XZ discovery recently, he is really a Citus guy. Yes, that is now part of Microsoft but I guess you get my point of him not being directly hired by Microsoft AFAIK.

Microsoft as an organization could and should really do a lot more for security and privacy than they do. But first the culture would need to be that there actually is a lot of low hanging fruit instead of searching for excuses. [3] For instance, Windows Updates could be more reliable, predictable in how long they run and much faster overall. Windows could detect and stop ransomware much better. Microsoft could make Windows Server Core cheaper and have a separate more expensive license for the "full fat" Windows Server with desktop services. That would put some pressure on organizations to do the right thing and reduce the attack surface area.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/micro... [1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/chaosdb-how-we-hacked-thousands-of-a... [2] https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-tec... [3] https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/it-takes-a-phd-to-develop-t...

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

#85

Post by Rinzler89 »

impossiblefork wrote: post #83
Rinzler89 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I did use this for actual work at a major European software/technology firm though, and nobody complained. That is, actual presentations made from scaled-up nano, mini-manuals for the team written in plaintext, etc.

I also used it at work in the SW team. Nobody else in the company used it tho. Everyone only used office 365 and that's that.

Stop extrapolating that your niche experience somehow is the norm.

There's a reason why companies prefer to pay for office instead of using raw text and latex files for free.

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

#86

Post by thrance »

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…

Honestly, I really don't see the point of having such megacoroporations here.

What has Apple and Microsoft done for Americans ? They pay little to no taxes, they spy on everyone, they provide increasingly terrible products...

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

#87

Post by impossiblefork »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #85
impossiblefork wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did use this for actual work at a major European software/technology firm though, and nobody complained. That is, actual presentations made from scaled-up nano, mini-manuals for the team written in plaintext, etc.

I also used it at work in the SW team. Nobody else in the company used it tho. Everyone only used office 365 and that's that. Stop extrapolating that your niche experience somehow is the norm. There's a reason why companies prefer to pay for office instead of using raw text and latex files for free.

My point is really that it could easily be the norm though.

There's nothing hard about writing plain text files. You just need to write good English and have some feel for text as a medium.

In some way there's less to learn there than in word, where you can bold things, insert images, etc.

People outside this niche have even less need for complicated functionality. A sales team that writes in word could have written in plaintext, and have had an organised picture of all their doings, with little details, that will eventually be machine-digestable. The only problem is if you want to write mathematics, but then you have LaTeX.

An in-between solution, if you want things a little bit conventional, is markdown.

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

#88

Post by Rinzler89 »

impossiblefork wrote: post #87
Rinzler89 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also used it at work in the SW team. Nobody else in the company used it tho. Everyone only used office 365 and that's that. Stop extrapolating that your niche experience somehow is the norm. There's a reason why companies prefer to pay for office instead of using raw text and latex files for free.

My point is really that it could easily be the norm though. There's nothing hard about writing plain text files. You just need to write good English and have some feel for text as a medium. In some way there's less to learn there than in word, where you can bold things, insert images, etc. People outside this niche have even less need for complicated functionality. A sales team that writes in word could have written…

>My point is really that it could easily be the norm though.

It couldn't and the proof is in the pudding. If it were that easy as you make it seem, we would have done it a long time ago.

Non-tech people hate switching away form office since that's the only thing they know how to use comfortably, especially to janky stuff like latex that's not WYSIWYG and needs to be compiled. Nobody is gonna use that shit.

And non-tech people are the ones who sign the checks that make the purchasing decisions, and those people hate any kind of friction, hence why companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc are so successful.

Your view on things rings like that infamous HN comment form 2007 saying why Dropbox is a useless invention doomed to fail since we can host files locally on git and easily spin up a FTP server to share them if we want to.

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

#89

Post by kaliszad »

longhornjs wrote: post #70
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 EU has compelled companies to switch to Microsoft — yes, you read that correctly. The EU introduced the GDPR law, which significantly increased the complexity of using third-party services. To minimize this complexity, companies found it more straightforward to consolidate their services with Microsoft, as it facilitates easier compliance with EU GDPR regulations. Once again, we can thank the EU for pressuring co…

That seems like checkbox-compliance theater. Also doesn't seem to be supported by official findings. There are notions that actually you cannot be fully GDPR compliant with Microsoft 365. [0] Therefore state organizations sometimes do migrate to different offerings. [1]

[0] https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/pre... [1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/germanys_northernmost...

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

#90

Post by personomas »

usr1106 wrote: post #78
personomas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not true. America is still a democracy. The US as a whole is an ally to the West and Europe.
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