Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence
1–10 of 80 posts
Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence
#2I think this is long overdue, just like Europe's sudden investment in militaries to pull its weight in global defence. More competition is better.
Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence
#3> "The Cloud Act grants US authorities access to cloud data hosted by US companies. It does not matter if that data is located in the US, Europe, or anywhere else."
Exactly. So long as that is true, the idea that an EU datacenter run by Microsoft can be "sovereign" is nonsense. Having an in-EU owned cloud becomes a national security issue.
Tech independence is a long way off though. I wonder if, like the carbon transition, it will require an announced phaseout date to concentrate minds.
Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence
#4Anyone else see the parallel to the Trump-Tarriff debacle that has been going on - Where are the european hyperscalers? If europe cared so much about tech independence they should have invested in their own homegrown tech ~15 years ago. Sounds alot like outsourcing everything to chinese manufacturing and then complaining about being dependent on china, which is unfair! At the very least europe has noticed a problem and started thinking about finding a solution, which is a half step in the right direction. The best day to start is today
Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence
#5Microsoft need to get basic stuff figured out first. Point and case: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/04/windows-rdp-lets-yo...
Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence
#6While governments may be interested in moving stuff off Azure/AWS/GCP, in my experience, most businesses don't care enough. It is difficult enough to get them to spend money on the bare minimum needed for security. Yes, they will want 'sovereign data' because it looks good on the annual report, but most would not do it for double the cost.
Europe and other parts of the world should reduce their dependency on American tech, or any other tech that locks them in - regardless of it is geopolitical or something else (SAP?). They're not going to be able to do it soon, so will wait out the next four years. Governments do have a serious problem though, but are going to struggle to get the investment together.
Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence
#7Anyone else see the parallel to the Trump-Tarriff debacle that has been going on - Where are the european hyperscalers? If europe cared so much about tech independence they should have invested in their own homegrown tech ~15 years ago. Sounds alot like outsourcing everything to chinese manufacturing and then complaining about being dependent on china, which is unfair! At the very least europe has noticed a problem a…
Hyperscaler is such a middle management buzzword.
Who actually needs hyperscalers? Is it a whole company or just a single app of that company which needs hyperscaling along a certain requirement (storage, processing, bandwidth)?
And if you go into a US vs Europe comparison, SAP seems to be scaling fine. And datacenters used by netflix, cloudflare, etc. are all over the place.
Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence
#8While governments may be interested in moving stuff off Azure/AWS/GCP, in my experience, most businesses don't care enough. It is difficult enough to get them to spend money on the bare minimum needed for security. Yes, they will want 'sovereign data' because it looks good on the annual report, but most would not do it for double the cost. Europe and other parts of the world should reduce their dependency on American…
SAP is German. "Largest non-US software company by revenue", says wikipedia. Doesn't make it suck less, though.
Re: investment, there's long been a solid set of EU open source contributors, from Torvalds himself through SUSE etc. I think if we identified the right 100 people and gave them money and a sense of civic mission, the EU could achieve a lot in this area. However, the EU's own anti-subsidy rules trip it up here.
The history of Munich is very interesting here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...
Of course it's also political. If you want an alternative to US megacorps you have to put up with reds and greens.
Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence
#9Anyone else see the parallel to the Trump-Tarriff debacle that has been going on - Where are the european hyperscalers? If europe cared so much about tech independence they should have invested in their own homegrown tech ~15 years ago. Sounds alot like outsourcing everything to chinese manufacturing and then complaining about being dependent on china, which is unfair! At the very least europe has noticed a problem a…
2 things happen repeatedly in the European tech scene: you get large enough to be noticed by Google, MS, Amazon, and they acquire you. Or, in order to continue to scale you move the entire company to SV, ie Spotify.
If the EU stepped in to block the acquisition or corporate move, in order to keep their tech homegrown, it would be seen as government overreach and not respecting the free markets.
Re: Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence
#10> "The Cloud Act grants US authorities access to cloud data hosted by US companies. It does not matter if that data is located in the US, Europe, or anywhere else." Exactly. So long as that is true, the idea that an EU datacenter run by Microsoft can be "sovereign" is nonsense. Having an in-EU owned cloud becomes a national security issue. Tech independence is a long way off though. I wonder if, like the carbon trans…
Forget about access. What happens if Trump, tomorrow, orders Microsoft to cut off some government because they were mean to him or whatnot? How much leverage does a European economy running on American technology hand D.C., and do you really trust us to safeguard that power responsibly?