Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

"Companies operating in Germany have to make sure that data is anonymized and stored in accordance with the law. These data rules are a big reasons why German companies have to stick with their old tools."

Pardon my German, but that is utter and complete Büffelscheiße on multiple levels. Firstly, how does data protection and privacy law prevent you from using those tools? Secondly, the German law in these matters is not a hindrance to innovation, that is a lame excuse: If the only business model you can come up with is grabbing as much data as you can and then sell it to advertisers, that is not innovative at all.

I think the problem more has to do with a general resistance to change that is very common in German companies and public institutions. "Was der Bauer nicht kennt, frisst er nicht", as we say in Germany ("What the farmer doesn't know, he won't eat"). Large institutions and bureaucracies develop a huge inertia as they grow. The three rules why things do not change: 1. We have always done it like this; 2. We have never done it like that; 3. Once we change this one thing, where does it lead to?

As a German I'd say it's especially larger enterprise companies that are averse to change. For example having worked for clients in the medical sector in the past it was widely held wisdom that if you were observing a new trend in technology it'd take at least five to ten years before you could even think about convincing those companies to adopt them. They were the ultimate late adopters.

Smaller companies experiment more, but investors are equally risk-averse so they tend to prefer startups that are cashflow positive (as opposed to Silicon Valley's growth mindset) or that follow tried and true business models. So a lot of innovation has to be bootstrapped or rides on the back of existing companies -- the product company spun out of an agency seems to be a fairly common.

But all in all I'd say if something is holding German companies back from innovating it's the risk aversion, not the privacy laws. The strict privacy laws actually creates a market for domestic solutions to problems solved by US companies with no regard for privacy (i.e. nearly all of them). Sure, it makes certain business models impossible but many would say that's for the better -- many problems actually end up not being impossible but simply requiring less obvious solutions than blatantly violating your customers' rights.

And looking at the German economy, especially in contrast to other European countries, I'd say calling it a failure is incredibly dishonest. Risk aversion may limit innovation but it also creates a strong healthy economy that is incredibly stable because it rests on a large number of medium sized companies rather than a small number of unicorns and a constant Cambrian explosion and mass extinction.

Seit printer nix gut.

> Once we change this one thing, where does it lead to?

I can definitely confirm this! Being a foreigner in Germany, a country I've come to love very much, has been eye-opening in this regard.

Never in my adult life have I observed such an obvious, visceral, inexplicable, omnipresent fear to change. It's awe-inducing, really.

Alas, it is perhaps the only thing keeping one of the things I love about Germany: it's café culture.

However, I can also understand those who are highly skeptical of "innovation" and "change" in general. Some of us just plain suck at explaining our ideas and creating the kind of logical, reality-based enthusiasm that gets Germans on-board.

I like to think that Germans have learned to question change beforehand, wanting to scrutinize policies before they are implemented. This is only half the truth, but one can only dream...

Correct, also the fact that "companies don't use Slack because of this" is laughable

Companies do use Slack and other similar services

Some companies do use Slack but I know several examples where the introduction of Slack was prevented for compliance reasons. If these reasons are sound I cannot tell, but dismissing this argument as laughable doesn’t hold either.

Doesn't the SEC take a dim view of chat programs being used on Wall street? My understanding is that they have to use chat programs with builtin compliance regimes to avoid insider trading and such...

Digital innovation is happening in a lot of sectors. Healthcare and others have privacy concerns that turn a lot of 'efficiency' dreams on their heads.

I'm at SAP (and in Germany, too), and our team was migrated to Slack Enterprise Grid just this week. We migrated to Slack (from internal IRC) a bit over a year ago and because a lot of other teams did as well, corporate IT was pushed into investigating company-wide Slack as an option, which now became available in January.

Compared to other tech companies, it took us longer to adopt Slack on the company scale, but mostly because Slack was lacking an on-premise solution until recently.

Depends. Some companies are rather paranoid about privacy issues and using services like Slack or GMail is a clear liability risk, especially when discussing customer data or confidential information. I'm not sure what the GDPR has to say about this but my understanding is that some privacy experts consider services like Slack problematic.

However this depends on the scale and type of company. In practice many smaller companies don't even have a Betriebsrat despite fitting the requirements. I'm also sure not everyone is aware of the details of legal requirements around privacy if it isn't the core of their business and some are even blatantly unaware of basic labor rights.

Slack already signs DPAs when they declare they will be GDPR-compliant when the law comes into practice.

Thanks krylon, that`s exactly what i thought too!

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