Especially us europeans should not rely on American services at all.It's not worth it.
American corporations are just as much a liability as their counterparts in China.
One of the companies in the EU produces enterprise software almost no one on this website uses (SAP). The other is Dassault.
In the US the top five companies are Microsoft, Oracle, ADP, Adobe, and Salesforce. If you include Alphabet and Amazon, well...
When the EU or Asia (non-China, I guess) can offer mature alternatives even remotely competitive with the American companies, I guess your strategy could work. Until then, no one is going to flock to Hetzner over AWS.
And I like Hetzner.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_software_c...
Indeed there are viable local options for many of these things. Heck, the reason why European companies have so little relative marked share, is because they serve smaller, domestic, markets.
A Danish webshop provider probably has a better offering for a webshop for servicing the Danish market. It probably has better support for Danish accounting, better locale support etc.
(Maybe more relevant for SaaS than servers though)
> It probably has better support for Danish accounting, better locale support
The list employs some particular filters (e.g. SaaS seems to be excluded) and heavily emphasizes market cap over revenue.
I could argue Google is not a big software company (as in lots of people working with mismatching socks and propeller hats).
But that would be just as stupid.
Would you consider Randstad to be a building company? They loan out hundreds of thousands of building contractors across the world
Accenture is American-Irish and listed on the NYSE. Subject to US jurisdiction from a national, not global level.
What? SAP is a huge software that is used in a lot of companies.
Do you think there is a huge tendency towards Oracle, Infor or MS Dynamics rather than SAP across hacker news, or are you just assuming that people who go on hacker news aren't in the 'circle of companies' which need an ERP?
Most people on HN probably go work for companies that pay them the best compensation or offer them a good position, not based on what ERP they chose.
Does that mean most people on HN work for companies either too small for or too competent to outsource an ERP system?
Famous example: MS Windows having a marketshare of 96% should not necessarily stop you from designing your business around linux.
"MS Windows having a marketshare of 96% should not necessarily stop you from designing your business around linux"
But Windows doesn't have this kind of marketshare in most areas going forward? The #1 OS used worldwide is AndroidOS and no one is clamoring to write for it as far as I can tell.
Your opinion is 'yes'. OP's opinion is 'no'.
Both are valid opinions and highly depend on the nature of your business.
But, OP's somewhat un-american sentiment aside (which I believe is mostly what you're reacting to, rather than the general nature of their argument), I agree that erring on the side of caution and minimizing external liabilities should be on the top of the agenda for any company.
And this is aside from the whole "support local infrastructure and don't empower monopolies further" argument.
That said as a european I have to consider my interests and interests of my business.
I think EU/EFTA is large enough to enable the growth of at least one 80% offering given enough time. Or otherwise large enough as an economic bloc to force America to stricter legalisation so that they can use and depend on the American offerings.
Amazon can sure kick your company off its services.
For many startups AWS is a no-brainer, which makes life somewhat harder for anyone who wants to deal with Iran from EU (as long as EU allows it) and not be shut down on a US three-letter agency's request.
If you keep everything your business is at Amazon you better be prepared to Amazon booting you.
You don't need the market to flock to Hetzner or OVH to use it yourself and avoid US sanctions.
There are problems with the laws, copyright laws too, US gov agencies etc that are all incompatible with our own laws. If something bad were to happen, our own courts have zero power to help us. We also don't have a direct fiber line to America so all our traffic hops through Europe and more recently through South America, so about 200ms added to most requests.
The only reasons to use American hosting companies is because of:
1) The financial cost can in some cases work out to be lower than local options.
2) It can be easier to scale your service vs self-hosting on premisses.
3) American hosting platforms have really nice GUI's and tooling, while being well integrated with the billing side - everything mostly just works as expected.
But other than that, if money and skills are not a problem, then on-prem is best here.
Those are not problems, those are trade-offs. OP is right, you could be in a position in which those trade-offs dont apply to you (i.e. by buying a "expensive" but great solution, this happens all the time in all the industries) or you could sacrifice one item (say speed) in your solution if this is not a problem for your workflow ("so what if a open source tool runs 2x as slow as the best proprietary option, our daily batch processing take 2 hours and it is used in weekly buckets")
> problem (n) 1a: a question raised for inquiry, consideration, or solution
Sure, please let me know how the EU plans to build Office 365, AWS, GitHub competitors of similar scale, quality and success.
We have no private investors that would pony up enough money to go against US tech titans and fat chance the EU would ever fund such initiatives and if they would, the money would evaporate over night to companies with political connections and overpriced consultants who would just produce documentation.
Let's face it, the ship of EU dominance in tech has sailed a long time ago, we might as well get comfy with the US pulling the strings on that front.
The only way the EU would ever stand a chance is if the EU would pull a Chinese style great firewall and outright ban foreign tech companies on their internal market, leaving space for local companies to spring up and fill the void but that will never happen.
However, if you cannot trust those products then you cannot use them.
Remember, this thread is about Github blocking an entire company due to one employee due to American politics. If a non-US company risks to lose it project management/code management (Github), its infrastructure (AWS) or its documents (Office 365) on a whim due to American policies then they cannot use those products.
If a big enough chunk of the world can't use the American offerings, then there is a market for alternatives.
You're right that it's probably too late to reverse all of this economic damage that the US has intentionally caused. It's a difficult problem for the world.
You're right. You should frame it correctly and take ownership over the complete and utter regulatory failures of European countries to support and nurture local businesses.
Did you miss this a couple of weeks back?
https://www.eetimes.eu/eu-signs-e145bn-declaration-to-develo...
I would also point out that many of these companies you mention are immensely scattered. Take anyone and you'll find their resources spread across an evergrowing domain/portfolio. I'm not saying it's bad that Apple is developing cars and Facebook VR headsets - I'm just saying it spreads them thinner. If the EU found it valuable enough to pursue e.g search within the next five years it's not at all unfeasible or unreasonable to do so. It might even be better for the greater good of the internet frankly.
As someone else mentioned, capital is way harder to raise (meaning slower to market) - and then an underrated factor which is equally important is how easy or difficult is it to sell as a nascent startup. At least in my industry (cybersecurity) it has been very hard in the EU vs US in the earlier stages of product maturity.
Much like the parent comment, I don't see this changing anytime soon and I'm fully betting on the fact US will keep their dominance in tech.
It would be really interesting to know your opinion on what functionality in AWS is indispensable and what you can sacrifice in case Hetzner/OVH price for the rest is the same as AWS or lower.
There are no such plans. EU wields a lot of regulatory power. The most likely path of action would be to force MS/Amazon/etc. to spin-off their EU side of the business. And I believe that the companies have already prepared for this.
China requires access to your company code and pretty much owns you.
The USA government is interfering as much as Europeans government do, by making stupid laws and demanding access when they can think of an excuse. Sure, it's bad but it's not as bad as China.
You can't trust any government, but some are better than others.
Chinese and USA services should be avoided...