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Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, I hate MS. On the other hand, EU tech companies need to be better and EU consumers need to support them.

Step 1: all the tech companies should stop using Windows (and MacOS for that matter). They whine about MS but still use their products. So use Linux, use LibreOffice, use EU based email or roll your own, develop software on open standards, etc...

Look at what the non-MS (and non-Apple) FAANGs do; they use OSS operating systems, tech stacks and build their whole infrastructure on open tech and standards, apart from a few proprietary bits rolled in-house.

EU tech's problem is that they all try to be MS but aren't. None of them seem to model what they do on the successful non-MS/Apple big tech companies.

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> Look at what the non-MS (and non-Apple) FAANGs do; they use OSS operating systems

My man, at Amazon basically all engineers use either Windows or Mac. The only ones using open source are customers, and sometimes not very much considering all AWS is a proprietary cloud.

Netflix on the other hand is basically 99% AWS too.

And Amazon infrastructure is what, Windows Server on Azure?

No, MS DOS on Cloudflare Workers over WASM

You jest, but you know deep down that (except for S3 and APIs created outside Amazon) every API on AWS can't easily be replicated outside of AWS, and that's the point the parent's making. It's like calling Android (at least the official version) open because it's based on Linux.

That's completely missing the point. The point is that the tech boom after the .com bust came as a result of tons of startups (Facebook, Netflix, Google, Amazon, etc...) leveraging commodity hardware and open source software to build their infrastructures and businesses instead of relying on vendors like Microsoft, IBM, Sun, etc... It's about how they became big and the forces that allowed them to grow, not about the fact they still sell proprietary products.

EU 'tech' companies are like the slow-moving 'enterprise' companies that still buy from MS, IBM, Oracle, etc... Instead of leveraging what's out there, taking some risk and building things themselves they just do the 'safe' thing. Likewise EU investors play it too safe as there's too much generational wealth whose goal is to preserve said wealth.

On the top of that EU companies looking at the EU historically bad legislation bodies to achieve "protection" against US based tech companies instead of innovating.

There is not a single company in the EU that could build S3 today. If there was such company we could have a cloud that uses S3 as storage and any computation platform to run most of the workload running on US based cloud companies today. There are several OSS software components that can be deployed on Nomad or k8s and have a solid infra just with these two. (I am leaving out IAM/AAA, obviously). Sure this is not the convenience level of AWS/Azure/GCP but at least a start that you can build on and if the EU is serious about it turn it into a real EU based cloud provider. Once you start to add additional services (for example TiDB, Presto, Kafka or even Qemu/Firecracker/KVM) you can build a cloud that has the best offerings of the hyperscalers.

Instead, the whole EU tech scene is hiring lawyers to pressure the EU to ban US based cloud computing. Somehow we lost our way in the EU and innovation happens in the US and in China.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/opinion/gaia-x-a-tr...

https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/object-storage/

S3 on OVH.

Netflix is AWS but they run FreeBSD.

This is a pretty common misconception about Netflix.

Netflix is running on AWS (using Linux) and the streaming service is not running on AWS using FreeBSD.

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix-kinesi...

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix-nicedc...

https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/fosdem/looney-netflix_and_fr...

Oh ok sorry. But Netflix is always touted as the biggest commercial user of FreeBSD. I wonder what they're using it for then if not streaming?

No, you've misunderstood. Netflix (the website and other such things) runs on AWS using Linux. However, Netflix, the streaming service that their website and apps use, runs on FreeBSD and is not on AWS.

As soon as something substantial comes up from Europe, including the UK, will end up in the US.

It's not really a quality problem, Europe produces tons of high quality stuff but anything that can scale scales in the USA.

Europe is not one of the richest places on earth by selling museum tickets, the place has the talent even has the money - albeit not at the scale of the US. I don't know what's missing but tech in the sense of "fast scaling high margin business that eats the world" is something that doesn't happen in Europe and I don't believe that any legislation will directly change that.

EU is more in the business of mitigating the risks of having your infrastructure run and data being processed by foreign entities. GDPR and the other stuff is all about that.

> I don't believe that any legislation will directly change that.

I definitely didn't avocate for any legislation. I'm saying they need to shift their perspective. Tech isn't booming because US startups played it safe...

Legislation plays a big role in encouraging entrepreneurs to play it safe or not.

Cf. banking. European fintech startups are doing extremely well. In turn, big banks have to catch up and adapt if they want to stay relevant. Thanks to EU regulation and investment in core infrastructure.

If we think about the cloud, I don't see what Europe is lacking if we really wanted to build an O365 competitor. But there's no stewardship, rather the opposite, cf. the lackluster response to the CLOUD act an other extra-territorial US bullshit. Instead we have OVH and Hetzner compete on price rather than features and quality, and underfunded open source software like NextCloud.

The EU doesn't have the 'free market above all' philosophy of the US. As a result venture capital is more restricted. In the US failure is not a bad thing, just a reason to try again. The EU is more risk averse. There's much more restriction on businesses, building megacities etc.

However there's a flip side to this like our much better social welfare systems and affordable healthcare. I personally prefer it this way. It does hurt us economically but economy isn't the only thing that matters.

In Europe we limit how high you can climb and this limits the amount of risky investment we attract because a big win is not automatically a mountain of profits due to more taxes and more regulations. But on the other hand we limit how far you can fall too. As a non-entrepreneur nor investor the latter matters much more to me.

> Step 1: all the tech companies should stop using Windows

Their complaint is a lack of open standards and interoperability create unnecessary barriers to stopping using Windows so your solution is that they should stop using Windows..

It sounds like you’re advocating for using local products rather than the best products available.

That’s fine but it’s not something that will ultimately benefit the EU after China and the US retaliate in kind.

Absolutely advocating supporting local businesses. Just like I advocate using OSS. Is an EU company going to make a better search engine than Google on day one? Is any company going to be an absolute world-beater on day one? Sometimes voting with your wallet means supporting something you want to succeed...

I mean, I'll never use MS products nor buy an Apple product, ever. Not even if they have the nicest X. Because I don't like the prospect of a world where it's only MS/Apple. So I use products that are good for an open world as much as possible.

In the real world, people support local businesses. People support small business and hand-made products, even if it's more expensive. Because that's how you grow your local economy.

>In the real world, people support local businesses. People support small business and hand-made products, even if it's more expensive. Because that's how you grow your local economy.

That's fine as a consumer. But as a business and a professional I don't have time to muck around with half-baked "local" solutions when better solutions exist.

The argument could have been made that the early Googlers shouldn't have been mucking around with Python and Linux...

They used Python because it provided value, not because it might in 5, 10, 20 years into the future.

You missed the point...

Obviously Google's stack enabled them to be successful.

I think tools like Python, Ruby and PHP still are great. Not everyone is Google-scale.

So it sounds more like moving all capabilities to China and waking up later that you don't have locally any possibility to make products.

Right now US companies are hiring eastern European developers directly for "whatever they want to be paid" and local companies cannot compete on salaries. Whole world is paying US companies, EU companies are local at best in couple of European countries and even then they have to spend loads of money on localization.

While US is 331,449,281 people and EU is 447,706,209 differences between EU counties are a lot bigger than between US states. If you start up with a company you can start in single language and single country - moving to other country takes loads of effort.

I might be wrong about how it is easy to scale business between US states but I expect it is a lot easier than in EU.

Biden said to "buy American" and still has tariffs on the EU, so I am not sure who should retaliate.

you think google/fb devs use linux laptops?

Some of them do.

Most use Mac.

I'm sure all tech companies use a variety of tech to make sure their products work across user devices.

But their infrastructure sure as hell isn't Windows Server on Azure...

And it's pretty well known that Google uses a lot of Linux internally, even if I'm sure some devs are also on MacOS and Windows for reasons.

you think google/fb production code runs on laptops?

A lot of Google engineers use Chromebooks.

I had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobuntu on both a laptop and a desktop, and then replaced the laptop with a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook_Pixel after those came out because I wanted to see The Future!™

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