European alternatives for digital products
european-alternatives.eu
european-alternatives.eu
I feel that the ability to bootstrap projects in all the large EU countries is way harder than the US, or smaller euro ones (like the Netherlands or Estonia).
In Spain for example, the cost of something similar of an LLC is way higher than in the US, not to mention that you have to pay almost 400€/month (at minimum) just for owning the company as Social Security fee, even if I'm also working for someone else paying my social security through my salary.
It's a huge burden if you're in my situation, which is having an average salary, not a lot of savings and you don't have a family that bails you out.
Also, this listing lacks a few more that I listed here: https://iagovar.com/mapas/european-web-hosting-alternatives
Also, there's less of an entrepreneurial mindset in europe. DO a good job, get paid, work life balance. Very different set of goals from america
If you can sock back a retirement working for big tech for 10-12 years (counting equity), it frees you up massively to do whatever you like, whether funding as an angel, or self-funding your own start-ups. It's not uncommon for people you know in tech in Silicon Valley to pitch in on early small funding rounds if you've started something new and are rounding up some early funds. Multiply that wide process by the scale of the US tech industry - at the small and large ends - and all the wealth that has been created in it over the past 30 years.
1.3 million software developers with a median salary of $110,000 is a lot of money just from the software developer worker bees every year (save N% per year of that pile, now it's available for investment in one form or another; and that's ignoring the equity value they're yielding).
Public housing is a nightmare in all of Europe, and being homeless is as much a risk as in the US.
Compare this with the cut throat competition in Sillicon Valley or the international arena.
That's how you end up with non existent tech offerings in Europe.
Europe is also doing pretty well in several fields and you don't explain at all how tech in particular is affected by public spending.
Would you rather get the public health and education, or keep the 20k euro and find a solution for yourself?
I reckon that my health expenditures are 1000 per year, and I am self-taught, so I don't need the government for anything.
What we need is to make the public services Opt-in/Opt-out, so people who find it competitive like yourself can keep enjoying it.
Also, EU governments provide retirement benefits while the US's doesn't. This is the main expenditure for these governments.
Not saying that your argument has not some truth in it, but it's definitively wrong in the case of healthcare.
People migrate to the US before the EU. Besides, US lifestyle (also a high tax country btw) is not the only possible alternative to european style quasi socialism (56% on the way there)
Incidentally I'd say most western countries are way too close to socialism, I'd rather see more private entities taking over security, healthcare and law making.
It's just that there is no money, so private EU companies suck so there is no money. The lack of strong companies doesn't imply socialism. Most people in Europe has most of their trade interactions with other individuals and private businesses.
The US population not taking care of themselves is a public health problem not a medical care quality issue.
Of course, if you have the money to fly to the US, stay in the US and pay out-of-pocket for a medical procedure in the US, then yes, the US is a good destination. Which translates into: if you're rich, medicine in the US is great.
However, not all of us are rich. And definitely not all Americans are rich.
Sifted goalposts
> The average American pays more for healthcare over their live than the average European, and the outcomes are objectively worse.
remains true. No matter how you want to spin it and pretend that medical tourism affects this in any way.
Edit:
For 2015, https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/executive_briefings/c...
- Medical tourism to US: between 100k and 200k per year
- Medical tourism from US to other countries: 150k to 350k per year
Europe is ~500 million people
US is ~ 360 million people
Medical tourism is a drop in the bucket.
>Americans cite cost savings as the most common reason to go abroad for health treatment, as medical procedures in foreign hospitals can cost thousands of dollars less than in the United States. This is especially true for those without health insurance—for an uninsured person, a knee replacement can cost $30,000 in the United States, compared to $12,000 in India. Many health travelers also go abroad for elective procedures such as cosmetic surgery that regular policies may not cover.
In other words, they largely go outside the US to save money on either cosmetic or routine procedures that, for one reason or other, US insurance won't cover.[1] Not same thing as the earlier discussion of rare or difficult conditions.
[1] Or they've chosen to not get health insurance. Post-Obamacare, this means that they are willingly paying the tax penalty for not having insurance. 91% of Americans have health insurance.
There was no earlier discussion of "rare or difficult conditions".
> 91% of Americans have health insurance.
That health insurance is often tied to the employer and wildly varies in what it offers. And you have to fight insurance tooth and nail to get what you need. Even on a good insurance.
Also, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...
--- start quote ---
In 2020, 8.6 percent of people, or 28.0 million, did not have health insurance at any point during the year.
The percentage of people with health insurance coverage for all or part of 2020 was 91.4.
More children under the age of 19 in poverty were uninsured in 2020 than in 2018. Uninsured rates for children under the age of 19 in poverty rose 1.6 percentage points to 9.3 percent.
--- end quote ---
I can't imagine a European saying "yeah, we have 28 million uninsured, many of them kids, it's their own fault".
It's not in the top 5 by number of patients treated. Anecdotally I met people who went to Germany, Israel, India and Thailand for treatment, I never heard of anyone even discussing going to the US. The visas alone are a nightmare.
The U.S. has the largest concentration of the best research hospitals in the world.
I see someone shifting the goalposts here, first we were saying that US healthcare is not worse in any metric, then we started measuring it's success by medical tourism, now are down to some special rare diseases.
Let's come back to where we were before, measures per unit of money spent, US healthcare delivers worse outcomes that any other developed nation. Measured in average health of its citizen, the outcomes aren't great. Life expectancy, and other metrics aren't particularly amazing.
The total societal outcome -- spending vs outcome -- and therefore the average outcome too, for the USA as compared to most other developed countries... Pretty much sucks.
My US government provided pension will be something like $3500/month when I reach retirement age. This is in addition to any personal retirement savings.
How does that work?
Why take on a risky career path like being a doctor if best case you're half a million in debt and that's assuming you don't get weeded out at any point? It's no surprise we have shortages of engineers, doctors, nurses, teachers, etc.
Even a bachelor's degree is on average 32k for in-state at public colleges assuming you graduate in 4 years. Contrast that with my German peers who didn't pay anything and yeah, maybe I wouldn't have been a software engineer if everything else wasn't so volatile. I certainly don't feel as essential as doctors or nurses, especially now.
Sure it's cheaper to start a LLC in the US and you can hire/fire on a whim practically, but 63% of Americans don't have enough savings to cover a $500 emergency. Doesn't exactly leave a lot of wiggle room unless your parents have a basement for your MVP and some seed money.
The US has a very mature and developed tech VC scene. Where's Europes isn't as mature. Also clustering is a thing -- why didn't Silicon Valley happen in New York either -- many of the conditions were there just like California but it didn't materialize and Europe was simply a mess in the aftermath of WWII there weren't going to be many tech revolutions taking place there.
In fact ironically enough there was such a congregation of talent in Berlin in the 1930s that some have predicted a second "Renaissance" was inevitable were it not for WWII.
I have never understood why countries slap so much red tape and so many fees on this. The UK has got it right, IMHO: make it as cheap and simple as possible, there are only upsides [Edit: for society/the state] to people starting up a business.
The last time I incorporated a company in the UK it took a grand total of 35 minutes from start to actually having an incorporated company.
that is not true at all. The majority of business ventures fail and a lot of small businesses aren't productive, and at the end of the day someone needs to pick the tab up. Even Thiel used to say, don't start a business until you have a very good reason to.
What you actually want is to incentivize the kind of people to start a business who have a high chance of driving innovation and bringing about large, productive firms, you don't really want an army of self-employed people with low capital formation in a developed country.
(I have edited my previous comment to clarify)
the state takes a pretty big amount of risk and costs. Who pays healthcare, who pays maternity leave and social security in a fast and loose labor market like that? The answer in the US often is, nobody or the federal government.
In a country like Germany, France or in Scandinavia running a business is harder because there's an expectation that businesses can take care of their workers. A lot of red tape exists to make sure that a business can shoulder these things. In fact in Scandinavia eliminating unproductive firms through measures like wage compression was deliberately part of their social model to drive concentration and creation of productive firms.
There really are a lot of implications to creating the sort of environment that the US or to a lesser extent the UK has, and it doesn't work well with the economic model of most of Europe.
Are you from Scandinavia? Because the state pays these things (except maternity leave) in Denmark, whether you're in a job or not, so no there really isn't a risk to the state. The only thing the business is paying for is your salary, pension (if they offer it) and other "bonuses" (if they offer them).
That's not true. Red tape is red tape, it serves no other purpose that perpetuating itself (and since we're on this topic there is much less red tape in the UK than in France or Germany.
If you're a business an hire someone then you have to pay their salary and any taxes to finance healthcare and other benefits. OK. There is no need for red tape for this or to make it difficult upfront to incorporate a company, just make it clear and simple to know what to pay and how to pay it when or if you hire someone.
Only if they have debt. Some companies never take on debt and then fail.
While the EU has a very well integrated market for industry goods, for services (where I would include software) the market is less than perfect.
The language barrier is the biggest strangle for EU software entrepreneurship / platform business in my opinion.
The second-biggest obstacle imho is funding. If you want to grow really fast, it is hard to get enough money.
Third, I would rank ecosystem in general, besides money.
I think over regulation is not as bad as it is often said. All developed countries have regulations in place, some more some less.
That doesn't explain why Israel doesn't have this problem, they have an even smaller home market. They just sell internationally.
I believe it’s just the lack of massive capital and the power law of VC investments. Start 1000s companies with smart people and a tiny fraction will get insanely big.
We’re starting to see this in Europe too now.
On the other hand, people in Sweden are positive about hiring (and sometimes being hired as a) freelancer. But that's not a company, right?
I get that home markets may not be big and provide a springboard perhaps to other markets but even the big countries there don’t seem to dominate the small countries in terms of Software.
By the time US companies reach the EU they are already big, worth billions.
That being said I believe the main issue in EU is funding.
IMO language is big barrier as just testing different text in UI is a lot of hassle when starting out - not to mentions laws, cultures difference, dealing with business partners etc. is much harder due to that.
IMO common law/company to easily hire people across EU would help.
Hypothesis: A lot of people read English well enough to use apps and websites even before automatic translation was built into e.g. Chrome and Safari; but translation into your mother tongue is much easier than transition into a second language.
So what makes you think that "popping new software ventures" is a good thing for society? Isn't there enough software already? The problem is the mediocre quality of it, and decline (hello Adobe). Popping new software ventures is hardly a solution.
in short, because time exists and effects all else in our reality.
1. The USA has a culture of granting equity to early employees. Equity grants are highly motivating. Such grants are expected and standardized. Rest of the world doesn't. Even as late as 2006, the Zürich tax authorities were needing extra time and special procedures to figure out what to do about Googler's equity and stock grants because a US firm setting up shop there was the first time they'd had to deal with this kind of compensation structure.
Evidence: one of the very few tech firms to get big in Europe (ARM) did grant equity to early employees.
2. USA is a large internal free market and this is a big deal.
ARM is a descendent of a computer company called Acorn. In the 1980s the UK was able to hold its own against US tech companies, in fact, Acorn RISC machines were in some ways technologically quite superior to the the US machines. I remember when I was a little kid, the teachers were constantly asking me to fix the school computers in various ways. The Acorn machines simply did not break, ever (well, maybe there were occasional issues with the printers). They were also easy to use and had a consistent UI, some great apps. Feeling kinda nostalgic to remember them really. The IBM PCs were just broken dreck that the schools put up with because they got them cheap via some subsidized scheme and had some unique apps, and Macs were nowhere to be seen.
Within a decade that situation had reversed and the Acorns were being pulled out. Why? Well, Acorn hit financial problems, partly because they were unable to sell into Europe due to bureaucracy and paperwork, and partly due to a failed attempt to expand into the USA, stymied partly by the same problems. The US firms didn't face this problem because of the ease of interstate commerce, so they were able to get big enough quickly enough that they could invest more into their tech and also hire the big legal/logistics teams necessary to move into foreign markets. The complexity of this is a large fixed cost, but the size you can get to before you have to tackle it isn't.
So, Acorn died off and ARM ended up taking on the low end microcontroller market. ARM grew quietly, getting big enough in a boring market that it could sell and hire internationally, and then the smartphone revolution hit and it grew very quickly. Why was it able to grow so quickly? Partly because by then it'd reached a size where it could do things like ... hire chip design teams in the USA. The UK is a country with 1/5th the population, after all.
It is beyond insanity. And should you succeed in France/Belgium/Spain you'd be seen as the evil capitalist responsible for all that is wrong in the EU.
The whole mentality is rotten.
The EU has one big software company and it's... SAP. SAP is a drop in the bucket compared to the big US or Chinese tech firms (I don't think SAP is worth even 1/10th of any GNAFAM). But there's worse: I think SAP's market cap is worth basically as much as the next 50 or next 100 (or maybe basically all the others) EU software companies. Something crazy like that.
So one successful software company (thankfully we have Germany in the EU and SAP if, of course, German).
It's a failure whose level of failure cannot be understated.
A complete, total and utter failure.
Even when there are local apps available, many small businesses (and larger ones) will stick with services from big, well-known tech companies. Why? I guess because of inertia, or simply because those products feel safe and familiar.
Where are the pan-European equivalents to eBay, Etsy, KickStarter, AirBnB, Shopify, AbeBooks, etc? Europeans use these services entensively. You'll probably find local equilavents in each European country, but they are not pan-European or global in scope.
Global expansion is not an issue; every american company can easily reach the whole of EU. And there are many many european startups whose main market is america. Unless you mean that, products are so tailored to their home market that they don't have global appeal.
China knew that America will try to crush them. It's a real, literal, life or death situation for them to come up with a Chinese Google. They have pumped trillions into the tech industry over decades.
The biggest problem is funding due to the risk aversion of EU institutions and limited alternative sources. You have to be incredibly qualified to acquire the funding need to drive a startup forward in the way that happens in the US. This ranges from the small angel investors through to the first series of VC funding.
In the EU, if you are a business like a biotech or pharma you may be able to navigate this because those are well trodden paths with high risk adversity baked in. A software company has many unknowns, so you encounter problems with expectations. You can't fail in the EU because you only have one shot and won't get back again with another company/idea. In reality, it's very likely you'll stumble a lot initially and won't have the leeway that you have in the US. If you compared bankruptcy on both sides of the Atlantic you'd notice similar patterns.
Developers can have a very idea idea of cost management and what is valuable. They may be either blowing their employer's money on inefficient AWS solutions, or they are building their own k8s cluster on cheap VPSes because they felt that the managed solutions were expensive. It's an easy trap to fall into. You need to have a balance that is sustainable and productive. It was much easier to understand the whole space when we were building on LAMP or Ruby-on-Rails than it is now.
It's best to have a partner who is very business-savvy to help with navigating these options. If you only look at it from the tech perspective you'll fail quickly.
And also European companies are moving to the US to start and/or grow their businesses there. Why is Spotify even listed on the NY stock exchange?
All these silly fees you mention are marginal. It would actually be much cheaper to hire devs from Europe, so cost is not the issue at all. It is simply a lack of capital altogether. Nor is there the risk taking that is required.
Europe has no VC.
I'll much rather build and run software for free in my spare time than start a business since the latter would mean having to spend dozens of hours every week dealing with all manner of bureaucracy.
I have the capacity and funds to start a business, but I just don't think it's worth the hassle.
Doing international business is always difficult and the additional hassle when you deal with American customers says absolutely nothing about the overhead of starting a domestic company.
Thus the reality is that you run from left to right with your attention chopped up over 1000 things simultaneously while in theory you have to write down all time spend on each business related activity. Almost everything counts as long as you document it. If the description is to generic it is rejected.
Of course there are exceptions too! In the [corona] period 1 January 2021 tot 1 Juli 2021, if you were unable to do work, you may count 24 hours per week. It might be attractive to write things down anyway as it might add up to more than 24.
Now [say] some former employer asks you to do some work for a few months. He wants to pay you a salary as usual but you prefer freelance while the work is unrelated to your company. Do you start an extra company for it???? Will you fail to make enough hours cleaning your office and organizing your desktop??? How much will it cost you if you don't reach the magic 1225 number???
Or say the business is a moderate success, some money comes in, you might be able to survive, the feature set is complete and you ran out of bugs to fix. How spend your time now? You want to get a job but if you spend more time doing that it costs money.
In the EU, there's a lot of this "what the regulator currently will accept". By the letter of the law, in the worst case, our business in the EU could not have existed. But it did exist and thrive.
The standardization in the US makes it easy. But if I ever have to figure out something for Germany again, I'll slit my throat and feed lizards with my blood first.
Because people in Europe still largely believe that a business should be an actual business. You know, operating and bringing profit.
Unlike the US where nearly every single "unicorn" can lose billions of dollars a year for over a decade, never see a profit, and still be lauded as a successful business.
However, Uber as a company has so far lost over 20 billion dollars and only turned a profit once. Yup. A very successful and sustainable business.
I don’t understand - what do you think is the problem with this? What exactly is wrong there?
They aren’t spending your money, or tax payer money. They’re doing nothing but pumping money into workers’ hands and the economy, creating thousands of skilled jobs. It’s currently a massive wealth-redistribution system.
Why are you sarcastically turning your nose up at it, based on some accounting metric, that doesn’t even involve or effect you? Why don’t we want this in Europe?
They are not really pumping that money into workers and economy given how they don't want to spend any money on drivers.
> Why are you sarcastically turning your nose up at it, based on some accounting metric
It's not "some accounting metric". The measure of a successful business is whether it can support itself. And not if it can siphon unlimited investor money for a decade.
> Why don’t we want this in Europe?
Because those 20 billion dollars are better spent on actual businesses.
Uber pays thousands of engineers hundreds of thousands of dollars. They all live and spend in their local communities.
> The measure of a successful business is whether it can support itself.
Well this is the major difference - in the US they’re happy to invest and work for the long term, not short-term profits.
> Because those 20 billion dollars are better spent on actual businesses.
Why do you care or have an opinion on where someone else invests their money?
I’ve had to work my whole career for North American companies because European ones can’t even begin to compete. It’s madness to say Europe is better off with our bargain basement tech sector.
It's not even close to "thousands of engineers". It's ~23k employees, not engineers.
The absolute vast majority of its employees are not engineers. And their salaries are of course laughable. It's barely median U.S. salary for employees, and below median for drivers [1]
So much for "investing in economy", "pumping money into workers’ hands" and other bullshit. It's a yet another unbelievably unprofitable American "unicorn" driving wages down and passing all costs onto its employees.
> Well this is the major difference - in the US they’re happy to invest and work for the long term, not short-term profits.
10 years and loss of 20 billion dollars is not "working for the long term".
> Why do you care or have an opinion on where someone else invests their money?
Ah yes. I'm not allowed to have an opinion. It's not as good of an argument as you think it is
> I’ve had to work my whole career for North American companies
Good for you. It's still not as good as argument as you think it is.
Uber was up to 2000 engineers as early as 2016.
The question is what happens if/when it stops being sustainable. It's not so easy to adjust from those sorts of salaries downwards. The endless flow of VC money into absurd startups with no business plan worth a damn is caused by groupthink and extremely bad monetary policy by supposedly "independent" central banks. They aren't really independent of course, they're creatures of government and politicians can reign them in any time they want.
Why would they do so? Inflation. Bubbles. The sort of problems that have occurred repeatedly throughout history. And what happens when they respond by raising interest rates and ceasing to buy up all the low risk debt instruments? Well, suddenly boring but profitable businesses become useful to invest in again because they pay out dividends and the like. That in turn leads to a sucking sound as money flows out of the venture and equity markets, which makes it harder for those businesses to buy up all the talent, trashes the returns offered by VC funds and makes "sell $1 for $0.90" type business models unsustainable.
Fundamentally, the salaries we earn now from US firms may not be reflective of the value we're actually creating. They may be partially an artifact of money printing. Of course, the Eurozone prints money up the wazoo too so I'm not saying that in relative terms EU/US programmer salaries will get closer just that the very high salaries and proliferation of zombie fake businesses may go away.
> Of course, the Eurozone prints money up the wazoo too
I disagree that the ECB prints as much money as you say. Sure we have had ridiculous amounts of "quantitative easing", but this has been nowhere near as bad as it has been in the US. The frugal EU countries (Germany, Netherlands, Austria, etc.) always keep a leash on the ECB.
I can feel it myself. I am very reluctant to create a money losing business. It is a deep-seated fear (I'm creating a new business at the moment). Where I got this from, parents, culture, common sense, whatever, doesn't really matter. I would not personally feel successful if I had created Uber, I'd just feel stressed and kind of a fraud. End of story.
So for my new business I'm not getting VC funding even though I know some VCs and they made it clear I could get money from them. I want to build a real business that is actually sustainable on its own terms. This will inevitably limit my reach and likely means I won't create a "tech company", but I've made my peace with that.
The US had way more wealth compared to Europe, thanks to unbridled capitalism in the past centuries and not hosting a World War.
That wealth trickle down and converted in various shapes until the current VC class.
Two.
Ok I perhaps misspoke because we would want them, if they came without costs. And by cost I mean law and regulatory environment necessary for such companies.
In EU generally speaking law is in favor of the people (individuals) a lot more than in USA (there are huge exceptions to this like defamations (or anything to do with banks), but I still believe its true.).
There are stories about EU fining USA corporations and how that is unfair. But they fine local ones as well, so breaking things (as in breaking/ignoring law ) and moving fast ends up with law breaking you long before you are successful enough that you can shrug it off.
It's not hard to start business in EU, but it's hard to get hokey stick growth. There are plenty of small to mid level companies in EU that pay well to founders and it's employers.
But if you are trying to get hokey stick growth, EU is not optimal, so why even bother starting there since you can go straight to USA most of the time ?
And honestly speaking if we would have to import American style laws/ regulatory environment in order to get them here, I would rather choose not to have them
1. Enormous internal market
2. Extremely wealthy
3. Well-developed capital markets for investment
So it's an enormous, wealthy country where there is lots of investment. Obviously there are other factors but these seem blindingly obvious as starting points.
I find the UK's inability to compete with the US web giants depressing. I don't like the idea of relying on a few American companies for search, cloud infra and so on. I'd love to see us build a British Google for example. I don't like the guy at all, but I agree with Dominic Cummings that we should focus our efforts on something like this.
I'm not arguing for web service nationalism but, for economic and security reasons, way more nation states should be looking to encourage the building of their own web backbone companies. It would also be good for general Internet resiliency to not have so few companies and single points of failure.
Half a fucking million.
All good European engineers are leaving to USA. And I would too.
Regardless, even in Australia wages for tech workers are higher than most of Europe.
Europeans are truly in denial about what they’re getting. Nationalism is a great blindfold.
Fwiw, I'll grant that the US is ahead in big tech but I'd never move there. The quality of life is pretty poor compared to wealthy European countries. I've spent a lot of time there and I'm sorry to say, you seem a bit delusional to us over here. Life is hard in the US to many people here and kind of uncivilised in terms of social safety nets, inequality and any number of other metrics.
My wife and I both work in tech, outside of SF. We make around a 200k premium each to not work in Europe.
You can look at ‘any number of other metrics’, but one of them isn’t going to be culture. European culture is dead and ossified.
I don't need to worry about my family in Europe. No matter what health problems they have, they will be taken care of in a good public hospital and it won't cost them a thing.
When my kids are old enough to go to university, they won't have to take out a loan to pay for courses.
If they drop out of college, they'll still be able to get a decent job that pays a living wage.
They'll have access to affordable child care for their children, and they won't need a 200.000€ job just so they can afford living close to their job.
I don't have to be afraid of getting mugged or shot on the street if I go to the wrong part of town because we have much lower crime rates because our social security system helps people who run into hardship instead of punishing them.
https://www.hackreactor.com/blog/software-engineer-salary-re...
Even in California the median is around 120k. Well done for earning 500k but that is not a typical software engineer salary. Even at Google its under 300k, and FAANG-type companies are, by definition, outliers.
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/Silicon-Valley-tech-work...
Anyway. It sounds like we're both happy where we are then. That's nice. Enjoy your utopia of culture. I'll go back to my ossified life!
USA is just a third world country with a Gucci belt. My family's value system is completely incompatible with how America operates and what drives people and organisations.
I have many senior dev friends who think the same.
There is one, and with users globally: https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/05/no-tracking-search-how-does-... Self-disclosure: CEO
Here in France we have (had ?) Qwant[1] that never really worked because at first it was about having a search engine at the level of Google, then being user privacy focused (like DDG), then being focused on kids, then on music, then...
But from the beginning it was failing because they were just providing a proxy for Bing's results. They were not even providing a sanitized version of those results. It was Bing's results with a different UI. And then, because they needed money, they focused on some topics (like the kids, which provided them public money) or music (income from partners companies). Also there was a lot of political/bureaucratic crap involved within the direction.
So it looks like the issue is that it was people with money that said "we are going to be the French Google". But they hadn't enough money to do so and being "the French Google" is not enough.
If we look at DDG, first it was a bad search engine but they focused on their promise about user privacy. And then they improved their search engine from there. Now they are a credible alternative to Google because they have something that Google don't, while on the core feature (search engine) they are almost the same. If you want to compete, you have to offer something different while providing the same core features.
I think ProtonMail (Switzerland) is a good example. At the moment they don't provide a webmail as good as Gmail, but they provide great email service while focusing on user privacy. They are trying to compete against Google on email like DDG dig on search engine. And that's why it's more and more popular.
So there's probably a mindset issue : don't compete for the sake of competing. Offer something different and then try to reach the competitors level on the core feature. You can't beat a multi-billion giant at its own game.
I got pissed off when I wanted to rotate a PDF 90 degrees on my dad's computer and adobe wanted to charge for it, then I found that smallPDF could do that and a whole lot more like edits and signature collections. I ended up subscribing him but the free tier already does several things that adobe would charge you for so I encourage anyone to use this service.
I am continually frustrated at just how difficult of a problem simple PDF operations are on Windows PCs. Even looking for alternative PDF readers is a complex and confusing task. And, every top result wants to either charge or require an account to use it. The FOSS tools aren't great either. Why can't Microsoft make a product like Preview for Mac which allows for such things?!?
I presume it's some nonsense application of antitrust laws preventing this.
Checkboxes for example did not seem to be available in any of the tools I found.
I also figured that if I had to spend the time to position the fields, someone else shouldn’t spend that time too: crowd-edited PDF if you will (the document never sees my server)
>"It's not hard to find for anyone that knows how to type in a few words to google." I find this to be pretty dismissive and insulting.
Edit: Lo and behold, PDF-XChange Editor is also a product they are charging for. It is $46.50 for a single license, and there is also a PRO version which costs more. So again, it looks like we haven't solved the "free, simple PDF editor with no upcharge like what Apple provides with Preview" problem.
Europe’s biggest software company, never mentioned…
Lidl wanted to introduce SAP and after investing 500 million Euro into it, they stopped and aborted the project entirely.
Self-diclosure of bias but they also missed our independent no-tracking international search engine (own crawling/indexing) https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/05/no-tracking-search-how-does-...
So does Seznam.cz search engine, which, I believe, has it's own crawler and rankings.
Email.cz is used by the most of Czech citizens. When someone asks you for an email address, it's common to reply with the username alone and just confirm it's hosted on Seznam.
Myself and others would appreciate one for Canada! Perhaps I should build it.
Do it! Be the change you wish for. :-)
If a German company hosts everything on Google or AWS is it still considered European? Or if a Romanian company moves HQ to New York and still does development mainly in Romania like UI Path?
Or what if you are an American company with all or most of your dev team in say Sweden or Hungary? Does that make you European?
And if you are say a non-European company but meet all the European data protection and compliance requirements and the European counterparts do not?
In this context "European Union" and the company is registered primarily in the EU and where the vast lionshare of profits are declared. The companies mentioned do appear tastefully (or limited in your words) curated are definitely EU based and lends some credence to the overall claim and purpose of page. I'm not seeing controversial 'European' companies that are actually American like Stripe. (Sometimes people claim Stripe to be Irish) -- Adyen is definitely Dutch for example and Mullvad is Swedish.
I'm not seeing anything with a Union Jack on the page and the UK would normally have some entries here. Switzerland and Norway are part of the EU institutions like Schengen and the EEA -- just not full members. So the author of the page does appear to have very good working definition of 'European' but it's not clear what exactly that is -- it's not in the terms page for instance.
Indeed, it's the Swedish word for "mole". Chosen, I assume, because like a VPN, the animal digs tunnels.
Edit: They may have changed that, it's a Deutsche Telekom company that managed the physical access, that seems a little pointless, if everything is available via the internet.
As for the last question, that doesn't mean you're an european alternative, you just do what you mentioned: either don't violate or are compliant with the EU policies.The website is probably meant for people who want to use services from inside the EU.
However, this needs to be reminded: if the EU wants to keep this dream of promoting tech development, it needs to look itself in the mirror when it comes to supporting/not supressing entrepreneurs with shitty legislation. They won't do it obviously, but the discussion needs to keep happening. Right now you still have the vast majority of old "boomers" that don't understand the way in which the whole pipeline works, the second biggest group is right out activists who frankly exaggerate when talking about technology(and it mostly has nothing to do with tech regulation/support but forcing tech into their own ideology) and the third group is probably the least popular one, with sensible people who understand you cannot regulate because that suppresses development, but at the same time recognize values and rights needs to be adapted to this medium, while being individual-focused.
Sorry, but that's not a reason for me to buy something. I prefer solutions that perform good over something whose only merit is that it has been made by my neighbor.
Instead of trying to guilt-trip people into buying why not come up with products that can compete in the global market? There's a few - I mean I'm a Spotify customer. But most EU tech is just garbage.
I prefer supporting competition in the market, because I know that as soon as monopoly gets established it starts abusing all marlet participants and acting like a little dictator. Of course it doesn't have to be local.
Also Skype was really good before Microsoft bought it, i have no idea what that department is smoking
Leaseweb, OVH (is mentioned in the cloud section), Hetzner all deserve a mention.
bit of a stretch to say Switzerland isn't European
(and there seem to be zero UK companies)
(In particular, free movement of people in the bloc as I understand it.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_for_work...
And it has the EU TLD.
(similar to the same way the EU has attempted to commandeer the term "Europe" to mean itself)
If it was about what Europeans create, I would be receptive. Instead, they are promoting whatever is in the European Commission agenda, which is radically different to what I need.
It seems like a case of appropriation until you realize that most European supranational organizations share similar origins, goals and members.
Thus EU membership has lots of asterixes and grey areas unlike the US which is a federacy the EU is a confederacy (Look at Brexit). Switzerland is somewhat unique in that it's both EU and not EU. Take the UK for instance -- their grey area is "Northern Ireland".
A good rule of thumb is that if a British person says Europe or European they mean "the continent" and are including Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, Lichtenstein, Vatican City etc, but excluding the UK itself.
If a German/French/Spanish/Italian person says Europe or European, especially if they've been to university, they a very likely to mean the EU and only the EU. These people usually don't consider Switzerland or Britain to the "European" as a consequence.
People outside of Europe always mean the continent and population, including the UK, when they use these terms.
German, been to university. Same for my whole social system. That's absolutely BS what you're saying. Especially German speaking countries have a stronger bond than EU/Europe because of "DACH" and a shared culture (see the anthroposophy discussion recently).
I just added a new live chat service to the category called crisp (https://european-alternatives.eu/product/crisp), maybe it better fits your needs.
I do question the design of the logo which makes the site look like an official EU initiative, which it is not. At best it's unintentionally misleading and at worst it might not be entirely legal.
Often even the european media landscape is only mentioning US services in reviews and comparison. The fact that it needs a page like this says a lot about how bad marketing of these european companies even in their home market is.
I don't really get this fragmentation in a free world. Why should i use product that is less competitive just because companyX servers a located in a country that is theoretically more friendly? Even that is a big question.
If you live in Poland or any Eastern European EU member, in this case GB, US do more to protect you from absolutely real War risk.
Germany, France, Austria government is absolutely corrupted they lead to situation when Russia think it can claim rights on other sovereign countries. Half of eastern Europe felt left behind. Same with China relationship. How many people will lose their job because china is building their capital on not fairly regulated market, stolen Intellectual property. EU don't care. No real protection. They afraid tensions(polite form of saying corrupted) even when this tension means protect own citizen.
At the same time ex german counselor works at Gazprom to Lobby corrupt interests. He got an official title. Russia takes this money and execute, poison people, blow up military objects in European countries.
But EU built a nice website to support corrupted governments via taxes. Maybe first get some responsibility and do your job?
More discoverability of alternative offerings is always better, for both the customer and supplier, unless the supplier is a monopolist.
In my experience middle sized companies that still have to prove themselves and build good will offer (much) better servivce / product than mature corporations run by beancounters who are focused on "monetising" their userbase most effectively.
But, yes, the cloud computing stuff is pretty sad indeed.
So yeah, regulations will definitely work :) It will just create more lazy corps that have no motivation to be competitive
There's a few other examples I'm aware of, like FFAA for "Fuerzas Armadas" ("Armed Forces"), but I have the feeling this is an obsolete practice.