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Comment by axiosgunnar | Hacker News Reader

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axiosgunnar

> Government project

> awarded to Microsoft

Hey Europe, want to stop being several decades behind in IT compared to US/China?

One simple trick:

Ban FAANG from public procurement in Europe!

It‘s a no-brainer really.

Buy locally, ideally giving small companies and startups a chance.

You will have to do it anyway very soon if you want your privacy laws to be taken seriously.

There might be a couple of months of friction while buerocrats have to find new procurement partners, but that's it.

And then the European tech scene will rise.

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I really can't agree with this more. My university gives >$2e6/year to Microsoft alone. I'd much rather it gave >$2e6/year to providing jobs for locally employed people, rather than buying someone another yacht.

Curious how many students and faculty at your university are served by that $2m/year?

I don’t disagree with you, but if I were the CTO of a 10000+ seat organization, and a Microsoft/Google/etc told me they could provide email, storage, sharing/collaboration, office apps, security etc for a few bucks per user / month… that’s a pretty compelling deal.

And the idea of a university rolling its own office apps suite to provide local employment sounds like the sort of decision likely to end up in tears, or at least in students relying on Excel and Word on their own computers anyway

Most people wouldn't end up with rolling their own, but contracting existing support providers or developers.

E.g. for Excel and Word replacements there is LibreOffice, and any number of companies offer more polished packaged up LibreOffice variants and surrounding services. One example is Collabora in the UK[1]. In that respect the effect would be to shift revenue that currently mostly leaves Europe to companies closer to home.

The biggest hindrance is that if you do too much of that and you'll get the US and others doing the same thing in return, whether in the same sectors or entirely different sectors.

[1] https://www.collaboraoffice.com/

> Ban FAANG from public procurement in Europe!

Is it any better if SAP / Telekom get similar contracts (what usually happens in Germany)?

At least the tax euros stay in Europe, and you get local expertise, tech hubs etc

Don't Google Microsoft et al have offices in Europe?

> Microsoft

> Ban FAANG

I know exactly what you mean, but is that what we're doing now? Including Microsoft in FAANG but not changing the acronym?

to be fair, microsoft should've been included in the first place. they've been teetering top 3 market cap for a while now.

They should replace Netflix in FAANG or include Disney, HBO and a bunch of others.

A couple of months wouldn't replace Microsoft word never mind Excel, Aws, Azure AD or Azure

Microsoft didn't build this project, they just host it.

It's built in-house by the government.

For instance in Finland Azure/AWS/GCP are seen as a superior alternative against anything local/European and we’ve started to move our govermental and healthcare infra into these cloud providers.

Get your point.

Those small companies and startups are going to end up using Microsoft/Amazon/Google for their hosting/cloud-services anyway so FAANG still win in the end.

The UK isn't part of the EU anymore.

But frankly we're very similar in this regard, and given we might get dropped from H24 we're not in a good position tech or science wise heading into a recovery...

We'll no doubt award yet more govt projects to the tech oligarchs of the west and praise students for using their toys...

Maybe GP has edited their comment, but it says "Hey Europe" and we are very definitely still part of Europe.

But one day you will put that offshore wind turbines into reverse mode and push the isles to the middle of Atlantic, right?

Indeed it was edited, it said EU before. Europe makes even less sense, there is no centralized public procurement in all of Europe.

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