These people keep acting like they're so clever for figuring this out, yet in reality all they're doing is giving death sentences to European companies by making them unable to use industry standard products.
Microsoft spent decades aggressively lobbying European governments and companies to use their stuff. Even if this finding has any short term impact (see the other comments about this point), I find it hard to believe Microsoft wouldn't swallow the pill and simply become compliant. If not - yeah, companies who are entrenched in Microsoft products have to find alternatives, which is gonna cost them significant efforts, but also open the door to more competition. Sounds like a short term problem for European businesses even in the worst case scenario.
The only way for Microsoft to become compliant is to carve out its European business into a separate organization (not even a subsidiary -- it could be that even a joint venture would not be enough to escape the reach of the CLOUD act).
The US also doesn't really believe in foreign competition ("Buy American", recent huge industrial subsidies as part of the IRA), so I don't really know if Europe should kowtow to the US here. If the US gave up on the CLOUD act none of this would be a problem anyway.
You need to find the sweet spot. Too little regulation is harmful. Too much regulation is also harmful. The EU and US are near opposite ends of the spectrum at the moment and neither is an ideal place to be. The US produces many more financially successful big tech businesses but those businesses do a lot of things we don't like. The EU doesn't produce many successful big tech businesses in the first place.
I'm more a fan of the EU because I think these sorts of regulations are good. The thing they do wrong here is that they do it slow. E.g. they introduce the universal USB-C port, companies won't be motivated to innovate on that tech since they know it'll take ages for the EU to update the law. So after all yeah finding a sweet spot of course is the best, the thing is that we don't know how to find it.
Fight tooth and nail to preserve this. We're living in the future here in USA, trust me on this, gig economy and corporate churn sucks. You don't want to get on this ride.
(BTW, USB standards are up to 240W already, it would be a decent power cable itself alone if not for the fire / power loss / safety / cable size issues that DC causes...)
Obviously there are plenty of skilled software developers in Europe so the question we have to ask is what else is different.
Having this discussion on HackerNews is useless, because people here are at best very light users of Office and at worst don't use it at all.
How many hours per week does your work involve Office software? Because for a lot of people it's 40, but those people are not on HN.
I have to admit though that O365 is handy for collaboration. I hope we can do something like a LibreOffice-based similar thing that companies can star using as a platform for online collaboration.
Where I work we already have lots of regulations on what we can and what we can't store on SharePoint or work on O365. My job is mostly safe from those inconveniences, but one of my first jobs was to build an asset delivery system that would comply with a number of US and EU regulations on what asset can be delivered to whom from where. Took lots of meetings with legal.
Like Google (US) or Zoho (Indian).
I do not know European companies providing a cloud solution easy to deploy (I wild truly be glad to know one).
It's open source so you can even self host. Should be more than enough for most comapnies.
Not sure how difficult the set-up process for an enterprise environment is, I only used the docker version before. But should be viable and if a company has Money for Microsoft365 they should have money to pay to someone to set it up manage for them.
It's just a question of money.
Having the US spy on Europeans is also very costly.
While something like NextCloud or Seafile it is fine for personal use or for small teams it is no way close to something like Microsoft 365 with the extensive backend it provides out of the box. Not to mention email integration.
Again, this is from the perspective of someone who uses and develops open source software and hots a lot of services for personal/family ise, but also from someone who knows the complexity and shitbat crazy wrchitectures you find in large, distributed companies.
If we managed to have in Europe something similar to Zoho, driven by European laws, that would be fantastic. We do not, and this is a real shame.
> But should be viable and if a company has Money for Microsoft365 they should have money to pay to someone to set it up manage for them.
Microsoft 365 is expensive, but the expense of running a home-made solution for a large company is not only the pure management, but also the ability to have hope if there is a problem. I have raised issues for Nextcloud (some of them quite impacting from a security monitoring perspective) and the community replies were horrible. If NextCloud does not monitor the community forum when someone raises such issues then I cannot have any trust that they will fix it for a paying user.
It will keep these already slow organizations busy trying to find and implement alternatives. Instead they could focus on growing their businesses.
Good luck Europe.
People in most of Europe are truly convinced finance, money and growth are mirages made to enslave them in eternal pursuit of an unreachable state, and instead prefer to cool it down. It's not a pragmatic strategy because it ignores we re not alone.
I don’t agree with you. So think about that next time you say “most Europeans”.
Perhaps not yoir personal opinion, but definitely one that is anecdotally common among white collar workers.
If so, I stand corrected.
If not, it was performed by representatives whose incentives are not aligned to the electorate (see Arrows impossibility theorem).
However, as a citizen of EU member, I’d say GDPR pretty well aligns with the general notion of the people.
Sometimes people ain’t happy when government uses GDPR as a scapegoat to keep iffy data private. E.g. hiding final beneficiaries of companies. But I don’t see people unhappy that GDPR prevents crappy software practices.
Same deal as credit cards. Here in Europe cards processing fees are capped. Thus we don’t have US-style kickbacks or points programmes. Which probably limits credit card issuers innovations and business models. But I don’t see people complaining about that.
Or how many are you?
I'm French, the motherland is a constant source of sad despair for me.
It's worse than that, it's delusional and hypocritical. Here in Sweden people will proudly write "We are not like the Americans" on their iPhones, drive Teslas and generally base their whole lifestyles on the foundation created by the American capitalism and possible thanks to the protection of US military.
Something-something auto makers conform to California emission laws, same argument.
The US commonly uses corporate data in geopolitical moves. Buy using Microsoft cloud products you're sharing all your data with us.gov
Also often times business like regulation, as it forces all their competitors to play on the same playing field. Which may be easy enough for established players, but is a difficult mote to cross for smaller up-and-coming organizations (regulatory capture).
Then there is the the frequent enough occurrence of conflicting regulations. For example, the EPA may require that an oil change shop store used oil above ground (underground storage can have undetected leaks). But the fire department requires below ground storage (above ground is a fire hazard). So which regulation do you violate? The one that fines you less, and the fine is a cost of doing business.
Unintended consequences of good intentions.
I think that's a bit more nuanced. There's definitely a lot of "nobody gets fired for MS", and lots of big companies use O365 because of existing licenses. At the same time, there's lots of small companies using Google suite. There are companies relying on specialised software. There's lots of those that don't use anything beyond a simple text editor where switching is trivial.
And yeah, huge companies rely on O365, but those will get fixes that get them to compliance very soon.
How many data was copied because of the MS chain of Windows->Exchange->Office?
Instead MS brought back productivity-tracking.
That's a No-Go and MS only gets away with it because of their desktop monopoly in the industry.
I think they'll do just fine without Microsoft harvesting your precious data
I think they'll do just fine without being forced to use Microsoft products
I think they'll do just fine without having Microsoft as only choice
I think it's important to fight lobbies and monopolies
I think it's sad that many European companies died because they couldn't compete with Microsoft lobbies
Europe is the home of many big open source projects and open standards
Maybe this will result in a proper open alternative to Microsoft 365
Yeah, right. Plenty of companies will fail if they are forced to use some of the almost perfectly equal alternatives.
People from the US tend to underestimate the EU, the EU could easily give a bit of cash to a competitor along with some juicy contracts, the US is not the only bloc that can throw millions at a problem.