It is striking that both the evil empire solution (Microsoft 365) and the underdog disruptive upstart (Google Docs, at least that’s what it was ~15 years ago) are both American companies. iWork is American, Zoho is Indian.
Why aren’t Europeans producing competitive software?
Back before Gmail ate the world there were a number of small “mail server with webmail” in a box setups - those mostly died off. Similar things happened with office suites.
The problem with the MS products is a different one.
All authorities and almost all business are in tight vendor lock-in when it comes to US software. That's a powerful factor. You can't escape 30+ years of grown lock-in without "insane" investments.
The second factor is of course the corruption all across the EU and its authorities.
Ever heard the story of Munich's switch to Linux and than back to MS? "By chance" MS built its German headquarter in Munich right after that… (Of course hundreds of millions of Euros where in play there). And the sister of one of the lead politicians behind that is "by chance" working for MS in a high management role. There are also known buddy connections between the ex mayor of Munich and MS.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
They absolutely do;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepL_Translator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeamViewer_(company)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufthansa_Systems
Just 4 examples from Germany. There are countless software companies in Europe, and not just western...eastern Europe is going big in IT in some areas as well. The ability is certainly there.
As to why that didn't (yet) result in good EU-centric alternatives to some of the big US providers in certain areas of IT...good question. I think the correct answer will be a mix of startup culture, government appreciation for the topics importance, convenience of existing solutions, marketing, and several other topics. Certainly not an easy question to give an answer to.
That's nothing even for a middle sized EU state.
Considering the whole EU such costs would be a rounding error; even really hard to spot in the budget.
But it would be an investment in domestic economy and a step towards independence form the empire. Should be a nobrainer therefore.
It is the digital equivalent of replacing all cars of a certain make that everyone uses for critical business functions and replacing them with your own line of cars that will take a decade plus to even mature after you spent a ton of money and an army of devs and dev-support/mgrs.
Really?
What does it lack (besides cloud lock-in, and compatibility with formats that are made in a way that it's impossible to be fully compatible).
> […] that will take a decade plus to even mature after you spent a ton of money and an army of devs and dev-support/mgrs.
You need to start somewhere.
Microsoft and Google are not shoestring budget bootstrapped startups - they can afford to run multiple products, or multiple variants of the same product adjusted for market need, and they will do it, as long as it's net profitable for them. Sure, it's nicer to earn X than X/2 or X/10, but as long as it's a positive amount, it's still worth doing.
That is, as long as it's more profitable to do it by the books than what a lot of industry players did so far, which is to spend money on malicious compliance and sabotaging GDPR.
It’s not (X/2), it’s (X/2) - (NPV of future profits from giving X/2 to develop competition).
Your model would work for just an adaptation to a compliant product, but not to the proposed “just seize 4% of their global revenue and use that to fund a competitor” model that I was replying to.
Because the european single market has a GDP of about 16.3 TRILLION dollars (2020 estimate, source; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_single_market)
By GDP, it's the third biggest market in the world, directly behind the US and China.