The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary
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The proof in the pudding is that Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that, they are either going to have to do without or use foreign software.
Nah, what hinders software development at that scale is literally just... scale and network effects. Europe has a significantly better legal infrastructure than Russia or China (which routinely kills entire sectors for random reasons) but Europe is not a homogenous isolated market of hundreds of millions people speaking the same language. That's literally it.
Looking at it another way, what's the American competition for Microsoft? You're just one company ahead of Europe in most cases, and most of them ironically sit in a state that looks like Europe in regulatory terms. If the vast majority of American states can't produce much competition, most of them extremely lax in terms of the legal environment, that's an indicator that this isn't what actually matters.
Computers: Apple and Google (Chromebooks are big in education). Server operating systems: various flavors of Linux, but I guess basically IBM since they bought Red Hat. Cloud services: Amazon. Office software: Google. Databases: Oracle. Name some slice or segment of all of these companies and there’s usually (though not always) a direct American competitor worth naming in the same breath even though each has their own specialty and none compete in their totality with each other.
MS Teams is lower risk from the perspective of management as it creates less of an alternative "center-of-gravity" for power.
Maybe it's more common in Europe for prestigious positions/roles (as opposed to compensation) to be used as reward/incentive (as opposed to a tool for change). Not sure.
Yeah this is another point that people seem to forget
We're talking about 2 or 3 cities in the US that punch way above their level. But we don't hear too often how there isn't a competitive cloud made in Boston or where's the FB competitor from Minnesota etc
"Gee, these industrial clusters are super rare and delicate! We have to make the conditions as favourable for them as possible"..
"This company is making lots of money but I disagree how they are doing it! We should force them to behave in a way that is more in line with how everyone else does things. All these big companies are the same and the wealth isn't going to go anywhere".
Europe puts a barriers in place that will kill off an entrepreneur's dream here or there. They only have to kill one or two key companies to do trillions of dollars of self-harm (which is what they appear to have done). In fact, everyone does this just to a greater or lesser degree; for example we can see how much prosperity China's manufacturing created with less blockers than in the USA leading to a few key industrial clusters.
However the gap to close is huge and France alone is not big enough to compete with US, it has to be the whole EU. Will see where it goes.
Airbus and Dassault are doing fine because they have well defined stable markets and (probably) government funding.
You should not buy the right wing discourse that in France rich people are too taxed and they flee blabla. This is just a way to push their right wing agenda. I'm myself quite rich and I'm doing well, so don't worry.
It's a great way to limit the understanding of the designers (no hands in the mud) and limit the total utility of design. You end up solving the problems of the elites, only, since no one else is in the room.
There are very elite engineering schools (mostly l'école polytechnique and the ENS which in kind of another beast) which are so selective that people from there are IMO in a different league from other engineers (not necessarily in a good way btw)
What French people don’t like is when elites try to steal our social system.
However your example isn’t really fair to be honest : Arnault and Bettencourt are really not self-made families, they are both from historical bourgeoisie. But we do have our fair share of new millionaires from the startup ecosystem.
Granted I limit myself to people who created successful businesses with real added value and mostly satisfied customers : businesses that are positive for the society.
That’s a myth. Ultra-rich and rich people are as powerful in France than anywhere else.
The myth "French people eat the rich" probably comes from the fact that our system discourages social upheaval.
It’s not the French people but the elites in power who don’t like people being rich if they are not from the same cast (prestigious schools).
French people only eat the richest when they want to steal our social benefits, and even that is becoming more and more rare since most media are now owned by billionaires and are spreading neoliberal narrative.
Yeah why would anyone dislike the idea of a run of the mill techbro making 50x more money than the janitor.
I also don't see what this observation has to do with hiring immigrants or not.
The underappreciated thing about the US immigration system is the fact that you usually don't even need it. If you're a Silicon Valley startup, you have a pool of 330 million people to hire from, and they all live in your country, speak your language and are part of the same culture. Yes, the EU has free movement, but moving from Warsaw to Berlin, two European cities that are pretty close to each other, is going to be far bigger of an ordeal than moving from New York, Massachusetts, or even Texas or Alabama to San Francisco. Maybe not from a legal perspective, but definitely from a language / cultural / "how do I go to a doctor here" perspective. If you need very specific talent, like people with expertise in building distributed databases or self-driving cars, you're far more likely to find them amongst 330 million Americans than amongst, let's say, 2 million Latvians. This causes network effects to kick in, making America even more of a "magnet" for talented people.
The other issue is basically the same problem, except going the other way. In the US, releasing a product means releasing it to 330 million prospective customers at once. In most industries, if you release your product in English and can accept credit cards, most people that you'd want as your early customers can already buy it. This is not true in Europe, every country has its own language and its own take on online payments. If your startup touches the physical world or legal system in any way (think easier invoicing for small businesses, 21st-century software for hotel management, an easy website builder for private medical practices etc), this is even more of an issue. The problem you're solving might not even exist in some countries (maybe their government already provides a good app for invoicing), and where it does exist, it's hard to figure out its nuances without speaking the right language. This basically means those kinds of startups usually work on a local level, not a European level.
Most wealth is not a metric for how ethical a place is. At a certain point it is negative inference.
Having superior infrastructure and economy is definitely a huge part of the answer, I believe the majority of it. This holds true all the way back to Roman and Byzantine empires.
They all lose them over time, or are themselves dissolved and absorbed.
Even within the EU, doing work and business can be very different.
My personal favorites to work in are the Netherlands and Switzerland. Easy going people, flat hierarchies, cooperative and forgiving of mistakes, though YMMV as always.
MS is from Seattle but it didn't start there
Culture and investment/market conditions (sure, with the help of laws) play a much stronger part on that
You couldn't get them without available hardware and without a market willing to experiment.
And you couldn't have that without strong CS/EE departments that had strong investment in the decades prior that had spun a whole semiconductor industry
And you wouldn't have had that without some welcoming immigration laws (at the decades prior) and some worldwide conflicts neither and a specific country that touches both main oceans and has decided that farther away areas might be safer for some developments.
If you want to understand why laws in France are the way they are you need to take a look at what happened in the past 250 yrs more or less.
Everyone wants to get a tech sector like California but insist on having non competition agreements being either valid or conditionally valid meaning there is a gray area that stifles innovation.
Innovation by theft? Well, California is a very special outlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause
Non competes are good for the big incubent companies, but bad for the economy and the workers.
Compare getting someone to move from Chicago to San Francisco (same language, same culture) versus getting someone to move from Norway to Italy (completely different language, very different culture).
So USA had a much larger effective work force when a company wanted to hire developers and much easier marketing of the products.
Europe had a lot of computer hardware companies in the 1980's but they were never able to capture the full European market. So they died out due to lack of scale.
There is also the problem of every single country wanting to be a king, so there was no political will to say "we need to join forces and create one single SV" (or one single unix company).
Still today EU can't create an European Silicon Valley as you don't get a SV by saying "we want a SV here", you get it by saying "everywhere else is NOT going to be a SV".
You're phrasing it in a way that makes this scale seem like a good thing. Is it?
I'm not convinced that the scale of supranational grow-at-all-costs uncontrollable corporations is good
Yet, here it is the top comment.
It reflects strongly on the American audience here.
It creates jobs in the USA, which is also good.
So of course people will defend that.
In my opinion, what they fail to understand is that this power doesn't have any significant impact on their personal lives. It favours only those who are already in power.
Depends how much they pay.
What has Apple and Microsoft done for Americans ? They pay little to no taxes, they spy on everyone, they provide increasingly terrible products...
People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality, effecting a large drag on communication. It's also incompatible with effective organizational culture (eg calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions, information is siloed to only meeting participants, cooperative doc editing corrupts and loses data, sharepoint is a psychological horror game etc). Its usage is a useful signal about an organisation though.
And of course it's a giant red target from security POV, as is obvious the headlines on the MS phishing epidemics and regular news on the gaping slapstick level security holes ([0] [1] [2] etc) in the load bearing part of company security (identity, and email password reset channel).
[0] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-critical-...
[1] https://www.hkcert.org/security-bulletin/microsoft-exchange-...
As a slack competitor Teams is arguably worse, but for people who haven't used Slack the difference is hard to justify switching.
Slack is just shit, and being just shit makes it an order of magnitude better than the trainwreck that is teams.
Yes, hate is a soft word in this case. We despise it, we wish its creators burned in hell together with the management who chose it.
Teams is the opposite of engineering, is the bully boy around the corner.
To call Teams a shit, means giving it consistence, which it doesn't have.
People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office (but I personally hate LibreOffice).
> calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions
What? Where? Is this about the list of other calendars defaulting to showing people under the same manager?
> information is siloed to only meeting participants
You can configure it to show meeting titles to everyone (the company I work for expects everyone to do so), and the new Outlook even showed me the meeting description and participants when peeking at someone else's calendar.
The more sophisticated your documents get the more you hate Office.
They absolutely do. Many people hate the office suite in its entirety, lots of people hate some program in particular (I particularly despise Word). Most people are indifferent and have accepted that $Program is what they are using in $Job
1.) Microsoft Office
2.) SAP
I know this is merely an anecdote, but it aligns with my personal experience + with the experiences of friends and family
IMHO, small independent providers should unite and develop something like File API, but for web (for a NAS with web interface).
Are we forgetting decades of office suite incompatibility? The main reason most european companies use Office365 over alternatives is:
1. Fear of retraining
2. Fear of untrodden path
but most crucially:
3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses
That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF.
Most of Words featured aren't used anyway because most people don't know them.
The rest is some Excel tools somebody once created which heavily rely on VBA but nobody can support them because they guy who made them already has left the company.
Have seen that more than once.
PDF embedding attacks have been a thing for years.
Personally I think that the culture of sending everything as a Word or Excel attachment has a lot to do with the dominance of MS office but if you can't avoid Office-like applications the other options are even worse.
So for example you can use Excel online with Sharepoint/OneDrive (two different hosts btw) but you can also use many maany third party hosts.
Additionally third party tools can programmatically access the first party hosts (like sharepoint).
I don't like Microsoft-esque APIs and the company sure has issues here and there but I doubt you'd get the same level of data privacy with a startup (e.g. everything goes through privacy review, security review, devs can't access customer data, data is separated by region etc)
And if you argue with Andres Freund and the XZ discovery recently, he is really a Citus guy. Yes, that is now part of Microsoft but I guess you get my point of him not being directly hired by Microsoft AFAIK.
Microsoft as an organization could and should really do a lot more for security and privacy than they do. But first the culture would need to be that there actually is a lot of low hanging fruit instead of searching for excuses. [3] For instance, Windows Updates could be more reliable, predictable in how long they run and much faster overall. Windows could detect and stop ransomware much better. Microsoft could make Windows Server Core cheaper and have a separate more expensive license for the "full fat" Windows Server with desktop services. That would put some pressure on organizations to do the right thing and reduce the attack surface area.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/micro... [1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/chaosdb-how-we-hacked-thousands-of-a... [2] https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-tec... [3] https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/it-takes-a-phd-to-develop-t...
And MS tries to force you into the cloud.
Most companies have a solution for network storage or cloud storage and most software will function with it. For personal use most people use their local hard disk and others use a cloud provider as a network drive. Or whatever proprietary storage solution the software supports.
Example scenario:
As an office user Alice, I want to open documented XXX stored on NAS Foo at Foo.net in application Bar at bar.com.
To do that, in application Bar user clicks on "Open File" button, then in dialog she selects "NAS" tab, then selects Foo, then selects file XXX.
When the file is selected, NAS Foo forms a one-time URL for the file, like davs://foo.net/u/alice/d/xxx.docx?otp=1234567890abcdef. This URL is invisible to user, unless she explicitly asks for it.
Application Bar receives this URL from the user browser and tries to open it.
NAS Foo shows popup to user about "Application Bar at Bar.com [LOGO] tries to open document xxx.docx. Allow? [O]nce, [A]llways, [C]ancel".
When Alice presses Once, a temporary password is generated and securely shared between Foo.net and Bar.com for the next 12h.
Now, application Bar.com can read and write document xxx.docx freely. At each read, NAS stores a record in a log about access to the document. At each write, NAS creates a new revision of the document and backups it.
Application Bar.com has no access to other files except for those selected by Alice. NAS Foo automatically revokes access of Bar.com to all files after a period of inactivity (month?).
In this case, service Bar.com cannot force Alice to pay for service just because their app contains some important documents in storage. Bar.com cannot pass those document to third party actor, like government, police, etc.
These massive integrated bundles of fluffy convenience are cybersecurity death-traps that leak personal data like a rusty bucket. Firms are rightly getting very nervous about massive fines, and blaming MS is not a get-out. With Microsoft unable to reign-in the complexity of their own products they'll lose market share to smaller, more specialised but more secure systems.
Ironically the path to better security for Microsoft would be to partition/split their own products as the anti-monopolists would have them do.
(Or the US could scrap the "Patriot Act" along with shutting down NSA and other 3-letter agencies, but that's even less likely to happen.)
Once again, we can thank the EU for pressuring companies to use Microsoft products.
[0] https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/pre... [1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/germanys_northernmost...
>Therefore state organizations sometimes do migrate to different offerings
And then come back to Mother Microsoft. See Munich.
For typesetting and presentations that have be 'nice' I use TeX and beamer. For the kind of stuff MS users use Excel for I use R.
For presentations that don't have to be nice I use nano, plaintext and then just scale up the text.
He probably meant an alternative to Office for companies and average people not tech enthusiasts. Nobody is gonna switch to raw text files and TeX.
That is, actual presentations made from scaled-up nano, mini-manuals for the team written in plaintext, etc.
Stop extrapolating that your niche experience somehow is the norm.
There's a reason why companies prefer to pay for office instead of using raw text and latex files for free.
There's nothing hard about writing plain text files. You just need to write good English and have some feel for text as a medium.
In some way there's less to learn there than in word, where you can bold things, insert images, etc.
People outside this niche have even less need for complicated functionality. A sales team that writes in word could have written in plaintext, and have had an organised picture of all their doings, with little details, that will eventually be machine-digestable. The only problem is if you want to write mathematics, but then you have LaTeX.
An in-between solution, if you want things a little bit conventional, is markdown.
It couldn't and the proof is in the pudding. If it were that easy as you make it seem, we would have done it a long time ago.
Non-tech people hate switching away form office since that's the only thing they know how to use comfortably, especially to janky stuff like latex that's not WYSIWYG and needs to be compiled. Nobody is gonna use that shit.
And non-tech people are the ones who sign the checks that make the purchasing decisions, and those people hate any kind of friction, hence why companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc are so successful.
Your view on things rings like that infamous HN comment form 2007 saying why Dropbox is a useless invention doomed to fail since we can host files locally on git and easily spin up a FTP server to share them if we want to.
Being familiar with something way bette than needing to learn from scratch. That's the end of the sales pitch.
Some specialists can't live without MS Excel and all of its extensions (banking), but that's not the common case. Common case is word processing, slide presentations, and task management (in spreadsheets).
And that's a problem because it isn't even particularly great software [0,1,2]. Of course all complex calculation tools have bugs, but compare the code quality of Excel with something like Matlab or R and it looks amateurish.
[0] https://www.microassist.com/software-tips/real-world-risks-o...
[1] https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-t...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
All other systems have a way steeper learning curve.
Free personal tier, which they host themselves, similar to Google Docs / Sheet: https://personal.onlyoffice.com/
Thanks, but no thanks.
FWIW this is no longer true, the feature is called 'Database Ranges'. However i (sadly) don't disagree LO is still miles behind Excel.
It's also dangerously focused on Microsoft and complacent with "cloud" software. Google has already been winning their wrestling match over desktop computing for some time now, they shouldn't be helped. And with shittier software as a result.
Also while using "Microsoft sounds" in the music is cute, I can't help but think that it's a bit like using Nazi music (Wagner ??) in a documentary critical of Nazis...
It is not biased against Microsoft. It is about Microsoft based on journalism and decent research.
Microsoft is by the way more trust worthy than European governments!
We first have to defeat Russia, China, etc. Become independent of them and even defeat them before we start trying to peel off dependency on the US.
US is an ally, and in the near future we have to rely on them. That's it.
The US is a merciless imperial power.
We are all looking pretty nervously at the possibility of Trump's return. He'd be definitely willing to throw us under the Putin bus for a couple million USD laundered through his golf club or hotel bookings.
And you wouldn't actually revolt and do anything about that. So, on a whole, not really allies. Just other people who individually may or may not be our friends.
(Arguably, Trump, Xi and even Putin still have "potential" left.)
Not true, ridiculous statement.
But in the role of US president he would be able to do equal harm, just by acting like a 5 year old.
Linux on the desktop is a reality. I'm on one, it's my main OS, I even play my games on it.
It having bugs is nothing special. Other systems have them as well.
Windows is not seamless at all. And if you'd like to debug, you're SOL, because often it's not helpful at all.
The state of things is not up to developers. Developers are part of a project, and the projects are part of a culture. Companies have projects and culture too, producing the same effects, for example take a look at how many UI styles Windows has, or how Microsoft's one project supports and contributes to open source, while another part of them actively destroys it.
Latest adventure an UEFI only motherboard (no BIOS backwards compatibility available), that no matter what, refuses to reckognise SSD NVMe that hold Linux instead of Windows.
Yes, one can complain the pesky OEMs still not being Linux Desktop friendly after 30 years, which in pratice doesn't matter to the regular consumer.
So yeah, it works flawlessly, but only for Microsoft.