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Comment by Quothling | Hacker News Reader

It'll be interesting to see what this will mean for European dependence on US tech companies. I'm not personally against companies like Microsoft as such, in fact I think they are one of the better IT business partners for non-tech Enterprise. Often what they sell is vastly underestimated by their critics within the EU, not that I disagree with the problematic nature of depending on foreign tech companies either. With the proposed deregulation of US tech and their "freeing", however, I wonder if a lot of organisations will be capable of continuing using US tech services or it'll move in the direction of how Chinese (and other) services aren't legally available for a lot of things.

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I work for a European company and we already have strict rules about what data we’re allowed to remit into the US. Typically we’re only allowed to use cloud products hosted within UK + EU. It’s actually causing problems for us now with some of the generative AI stuff since the Azure offering doesn’t match fully the APIs of OpenAI for e.g.

It's similar for us. Since I work in the energy industry we're required to have plans for how to exit Microsoft if the EU deems it too dangerous for too much of the energy industry to be reliant on Microsoft. Which is part of why I worry, because we honestly can't. We can leave Azure, but we can't easily leave the 365 platform. By easily I mean that we may not survive as a company if we have to do it. It can obviously be done, we just don't have the resources required to do it.

I'm genuinely curious to hear why it would be so hard to leave the Office 365 platform, to the point that it could mean have to shut down the company. I know it isn't something that can be done overnight, but this is on a whole different level than what I assumed the case to be. To make my question more concrete, let's say the EU gives you two years to move away from Office 365, why would this jeopardize your company?

Most corpos and banks are basically built on Excel, Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint, etc.

If you pluck that out it completely freezes 50%+ of their operations, people really don't get how much stuff in modern companies is reliant on MS stuff (and thus why they are one of the richest companies on the globe)

Yes, but there are comparable alternatives. Sure, the transition requires resources and effort, but to the point of making a company bankrupt?

In some cases I would say yes if there was a hard limit (even few years) to migrate. Again, most people that didn't work in many really big corpos and banks don't comprehend how reliant those businesses are on the MS office stack.

One very mundane reason a company I had worked for switched to Office365, was that emails from our own domain would often end up in the spam filter. It can cost a lot when that happens.

I see this being a problem in the current situation, where most businesses use either Google or Microsoft for their emails. But in the case of an EU-wide change, I think the situation would be different. Plus, there are other providers that could be used that aren't blocked by MS' and Google's spam filters.

yeah, the real selling point of the google mail is that they have the power to just remove mail from other providers. Or the risk of removing is enough motivation of using gmail only. And as a major mail provider, they could change the ways we handle mail (to make it more reliable), they just choose not to.

It is really f up but there are so many worse things that I just dont have the energy to feel angry about this one.

> Office 365 platform

Moving away from that would be a massive change management undertaking, but it's not the "Office" part which is our primary challenge. To be fair, I'm not sure we could actually survive the change management required to leave the Office and Windows part, as it would be completely unfamiliar territory for like 95% of our employees, but the collective we at least think that we can. We have quite a lot of Business Central 365 instances, the realistic alternative to those would be Excel (but not Excel). SharePoint is also a semi-massive part of our business as it's basically our "Document Warehouse".

I guess maybe I'm using the 365 term wrong?

I didn't know about business central, a quick Google search tells me it's an ERP. There are alternatives, but migrating an ERP is definitely more problematic than changing document storage and the applications you use to read and write documents. But if it's an ERP, I wouldn't say an electronic sheet like Excel would be an alternative. Or am I missing something?

At enterprise scale migrating to SAP is a 2-3 year project. Most of which is planning, discovery, business analysis and process modeling.

> But if it's an ERP, I wouldn't say an electronic sheet like Excel would be an alternative. Or am I missing something?

You're not missing anything, but that's our current exit strategy none the less. We need to be capable of exiting Microsoft within a month if required. It even says Excel in our strategy even though it would obviously need to be a different spreadsheet program. Well, maybe we would be allowed to use non-cloud Excel, I'm not too sure about that actually. I'm only involved in these things from SWE side of things where I have to give them a strategy for our part, which is very easy because everything is containerized and almost non-platform dependent, so it would be relatively easy to migrate away from Azure. The biggest challenge for our part of the business would be our reliance on AD (well Entra ID) authentication flows. Not a big challenge as far as the actual auth flows, because we could easily accept tokens from something like Keycloak but it would be a challenge to migrate the AD for the SysOps guys.

Now I see the problem: migrating from an ERP to a spreadsheet in one month would be a hell. But with a longer timeframe, I think it would be possible to migrate to a proper ERP without missing key functionalities.

They just mean that they would have to do real work and not just sit on their ass goofing off on the internet all day. Real work is something the last few generations are "allergic" to, it gives them the "ick". They somehow got it into their head that doing work is bad and that you should only rely on other peoples work, I blame Gates and public education.

I don't agree with this view. Saying that new generations are lazy compared to the previous ones is a complain as old as humanity itself, there are ancient writers that made the same complains centuries ago. Either you know their situation and you can provide some more detailed argument, or you are just assuming things you don't know.

Which is a nonsensical policy of course, since the US made clear in the past that regardless of where the server is located, US companies have to give access to data. See the CLOUD act.

My experience is that most companies in Europe just don‘t care about data privacy and continue to use whatever Microsoft sells them. Vendor-Lockin is a huge issue.

European wise I think we're really failing to build significant homegrown tech companies. I'm not sure of the exact reason although I've heard that startup support it low and too much regulation / diversity of regulation are issues.

It's a like a paradox of tolerance issue.

You have countries that are willing to turn a blind eye toward their tech companies when those companies ignore laws to grow.

In some ways it's "obvious" they'll outgrow companies from countries which have a culture of corporate adherence to laws.

>I'm not sure of the exact reason

Left wing politics doesn't promote economic growth.

What European country would you describe as having a left wing party in power over the last decade?

GDPR et. al. does not fit for the US big tech since you need to respect the user.

Spain has had a left-wing government for a while, and the current German one could maybe be described as centre-left.

Agreeing with you though that the EU as a whole isn't really "left-wing".

Germany just suffered 3 years of a left-leaning coalition that is just now imploding.

Germany was who I had in mind - you can't blame the lack of eu tech boom over the last 16 years on the last 3 years of a centre-left coalition.

Yeah, I agree. However, I can blame them on making things worse when I specifically elected them to make things better. Instead of solving Germany's issues, they are infighting and spending money on social programs and on illegal migrants. Next year, every single tax, healthcare, and social security rate is going up.

Furthermore, the Greens are blocking real progress in the name of NIMBY-ism. The current government is actively killing markets by introducing harmful policies.

My experience is that it's much simpler than that - all the money is in the Bay Area. Follow the money.

Yeah, many successful startups regardless of where they start become Bay Area startups as they scale :)

And for the most part it doesn't matter, nor should it.

There is just no upside to founding your tech startup in the EU. You'll just be at a disadvantage. And as long as we have a unified US/EU market, this is not something that can be fixed. This has always been the downside of any kind of trade agreement that opened up the markets to foreign competition. Typically, the two parties pick winners and losers. Europeans export cheese and wine and Americans export Google and Facebook.

Other than the fact that I don't want to move to the US, I completely agree with you.

Diversity of regulation and different languages/cultures. The US is a single, huge market with a largely shared culture and the same language. By contrast, an app that takes off in Germany has no guarantee of doing so in Italy or Slovakia.

America is a single massive low-regulation market. And a wealthy one. Tech products require high fixed cost to write the code/build the product, but then low ongoing cost to provide a service. Less regulation means lower complexity in building a product. A big market without a lot of regulation is a great way to amortize the high cost across a lot of people, while a wealthy market can support a lot of products. And of course a lot of investor cash to push around. Even using a single language and having mostly overlapping customs means that one product works for millions of people.

There are plenty of European customs and views that make developing these companies unpopular (eg data collection and privacy) but the single-massive-market is the economic reason why the US is so powerful.

That's not the only reason in my opinion. It's way easier for European graduates to find a job and cruise on to retirement. The govt takes care of them for life and so the do or die attitude needed to start a company just isn't there in most countries. This is a consequence of the welfare state most of Europe has become.

I see this as oversimplification. US Tech faces hard regulations too (fintech, healthcare etc...). Also Regulation is not that big of a bump in EU. GDPR simplified rules across 27 different national laws and forced new innovations in privacy. Also Spotify, SAP, Adyen all started in small markets, as counterexamples. The main reasons why USA is ahead I think are the historical advantages (internet, personal computer), the network effects created by the historical advantages and the VC ecosystem. Also the culture for risk tolerance.

Regulation may or may not be that much worse in the EU, but if there are 27 different countries, it adds a lot of uncertainty and legal work as you roll out to each one. GDPR wasn't written until tech winners were already called.

The VC system and network grew out of this existing development in America (of course the capital markets have been there since before tech, as I mentioned). The banking and finance system grew in America for the same reason - a large single-regulator market.

Spotify is basically a US company today - They have huge US offices, and their US subscribers are crucial. It's also a perfect example of a business that doesn't follow the high-fixed-cost-low-ongoing-cost model. They have to pay a license fee for every stream, so they can't amortize their costs across users nearly as well.

SAP is another example of a business that doesn't amortize as well across users - their product is very bespoke per company, and negotiated individually.

Also USA gets best of the talent from entire world, USA is almost always the first choice. But rest of the world gets what's behind mostly. So a lot bigger talent pool.

Actually I think it's more that Americans just have a higher cultural tolerance for risk. It takes a certain unusual kind of person to jump off a cliff and try to assemble a plane on the way down, and for some cultural reason, America generates more of those people.

To even have a shot at getting a successful startup off the ground, you need to a assemble a whole team of those people, which is still much more difficult in Europe (though things may be starting to change).

Overregulation and taxation is the major issue. I can only speak for Germany. Low worker rights in the US make for healthy companies that can grow and shrink as needed. You can't just fire people in Germany, even though you pay horrendous amouns for social security.

It's quite simple actually: - many different regulatory policies to follow in order to sell accross the EU - different languages / culture - risk averse culture in investments and business (Americans go all-in and do not fear to fail fast) - lot of lobbying from already established compagnies (which are often state-backed which doesn't help) - no start-up culture basically. Contrary to the US, regulatory entities expect the same from a 10 000 people org and a 15 people start-up. It completely kills most startups.

In the end all these regulations allow Europeans to have access to "safe" products but it kills most of our innovations in favor of the US or China.

Europe is still very much pro-American: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/overall-opinio...

However, the numbers are much worse than before and on the previous Trump presidency they crashed(recovered with Biden but crashed again): https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/appendix-a-fav...

The anti-establishment movements in EU are also predominantly anti-US, leftists are often anti-US too.

I got the impression of many Americans online believing that Europeans are tech and progress loving, bureaucracy hating people under tyranny of EU which is a building in Brussels that churns rules and regulations.

However that's not true, most Europeans love the big government hate new tech and prefer the slow and worry free life over the daily hustling.

If Trump follows up with its promises, I only imagine EU parting with US on more stuff. I also see many Americans apparently believing that EU is mostly museums and there's no technology. Also not true, EU is made of countries that are traditionally tool-makers and Europeans are anti-tech and anti-change only when it comes to adoption of tech into their daily lives, not when creating tools and machines. ASML is not a coincidence, all kind of precision tooling and machinery is the bread and butter of European industry.

So, if EU parts with US, I imagine that American stuff will be quickly replaced with European made stuff. The dominance of American tech in the daily lives is mostly due to network effect, a forced change will result in what resulted in Russia and China: local alternatives.

Europe is worse off than the US only in Energy and demographics. Two massive issues but there are no quick-fixes for those, so they are European realities with or without the US.

> I imagine that American stuff will be quickly replaced with European made stuff.

I am in the process of (very slowly) decluttering my life. One weird observation that I had, is that I have very few hardware from the USA, even when I think liberally about "from" as designed and not just manufactured. I found a (crappy) HP printer, (wonderful) Apple hardware and two Zippos. There may be more, but it's not obvious labelled.

Software and some online services on the other hand are different.

From this European perspective the USA is very much a service export and not a stuff export economy.

I agree. The software is also possible to replace if forced.

US invested huge piles of money on the computer age and they cornered the web and software markets and now extracting grotesque profits from it mostly because its a winner takes it all industry. It's not that Europeans don't know how to write software, it's that it doesn't make business sense to go after the established American companies. Linux is invented in Europe, just as the Web but the American entrepreneurs were those who turned these technologies into great businesses. If forced by blocking, it wouldn't take much time to create European alternatives as the hard work of discovering what works and what doesn't is already established. In fact, during the internet age there were many European alternatives for most of it, there's still local alternatives to many.

Take Uber for example, it's not anything special. In places where it's banned, local entrepreneurs quickly made local alternatives.

There's of course industrial software, gaming etc and that's also plenty in EU. It wouldn't take much time to replace everything.

There are plenty of examples from the last 10-20 years where embargoes simply propelled local alternatives even in the most improvised countries.

Americans will have to be stupid to ban software to EU, so it will have to be the EU who bans American software and that probably wouldn't happen until things get really bad.

I'm more curious about the NYT tech union strike. They went forward with the strike and.. it doesn't appear anything bad happened. That might completely undermine the union's arguments...

If Trump goes through with his wide-sweeping tariffs, there will be trade wars. That goes for tech, too.

And keep in mind, if he installs nothing but loyalists and sycophants, who's to stop him from these half-baked ideas?

Are you aware of the tariffs other countries have?

Try importing California wine into France or Spain as an example. Try importing American cars into China or South Korea.

There is also the de facto tariffs from Chinese currency manipulation.

Hard to be intellectually honest about tariffs without looking what much of the rest of the world already does.

Tariffs can work well. Sometimes you want to have tariffs, depending on the functionalities and industries you want to keep domestic.

But imposing all-encompassing tariffs is just plain nonsense. It is dangerous nonsense. Replacing federal taxes with those tariffs is even worse.

Again, Trump is fixated with tariffs. At least his idea of it. The last time he tried, ask farmers how that went.

The first time Trump was elected was a shock, but now we understand. It wasn't a simple mistake. I have only few customers who use Google Workspace for their emails and only one who uses Dropbox for files. Initially (about 2002) companies moved away from U.S.-based cloud services. However, now I have an increasing number of customers who want to cancel cloud services entirely. But for my customers, there is no alternative to Windows.

The EU beaurocracy is into self sabotage.

They don't promote a climate where European tech companies can grow and they hamper the usage of US tech companies products.

Absolutely undeniable. I wish those 'not liking' your comment would say why they do not agree.

I'm not innocent of knee-jerk down-voting but I would like to cure myself of the habit. I wonder to what extent the extreme political and cultural polarization that prevails in the West results from a general reluctance on the part of adherents to engage in debate. At least that's my impression.

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