Comment by olieidel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by olieidel | Hacker News Reader

Help me understand this: European companies have already been interested in choosing for European alternatives instead of AWS, Azure, etc. for years.

Sure, this interest has recently gone up significantly, but it already was there, especially in the area I've been working in (hospitals / medical devices).

But here's what I can't wrap my head around: Why do the European alternatives suck so much?

- Pretty much all cloud providers seem (very) subpar to AWS. Some are better in a very isolated way, e.g. Hetzner offers better prices for cloud instances, bare metal servers and object storage. But they don't offer anything else. OVHcloud's web interface is terrible. Telekom Cloud runs Huawei hardware and software (!) and the dev experience is really bad.

- There's no real Cloudflare alternative.

- There's no real Google Workspace / Microsoft Teams competitor (Mail + Calendar + Drive).

- No search engine / Google alternative.

Or, let me rephrase this from another angle: In the US, startups regularly build serious competitor products to some of the incumbents mentioned above. Look at what fly.io and render.com did to Heroku, I think that's very impressive. Or hey.com slowly building a Gmail alternative, very cool.

So it's possible, technically.

But why not in Europe?

I can't get a satisfactory explanation for this observation. We certainly have smart people and good universities. Is it about funding? Or about the culture of not promoting entrepreneurship? Bureaucracy? GDPR?

I genuinely don't know. What do you think?

In my experience it is a lot of things, in varying amounts depending on the situation (and each of these is both good in some ways and bad in others):

- The USA is a huge and fairly homogenous fairly wealthy fairly risk-positive market.

- The USA has a bigger = better mindset. "Your restaurant is fantastic, you should open another one!".

- Abysmal work-life-balance. Great for making stuff.

- Minimal language and cultural barriers.

- Because of the USA market, you can grow huge before having to expand to other countries.

- Because you can grow huge in the USA market, that is where the funding goes.

- All the the USA's allies didn't mind too much, because they are(/were?) allies

- All the non-USA-allies developed their own markets (Russia, East Asia, Africa, India, etc).

- And so now, given the messaging coming out of the USA, EU governments/companies/people are giving their USA-entanglement a second look.

Which, being in the EU, is pretty exciting. I feel like there is a lot of opportunity here right now.

Disclaimer: I'm sure there are 1001 reasons, and the above is just one potential view.

I think you've made some good points.

However:

> All the non-USA-allies developed their own markets

I have friends and family in India, and I'm not aware of homegrown alternatives to any of the following:

* gmail

* amazon

* google search

* whatsapp

* linkedin

* spotify

* facebook

* yt shorts

On that last one, when India banned TikTok overnight, it was a golden opportunity for a different homegrown alternative to step in, but it looks like YT/IG captured most of that market.

Happy to be corrected, though. If you have concrete examples, that'd be good to know!

We’re building seenode, a European alternative to Render and Fly.io. When you’re fundraising, you’re always compared to global competitors, not just European ones. Which usually have better access to capital, they get to the traction and revenues faster as there is one big market with huge purchase power.

I’ve spoken with other DevTools founders, and many of them see 60–80% of their revenue coming from the US. When you’re building a PLG model targeting software developers, you really have to think globally from day one.

Even though demand for EU-based server providers has increased recently. It wasn’t always like that.

Being EU based and trying to target only EU customers is more complicated, from fundraising to customer acquisition, especially when you factor in language localization and legal bureaucracy. It’s even harder if you’re building a B2C startup where regional differences are more pronounced.

Because people don't care that much about where their software comes from. They just want the best product available, and more often than not it comes from the States.

This is a global phenomenon - Americans didn't care about TikTok being a Chinese company either.

This alone does not explain why new leaders do not emerge from Europe.

Whenever they have, they have been bought by larger and richer (mostloy US) tech companies. Look at Deepmind, Skype, Nokia, Tandberg, etc... Arm is another (although Japanese rather than US-owned). There are also many cases where European founders base their companies out the States for access to higher funding (eg Stripe, Spotify). Another factor is that US multinationals have a large presence across Europe in terms of employment - if a large component of the top tech talent of Europe is employed by US companies then they are less likely to build large European companies.

The alternatives part is not right. Lot of them are Swiss but i don't think that matters.

Cloudflare - BunnyCDN, KeyCDN and quite a few others with not so complete offer.

Google Workspace / MS Teams - Infomaniak, Mailbox.org, Proton.me

Search engine - Qwant, Ecosia, Startpage

Search engine is the one where best alternative is Kagi which is US. But rest of the categories has been viable for years. Many of the companies are older than Google. Yes, UX/polish might be not same but unlike the Googles/Microsoft of the world which have been going down these companies are getting a lot better.

It's the trillion dollar question that get discussed on HN a lot. My intuition:

- Private $ market: EU is decades behind the US in private capital management and the appetite for risk. In the US, it is not uncommon to raise $20M on an idea. In the EU (at least until recently), you'd raise literally 10X less.

- Piling effect: companies grow quickly by selling their product to the previous generation of growing companies: internet -> mobile -> cloud -> AI. Each wave feeds the next one, all currently centered in the US.

>I can't get a satisfactory explanation for this observation. We certainly have smart people and good universities. Is it about funding? Or about the culture of not promoting entrepreneurship? Bureaucracy? GDPR?

You're not going to like this answer, but I think there is a lot more tall-poppy syndrome in Europe. Success isn't celebrated the way it is in the US. This also drives European resentment of the US in general. (And that resentment has undermined the transatlantic relationship.)

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