US tech rules the European market
proton.me
proton.me
Only 74%?
That feels wrong.
I don’t know a single company off the top of my head that wouldn’t suffer serious damage if you null-routed Google and Microsoft’s servers.
Excel rules the world, and even if it didn’t: nobody is running libreoffice on linux professionally, at least not that I am aware of- and hosting mail? Conventional wisdom is that you should outsource that: I don’t seriously believe that people would outsource mail and not go with Google/Microsoft and get a productivity suite “for free”.
If Windows pulled the plug, it would be a major PITA but no more.
The EU doesn't control FOSS any more than it does US tech, and it can't threaten it.
Sure, this doesn't mean the EU would have control over the FOSS stack, but it would keep the data/money/soft power away from the US. And the EU would have a much easier time enforcing its security/privacy laws on those EU companies running FOSS on hardware inside the EU.
All academic institutions I'm aware of run their own self-hosted GitLab instance.
Research in Spain has both GitLab and GitHub from what I could see (my company has 2 internal GitLab, a few orgs on GitHub).
Many projects from EOSC or used in EOSC ptojects and deliverables have GitHub repos.
Many projects I use from a Manchester Uni team from ontologies and metadata and provenance are hosted on GitHub.
CERN, Max Planck, INRIA use GitHub, although not sure if exclusively or if they mirror. But I know some of their international collaboration happens there.
So GitLab is definitely used in Eu institutions. Maybe all. But that does not mean GitHub is not also used primarily or as alternative or mirror by these same institutions.
It has remarkable stickiness but the replacement for Excel isn't another spreadsheet, it's programming + databases. SAP and other custom business software are pretty big especially in large organizations. Word is pretty replaceable, as is the rest of MS Office, especially if you have a custom solution instead of relying on Excel. Self-hosting email is definitely a thing for massive corporations. And don't forget 2/3 of the big Linux vendors are European.
74% tracks. Lots do depend on MS and Google solutions, but enough don't.
The advantage of excel is that any office worker can perform data manipulation there. It can't be replaced for una-tantum operations on data, because it isn't practical to do custom implementations every time you need something.
The alternative is to teach programming to every office worker and give them access to the db. Not sure it's a good idea
You don't make every worker learn programming. You either hire programmers to make a custom financial suite so that people can input things and then the software does the relevant calculations, or you buy one. SAP is an example of that. They're not worth 300 billion for no reason. There's also custom suites for many different industries, because many have different needs.
The point is that the ability to make custom software replaces Excel... Since Excel is extremely prone to allowing users to mess up.
Edit - I guess no one's adjacent to industries where accounting software rules? Like O&G?
Sure, more complex things can be handled by custom software, but there are still basic things that spreadsheets handle just fine. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Even large companies that use SAP still rely on spreadsheets for simpler needs.
There's a reason Excel rules the world. And it's not because there aren't programmers capable of writing "custom financial suites".
But because Excel can handle most anything you can throw at it
> SAP is an example of that. They're not worth 300 billion for no reason
Yes. There's very little reason for SAP to be worth that much. SAP are infamous for their projects that are nearly always over time and over budget and still don't do what was intended.
Programming in business environments is becoming ever more popular using languages like Python and R
It’s nowhere near as pervasive as Excel but I could see AI playing a big part here. Most Excel domain projects don’t require a high degree of technical understanding so autogenerated Python code that is “good enough” can be easily generated. Hell AI alone could take over most of the basic data crunching usecases.
For example: Say you use gmail and excel at work. If Gmail is down, your Windows PC crashed, or Excel does not own, the product (machines, websites, etc) do not stop working straight away. The specific term is unattended production hot path.
The 75% is already reasonably high when most production/industrial stuff runs on Linux or embedded derivatives. This shows the level of unattended production hot path on US tech.
lobby and corruption. But i repeat myself.
The main reason to switch to SaaS is that it’s less of your responsibility anymore. The decision is made mainly not because of technical but legal or budget reasons.
It's not just learning how to secure it once, it's constantly watching for announcements regarding new vulnerabilities and being able to patch at short notice or being able to pull the infrastructure offline if you can't patch right away.
The world is a different place now with what virtually amounts to criminal companies trying to find every vulnerability that allows them to get into your system and either holding your data for ransom, extracting it for their own uses, or both. Even if you really do want to employ someone solely to stay on top of patching and watching for vulnerabilities, it's safer and often cheaper to let one of the big companies host your data.
people really freak out when it goes down or you screw it up. i’m willing to roll my own of most things, but I don’t want to roll my own mail server or phone server.
these things are just so specialized and publically exposed and the penalties are too severe if you fuck it up or lose data.
Personally I've moved to Zoho for mail and use Ubuntu with a rsync/zfs based backup solution. I'm not logged in to Google but I do use Google Search. On my phone I use a separate Google account specially for the phone, and I use F Droid, except for my bank, which only distributes their app through Google Play.
Why do you think the EU is trying to bully (ineffectively) US tech companies? I don't think bullying US companies is the solution. More embracing of Linux would help a lot. Banks need to behave; making Google Play store a requirement for banking should not be allowed by the authorities, since banks play a special role. Then there is search and maps. Something should be done about that as well. Maybe something like an EU-based perplexity/anthropic competitor would be great.
Mistral?
Because this increases lobby spending. Win-win.
Dutch banks used to have a great system for contactless payment through your banking app. Worked perfectly. Last year, it seems they all abandoned it in favour of Google Wallet. I don't understand this move. Why outsource this to US tech giants when we had a perfect system already in place?
I think regulation that requires banks to keep their payment infrastructure in the EU and out of the hands of advertising companies would be a really good idea.
How would banks distribute their apps and make sure they are up to date then? F-Droid only accepts open-source software.
> Maybe something like an EU-based perplexity/anthropic competitor would be great.
Maybe it would be even better to have a EU-based app store that must be pre-installed on every Android/iOS/iPadOS device that is sold in the EU, so as to break the monopoly of Google and Apple in the app distribution.
Publish an APK on the website
And even then, people need to really want to buy that stuff instead of Microsoft, Apple and Apple OSes.
Note how even with all the geo-politics, pirate copies of Windows abound in China, they aren't all running away into Linux install parties with deepin or similar.
Skype was at one point extremely popular and this is European but it was bought and squashed under the mountain of American poo that is MS Teams. Forgive me the rudeness but I wish to dispell the thought that American tech is automatically superior or that it wins by being good.
Then there's Linux - another European development that has rocked the world but has been bought and ruled by mostly American companies with the noticeable exception of Ubuntu (and a few others).
The World Wide Web - a blow for freedom and the spread of information coming from CERN that has again been captured and perverted into an advertisement delivery and spying system more powerful than the East German Stasi could possibly imagine.
We have Big Tech to thank for Nazi saluters, quite potentially for the attempt to break the world economy and the idea of turning all of humanity into basic income serfs which will not, of course, include the owners of big tech itself.
The EU is the only powerful entity that hasn't been completely perverted by the power of big tech and we have to hope like hell that it won't be. To all those with shares in big tech or jobs in it who want to expand and rule - go ahead and vote me down - who would expect anything else!
Nitpick: Whatsapp was American from the start. It was founded in Mountain View, CA by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo.
2/3 of the big Linux vendors are European (Suse and Ubuntu)...
They're actually doing interesting things with immutable distros and stuff, but their customers are big, not startups or consumers.
Apparently you can't regulate big tech heavily and expect to compete with US big tech.
Is coca-cola american? most people would say so but their hq is in china!
These multi-nationals don't have 'branches' in Europe, they are incorporated there as well, that's why they're called multi-national. they pay European taxes and are subject to European laws such as GDPR and other data-residency laws, which means their data-center, and a large chunk of their support staff (Europeans are cheaper than Americans to hire/pay) are in Europe.
Should Americans avoid Proton and its products so they don't rely on Europe? Hypocrite much there friend? Should we avoid European cars? Maybe Ozempic/glp-1 medication should be manufactured by US companies in America (Denmark's GDP is seeing most of it's multi-digit growth thanks to American Ozempic usage).
Proton's leadership supported Trump and the GOP and now they want to promote nationalistic brand loyalty?
These people make it hard to be against trump's b.s. tariffs and hostility against our allies. Proton has a good product, why isn't that enough? They also have to meddle in politics and make it about "America vs Europe" or "Republicans vs Democrats"?
You know what would be great? if employee and customer owned companies replaced even the likes of proton so we can democratically vote incompetent leadership like this out. Make good products, let the products sell themselves. Why should Europeans have to put up with inferior products for the sake of nationalism? If you want to support Europe so much, tell us about how great your company's product is and how superior it is compared to American alternatives, I'd be down for that. Europeans can and do buy European goods and services of better quality, try finding a Swizz that enjoys American cheese and chocolate, or a European that drives oversized American pickup trucks.
Unless you're speaking as an individual or you are an elected politician, don't misuse whatever platform you have to meddle in politics.
... this again? Come on.
The CEO once expressed support for Gail Slater as head of antitrust and subsequently criticized lack of effective work towards tech regulation on the Democratic side in the same social media thread.
Calling that support for either Trump or the entire GOP is a massive stretch, and throwing the claim out without context borders on disinformation.
I can only assume they're actively donating to the GOP and trying lobby. In other words, it's not even support for trump that's a problem, but willingness and desire to get into bed with political parties that favor them in the moment (shouldn't at all).
The context was that some GOP-affiliated politicians attended certain meetings for supporting tech regulation whereas democrats didn't. The article doesn't mention this original context but talks about the secondary tweets as if that had been Yen's primary message.
> I can only assume they're actively donating to the GOP and trying lobby. In other words, it's not even support for trump that's a problem, but willingness and desire to get into bed with political parties that favor them in the moment (shouldn't at all).
Do you have any other data point that supports these ideas, or are you extrapolating from this single specific event?
> The context was that some GOP-affiliated politicians attended certain meetings for supporting tech regulation whereas democrats didn't. The article doesn't mention this original context but talks about the secondary tweets as if that had been Yen's primary message.
The context was around the time of the 2024 elections in the US. He didn't simply say that republicans attended their meeting or whatever, as you can clearly see, he expressed his beliefs about "corporate democrats" and how republicans are not beholden to corporations b.s. (this sh!t matters when you have reach!!).
Look at how Huawei was essentially destroyed in Europe, even though it was growing by double digits each year. This happened because they were blocked from accessing Google services by U.S. government.
You can't just easily switch to an alternative when U.S. software monopolies dominate the market. Replacing them would take a lot of time and money. Ultimately, this is about national security and geopolitical concerns.
Wasn't aware of this, citation? From what I can see they still list HQ in Atlanta.
Uuuh says who? I think they dominate because they are in fact better for business for one reason or another.
GSuite and O365 are better for businesses than uhhh… what is the european equivalent even? Tutanota and protonmail + libreoffice?
Also them being fully subscribed to capitalism: let other people solve my problems.
The reason tech isn't so big here is that there's more regulation and less loose capital. Both aren't bad things IMO. Venture capital is pure gambling in the US. We don't subscribe to the American unrestricted capitalism here (well except for the UK and Netherlands which are heavily influenced by America)
Basically none of these problems were even remotely tackled in the last 20 years and now everything is beyond repair. All they cared about was money and externalising any environmental or social cost.
I think this is a very broad statement that does not reflect the reality on the ground for a significant amout of non-etnical-europeans.
Europe is a very diverse continent culturally speaking and also has a big immigration background, and those blank statements, while they're cool as a counter-narrative to the 'Europoor' memes, lack nuance in terms of the representation of what is going on.
I come from a significantly large cohort of demographics to the EU that was searching for upward mobility from a poverty/middle-class background in South America/India, and on the contrary (maybe our fellow Asians in Central Europe can agree here also), money matters. A lot.
If you're an ethno-European and you live in Munich, Freiburg, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Zurich, Basel u.z.w not needing money would be OK because at the end of the day you can have relatives nearby, and probably you might be sitting on some real estate heritage that can make you good in the future.
But for a large part of the cohort that I mentioned, there's no family at max 3h flight, and money matters to help family abroad.
> Venture capital is pure gambling in the US. We don't subscribe to the American unrestricted capitalism here (well except for the UK and Netherlands which are heavily influenced by America)
This turns me off most of the time, but here we go...
VCs are just the capital allocators; most of the time those people represent family offices, institutional investment funds, and sovereign wealth funds that have some excess capital to allocate in several ways to have positive disproportionate positive returns, where those returns will subsidize the failed ones.
Capital for investment means that an ecosystem can start to work and you can have a flow of talent and capital, and it potentially flows to other parts of society—more explicitly, to the economy—but at the end of the day, it goes back to the public via taxes and public services.
If the alternative for the capital arriving in Central Europe is (a) founders fleeing to the USA and opening their companies there, (b) European companies using Delaware LLCs to operate at EU, (c) working at traditional old-money companies that squeeze wages, and (d) having those jobs and capital fleeing to Poland/Spain/Paris/Portugal/Amsterdam; I will take the capital at any time of the day.
It's not that and I don't have that, it's just that we have good social security and free healthcare where I live. And nearly free public transport. So you don't have to be afraid that an unexpected event can bankrupt you like in the US.
We care more about quality of life here than just about money. Of course money still matters but not as much as in the US where it's pretty much people's only goal in life.
I don't want my country to become like the US. As it is Holland is already one of the most capitalist countries in the EU, very neoliberal. If you want it to be more about money, then the US would be a better destination to migrate to than the EU (and I'm not saying that in a "go away" manner, I'm an immigrant too, I just mean that the US is a much better match with your economic vision).
And yeah I know there's many people from poor countries, I have an ex who is from South America. But they get the worst jobs with really shit pay so of course it's more about money.
> If the alternative for the capital arriving in Central Europe is (a) founders fleeing to the USA and opening their companies there, (b) European companies using Delaware LLCs to operate at EU, (c) working at traditional old-money companies that squeeze wages, and (d) having those jobs and capital fleeing to Poland/Spain/Paris/Portugal/Amsterdam; I will take the capital at any time of the day.
I wouldn't. I'm fine as it is. I took about a 50% pay cut to be where I am but my life is so much better here. I can buy much less tech things here (things that cost the same everywhere) but things like food are also much cheaper. A car would be difficult but I don't need one and I really enjoy no longer having to drive (I deeply hated driving). And rent is cheaper too, even though they are really inflated right now, it's still a lot cheaper.
The tech things don't really matter, and I have more free time and a much easier life than at home.
Don't forget a country exists for all its citizens, not just the top wealthy, and not for companies. They're just a means to an end.
…of course, you can probably think of a more mild approach.
I understand what you mean, I am a fan of Ha-Joon Chang, but it won't happen unless EU shifts from its neoliberal economic paradigm into something more keynesian.
Disagree. Not only does Europe have the demographics and educational institutions, but on top of that, it has very high social mobility [1].
I agree 100% related to the retention of talent, but I have a different perspective: I think there exist 2 kinds of retention, (I) environmental and institutional retention and (II) organizational retention.
At the (I), you have all the things that Europeans bring here when such discussions happen: accessibility to public health care, a range of public services, less inequality, access to education, and so on.
At the (II) come the big companies and their perks, mission, compensation, impact on society, organizational culture, rewarding mechanisms for ambition, and allow people work satisfaction. And a market large enough to allow some work mobility (change seats and plenty of opportunities).
Being in Central Europe, I can say we have (I) but are lacking at the (II).
I have been around for almost a decade, and my general impression is that people have some mixture of a bit of professional cope that sublimes to work contentment and, honestly, unless you have a big reason and/or financial offset to stay due to (I) personal circumstances, people that can have options will choose (II).
[1] - https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/residence/residence-ri...
The European principles that created your social guarantees are largely incompatible with an individual-centric, growth-focused society that would reward certain ambitious individuals much more than others.
I agree in terms of the negative correlation, but I do not think this is related only to this set of synthetic principles but also due to the huge tailwind of the longest peacetimein the continent's history plus all the economic development and prosperity generated during this time.
Not to dismiss your point, but in terms of semantics, we cannot mix general guidance for policies and decisions made based on temporal preferences with a principle, which is a fundamental truth that sets the foundation for something and has axiomatic acceptance.
I acknowledge that for ethno-Europeans the European principles (social guarantees) are a thing (especially for the ones in Central Europe), but as soon as the money flow slows down, we will see those principles being tested, particularly due to the contentious (unfair?) intergenerational social contract.
The question is not so much are EU enterprises currently depending on offering by Google and Microsoft. The real question is what are the alternatives these companies could turn to if they needed to.
And the truth is that there exists solid alternatives from Asia to nearly everything they offer.
EU companies don’t need to reinvent anything. They have a great opportunity to diversify their supply chain.
That just moves the problem somewhere else, rather than giving the EU homegrown solutions to rely on.
Mercantilism is an idea of the past. The main issue is that American are deluded enough to vote for someone who thinks it's relevant.
When one of your trade partner decides to commit suicide by imposing tariffs on everyone and threaten to not supply you anymore, the correct solution is not to turn inward for everything, it's to turn to other partners which are not acting like buffoons.
The problem in Europe is that they've placed too much faith in supply chain diversification and almost completely abandoned independent capabilities.
Dubious.
The question could be asked if you narrow the topic to IT services but even then it's unclear. Cloud key components are there, same for telecom. There is a gap when it comes to productivity software but the need is unclear for me. You could easily switch from Microsoft to Zoho or WPS if trully required. It's not like there is anything critical here. Most core business processes are structure around the ERP where SAP, the European offering, is king and Odoo is a solid European competitor.
AI, you have key components open sourced due to the international competition and the small European ecosystem ensures some talents are there at company like Mistral. Search is the only sector where Europe has nothing and the alternative to the US (Yandex, Baidu) would be dubious.
I know it doesn't fit HN prefered narrative but the European situation is honestly not that bad. Actually, hitting the American service industry hard in retaliation to the tariff would probably have been the best thing Europe ever did. Really a shame Germany is spineless.