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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

> 74% of Europe’s publicly listed companies rely on US-based tech like Google and Microsoft.

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”.

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I think Microsoft servers include GitHub? If so, that'd have a huge negative impact on research and academia in EU, as well as software development (even some web pages using JSresources from GitHub pages directly).

> I think Microsoft servers include GitHub? If so, that'd have a huge negative impact on research and academia in EU

All academic institutions I'm aware of run their own self-hosted GitLab instance.

Gitlab isn't a European company anymore (and hasn't been for quite some time).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitLab_Inc.

ECMWF is on GitHub, and I think they mirror some work in their BitBucket.

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.

I wondered if it could be a question of definition of "rely on", maybe they're just talking about for their product but yeah I agree probably if you count everything that the company is using, I doubt it is as low as 74% who is not relying on Windows operating system or Microsoft email or Google email and so on. I think it's probably much much higher but it might be what they define as rely on for the core service, their product, but they're not counting on the accounting staff doing their financial of projections in Excel.

Youre forgetting about the tradies and other micro businesses that still do everything on pen n paper. I still know pubs and hotels local to me that do everything on paper.

> 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?

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.

You can replace excel with programming and a DB only up to a certain point.

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

I wish this site had emojis so I could spam the facepalm emoji.

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?

Because Excel and Sheets exist, most businesses don’t bother with custom software for things that basic spreadsheets can handle, which is a lot.

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.

But many companies also misuse Excel for tasks for which it's a poor fit. They also use it for data entry that has nothing to do with financial calculations, and Excel is not suitable for maintaining data. One of my big frustrations has been watching business people put literally everything in Excel and then mailing that around.

> You either hire programmers to make a custom financial suite so that people can input things and then the software does the relevant calculations

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.

> alternative is to teach programming to every office worker

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.

I read the definition of "rely on" here as production outage, not operations.

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.

I worked for two companies who ran two separate stacks. One was all Windows and was a glorified email / Excel thing for talking to clients. All the business logic was on a separate network and was all Linux.

If Windows pulled the plug, it would be a major PITA but no more.

FOSS may not be exactly "US tech" but from the perspective of the EU, it's perhaps even worse.

The EU doesn't control FOSS any more than it does US tech, and it can't threaten it.

I think the EU would be very happy with every major company running their own FOSS stack instead of handing their money/control to US tech firms.

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.

Because the EU is relatively low-corruption so far EU goals trend towards transparency, privacy and interoperability (despite some efforts to the contrary). FLOSS naturally aligns with these goals, without needing extensive threats or control .

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