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Comment by general1726 | Hacker News Reader

Russia is running on Windows too and did not collapsed. It turns out that companies wants to make money and are willing to jump through hoops, sanctions or not.

Also you can just use cracked OS (illegal, but if Microsoft is out, it will become abandonware) and create alternative API for cloud services. How hard do you think it would be to create i.e. S3 compatible API? Wait that already exists - https://github.com/jchristn/S3Server

And you could continue with whatever Azure, AWS etc offers. In the end, it is just some variation of a REST server.

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Russia has a homegrown Google competitor in the form of Yandex. It runs its own search engine, mail, cloud services, office suites etc. There isn't an EU equivalent AFAIK. And they had many years to prepare because Russia has been sanctioned in various forms for a long time going back to 2016.

Windows is not that important. It's more about Outlook, Office, all the enterprise apps running on US clouds, etc.

Which EU cloud providers can easily create knock offs and then let EU services migrate without changing anything on companies side, except just endpoints.

Furthermore EU equivalents of Yandex do exist - https://www.seznam.cz/ (Do you see the Yahoo in it?) or French Google: https://www.qwant.com/?l=en or equivalent of Google Maps https://mapy.com/en/ just have a look here: https://european-alternatives.eu/

They are small, sure, but the moment competition is gone, there is no reason for them not to scale

It doesn't take years to set up a local equivalent of Yandex, or indeed what Russia has set up. It's very feasible to do the same as Russia.

Yandex is older than Google itself is.

The building you in being 30 years old doesn't mean it takes 30 years old to build a new building.

Buildings aren't comparable to tech companies, are they? Tech companies continuously build out their technology stack. They don't build a product then fire everyone who isn't a keep-the-lights-on-sysadmin. Modern Google or Yandex is the result of 30 years of continuous building, every day.

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