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Comment by linkjuice4all | Hacker News Reader

It seems like there's a big opportunity for someone to hire a bunch of disenfranchised US devs that want to flee the country to build an EU-native cloud platform - but clearly there's enough talent on the continent already, so why hasn't this happened yet?

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Because it’s not a dev problem, it’s a sales problem.

The sales problem being there isn't anything viable to compete with the established players. Europe has the capability, even without immigration from the US, it just needs a kick to make good enough products.

The EU should also create a new regulation to force everyone on the continent to move away from American companies. That’s one way to give the local startups a market to sell to.

I’d be interested in arguments that EU providers could be equivalent to Azure … is it realistic to move a large university across for email and other cloud services? Might be the right time to start campaigning for institutions to divest from US tech stacks…

What products are so hard to replace?

People usually choose big tech from a mix of CYA, sales pitches, preferences for known brands, and political reasons such as enabling surveillance.

It is much more complicated than that.

(1) Europe has a fragmented market; linguistically, product wise (2) Silicon Valley is in the United States (3) The United States has a very large amount of capital to throw at companies (4) even if you managed to succeed in the EU your shares will most likely be bought out from under you if you raised capital (5) all of the above re-inforce each other over time

Once you have that kind of an advantage it is very hard to lose it.

It is worth noting that only one of the “big three” clouds is in Silicon Valley - indeed, much of the original development work on what became AWS was done in South Africa!

It has! Here's a whole list of them, but others might exist too!

https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl...

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