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It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful ser

by thamer 6y ago

It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company. Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to its old glory by an old guard convinced that somehow their country is so exceptional that it can just launch any product and that people will switch to it. The story is more sinister when it comes to cloud platforms. A government project to free its companies from American domination over this sector will typically involve a bidding process in which established and well-connected companies with a history of costly, slow, outdated tech will win the contracts through their political connections with no consideration for their capacity to deliver or innovate. MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts. The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world leader in computing. It's always the same thing. Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies. Always behind, always getting paid, never actually doing anything remotely useful. Source: I am French. I know how this works, I've seen these ridiculous projects get political support and fail miserably due to corruption and ineptitude. This is more of the same. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant [2] https://gigaom.com/2013/11/18/a-guide-to-the-french-national-clouds/ https://gigaom.com/2013/11/18/a-guide-to-the-french-national...

linksnapzz 6y ago
Or Outscale; the "French AWS" owned by Dassault Systemes...they did do a great job of cloning the AWS console feature set; but the backend was supposedly all VMware & Cisco UCS. Surprisingly not Bull hw, given that the people responsible for it came from there. Coulden't be cheap to run, and I've always wondered who used it outside of 3DS.
- orwin 6y ago
  If you want a real "French AWS", you should look at Scaleway (well, their VPS will be entering beta Q3 2020 so it's not AWS yet, but it's coming closer and closer)
  - iagovar 6y ago
    The only real competitor to AWS is OVH, and it's not even close. Shameless plug: http://iagovar.com/european-web-hosting-alternatives http://iagovar.com/european-web-hosting-alternatives
GuiA 6y ago
There has been no better example of this mindset recently than the development of the StopCovid app. It makes no sense on a number of levels, but there are so many government officials pushing it in the name of “la souveraineté de l’État sur la santé”.
tastroder 6y ago
In terms of technology and innovation the German side is likely similar, though I wouldn't go as far as calling it corruption. Larger companies like Deutsche Telekom have been doing local cloud stuff for years now, leading to amusing overviews such as [1]. Having interacted with some of the folks at conferences I'm pretty sure there's a core of people in there somewhat committed to open source which was nice to see. But in terms of innovation none of the projects branded as "German X as a service" over the last decades stood out as particularly innovative or remotely well managed. [1] https://cloud.telekom.de/resource/blob/data/90924/61960634736a807d12b3c99c3d044b87/telekom-cloud-iaas-paas-portfolio.jpg https://cloud.telekom.de/resource/blob/data/90924/6196063473...
- cyberpunk 6y ago
  OTC is just a rebranded openstack, with a super unreliable api -- we have to use it for certain reasons at a client of mine and they're very keen to get off it.
adev_ 6y ago
Pretty good summary yes. The idea itself of supporting Europeans alternative to face American and Chinese tech giants is by itself noble (and I think necessary). However, the usual way it is done is a disaster: top-bottom, funding some existing behemoth company that will have no capacity whatsoever to innovate, nor will to do so. But they will get the money because they have good connections. If you think about it, it is not very different of the American military-industrial complex and the way the DoD/Army/DoE fund their programs (F-35 ?). Creating a good environment for startups and giving grants to several ones in parallel to create an internal competitive market would be both cheaper and more effective. But that would imply first a generation switch....
- realusername 6y ago
  > However, the usual way it is done is a disaster: top-bottom, funding some existing behemoth company that will have no capacity whatsoever to innovate, nor will to do so. But they will get the money because they have good connections. That's the tragedy of the government-backed tech in France. You also have a lot of very skilled tech companies there, but they are not the ones getting government support to grow further.
  - adev_ 6y ago
    >That's the tragedy of the government-backed tech in France. You also have a lot of very skilled tech companies there, but they are not the ones getting government support to grow further. That's almost an universal tragedy. The good techies, the innovative engineers or the avant-garde researchers... Typically, the one doing the work... are generally not the one doing outreach, going around in convention, networking, making connections with politicians.... And getting Grants. On the other side, many conference/convention/"one-man-show" dudes are generally much better to talk than to produce anything useful. Their is a million of example of that, in both side of the Atlantic ocean. I would say it is less tragic in America, mainly because there is a Venture Capitalism culture there that Europe do not have.
    - WanderPanda 6y ago
polotics 6y ago
The Qwant story is even worse than this, the level of cronyism and ineptitude, the extreme turnover of engineers, the lies from well connected french oligarchy hustlers...
- iagovar 6y ago
  Is there any place where I can read a bit about their history?
  - ohgodplsno 6y ago
    This article is in french, but NextImpact did a pretty solid job at showing the _latest_ bullshit: https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108986-six-ans-apres-son-lancement-qwant-netait-quun-prototype-selon-dinum.htm https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108986-six-ans-apres-son-lan... https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108320-qwant-mail-fail-linagora.htm https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108320-qwant-mail-fail-linag... turnover and employee discontent: https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108123-le-cahier-doleances-salaries-qwant.htm https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108123-le-cahier-doleances-s... Deepl (https://www.deepl.com/en/translator https://www.deepl.com/en/translator) will do a great job at translating those articles.
    - iagovar 6y ago
      No problem, I can read french :)
boudin 6y ago
On the other hand there's already some well established hosting companies in both countries. I would hope that this initiative will not be built from the ground up but capitalizing on that. Qwant is poorly managed, but that doesn't mean every project is doomed to fail. If you would judge Google success based on their failed projects, it would be the same conclusion.
- iagovar 6y ago
  Well but Qwant has its core product in its infancy, if they can't even manage that, you tell me. The problem has many layers, Europe is not really united, which makes most markets small, the governments are pretty bad at managing investiments in tech fields, and there's not enough private capital going around pouring money into this.
  - boudin 6y ago
    You're a bit harsh, it does work, so they do manage that. I don't think there's the intent to kill google or become as big. Competing against Google is also a huge task... It's far from perfect, there's definitely stuff they do wrong, but it's also far from being the Quaero fiasco.
    - iagovar 6y ago
      Well, maybe you're right, but I tried to give them some feedback about spanish results and the difficulty to use quotes and even when I really tried, it was impossible. And yes results are bad in spanish.
Udik 6y ago
I agree completely: as a European, I find these projects pathetic. We need the humility to learn something from the US and create an environment and a framework in which private companies can thrive, instead of being constantly dragged down by bureaucracy, regulations, and a legal-judiciary system eager not to help but to assert its power.
- pinkfoot 6y ago
  Learn to pay your programmers properly.
  - icelancer 6y ago
    No kidding. When I was in France I was appalled at the rates they were paying software developers. For a collection of countries that boasts better living standards for people, the comparative gap in pay for technical positions is absurd.
    - enriquto 6y ago
      A junior developer cannot at all afford renting an appartment in Paris with his basis salary. For other jobs outside of software, it is even worse.
      - Nextgrid 6y ago
        > For other jobs outside of software, it is even worse. My understanding is that it’s the opposite. Software is significantly underpaid but you can do quite well with a typical paper-pushing bullshit job.
        enriquto 6y ago
        An entry-level tenured professor or a nurse at a hospital earn less than 2000 EUR per month. This gives them barely enough to rent a small room in a shared apartment.
      - 6y ago
ginko 6y ago
Well yes, but sometimes this approach gets you things like Airbus.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  No, this approach doesn’t. Complex working systems are built on a core of simpler working systems. Picking winners works incredibly rarely. Industrial policy and the infant industry argument barely ever works. You’re far more likely to get the Argentine or Indian car industry[1] or the Irish steel industry than the Korean ship building industry. Airbus did not arise from the government putting out a tender for an airline company to be delivered in working order. There were many smaller, working, profitable aviation companies first. [1] They all disappeared absent subsidies/tariffs.
ryuukk_ 6y ago
what a nice traitor, i bet you are proud of yourself ;)
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
as for your link about OpenStack, was there anything in 2013 which would have been an alternative to OpenStack? If you wanted to build your own cloud infra back then this was the standard to do it with, no?
Rerarom 6y ago
Also see Quaero
- jansan 6y ago
  Right, that was pathetic. IIRC they burnt 400 million € without producing any tangible results.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    I do have some VC backed companies that did the same recently. Dog-walking, for example.
icelancer 6y ago
How do they think Google became what it is, or most American companies like Amazon? That the US government funded it and kickstarted them with VC funds? A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts. But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies? Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general in Europe is ridiculously low for a comparable position in the United States, or even Japan. How are they going to retain talent?
- turbinerneiter 6y ago
  I.e. Germany has: * A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950 The US is close to becoming a failed state due to the increasing wealth and income gap. Also, please do me a favour and read up a bit on the history of silicon valley and us innovation. It's hard to claim the government investment isn't a big factor. The DoD is behind a lot of stuff. And I say this with envy - the US model of government investment is way better than the European one. OP correctly described the issues we have. (Not saying Germany is perfect and the US is pure shit, I was being overly provocative to establish an extreme counter point)
  - tpush 6y ago
    > * A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950 None of these things (for good or bad) have anything to do with making good tech products.
    - readarticle 6y ago
      The implication is these factors will suffice in attracting and retaining talent, instead of simply paying them more. Completely delusional in the face of the past thirty years or so, but it remains a worryingly common talking point in WE “tech adjacent” circles.
enriquto 6y ago
While it is easy to laugh at these modern "maginot lines" that the french love to build, the concept of "technological sovereignity" seems very reasonable.
- woodpanel 6y ago
  When many goverment bodies more or less have to use foreign software-infrastructure, then "maginot lines" sound reasonable. Very reasonable indeed IMO if e.g. German police has to use AWS because of lack of alternatives, or the countless local authorities running on windows. On the other hand, it is not the US to blame for their tech-supremacy. It is Germany and France to blame. There might be many reasons to cite why we lack behind. But the whole spirit behind a government-google, a government-aws, government-yaddayadda comes across as being more part of the problem than part of the solution.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  I am personally very cynical about sovereignty as a concept - it just means "nobody is willing to try to pay the heavy price to try to stop us" dressed up as something noble. Every whinge about loss of sovereignty is a complaint that they cannot control others anymore. While there may be some good for avoiding outside control it is a cover for their drooling about shoving others inside their domain of control.
flr03 6y ago
Honestly there are very capable and smart engineers in France, and I don't blame the country ambition to develop its own solutions, but the SSII mafia (or how are they called now?) is killing innovation. It's a very top to bottom decision process (starting from the Government/MP), with big bucks involved, and very little understanding of how to drive these tech projects, all the way to the bottom. What I don't understand is the status-quo after years and years of failed projects. What a waste of tax payer money.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > there are very capable and smart engineers in France I would not be so sure. I looked at the IT salaries there (both as a permanent and as a contractor) and it just doesn’t make sense to stay there when you could earn way more money elsewhere in Europe.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    that's assuming money is the one important thing in your life though :p I'd personally need at least 3 times my current french salary to start thinking about compromising my other life choices
  - thiht 6y ago
    That's not how it works, not everyone wants to move country just for a (way) better salary.
    - realusername 6y ago
      There's definitely an IT brain drain in France due to low salaries, very few people of my former school actually work for a french company anymore, they almost all went somewhere else to get a better pay. In the post-covid world of increased remote working, the brain drain will likely increase tenfold since developers won't even have to leave the country anymore.
      - namdnay 6y ago
piokoch 6y ago
That's very true. Another thing is that it is not like EU is somehow very far behind the US in terms of services hosting or "the cloud". There is French OVH provider and there is German Hetzner. While the former has an opinion of being cheap but no so great (especially in terms of support), the Hetzner really shines. Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especially dedicated servers are first class. In many, many situations it makes much more sense (both from costs perspective and ease of migration to other provider) to use dedicated servers and hire someone who will manage them, than throwing tons of money into Amazon pockets to get "X-large instances" that have power of old Celeron laptop (exaggerating a bit, but not that much).
- mondaygreens 6y ago
  France also has online.net (now Scaleway?) which I haven't used recently but was very good and reliable for me 3 years ago. Been using Hetzner ever since, which has set the new bar.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  OVH's support is not great but at least it's cheap and they have some transparency. Azure and AWS have shitty support too for small customers but they are expensive. Hetzner is nice. We also have Scaleway in the same category.
  - holstvoogd 6y ago
    > Azure and AWS have shitty support too for small customers but they are expensive oh yeah, AWS is terrible with support! I have to rely on their support forum for any support as 20% of our spend for crappy support is just not feasible. I.e. I get no support whatsoever. You can trick them a bit by wrapping it up in a sales inquiry though.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  This is basically the same line of reasoning used by people that say you could replace your corporate slack with IRC. Of course you could, but there's a good reason that people don't. If you just want to compare one VPS to another, the only thing you're comparing is cost and availability. But really there's many more factors that people are interested in considering beyond just that. Even if the only service you're interested in using is a VPS, using an AWS EC2 would have so many benefits over a Hetzner VPS that I'd struggle to list them. Amazon, and Google, and Microsoft... don't win cloud business because people are dumb, they win it because they offer a better product.
jansan 6y ago
Europe: Politicians want "something great", so there is a verdict that "something great" will be developed. A huge budget is provided, but it must be ensured that the usual suspects (public or semi-public research institutions) get most of the share. The whole project structure becomes fragmented beyond believe, nobody cares about commercial success. The project fails, but not in the eyes of the researchers, who claim that there was never the goal to create a commercial product. With the bazillion of research money they gained "valuable insight" into the whole problem and made "considerable progress". US: Andy von Bechtolsheim meets with two bright guys, sees the huge potential of their algorithm, walks back to his Porsche, signs them a 100,000$ cheque, and a few years later we have a global tech giant called Google who the rest of the world either admires or is afraid of.
- iagovar 6y ago
  Basically. In Spain you can get such cheque, but it would be 30K and your chances of getting 1/10 lower.
- 9q9 6y ago
  "something great" Also: this "something great" must be something they (EU politicians deciding about funding) have heard about! And what have they heard about? Something US companies have already been commercialising, hence started a big PR offensive. That's why the EU started big funding of research on cloud computing after Amazon made money with it, started big funding of research on search engine when Google made money with it, started big funding of research on AI/ML after Google made money with it ... I predict that the EU will go all in on supporting research on quantum computing when Google sells it in a big way.
hwj 6y ago
> French X for any X OCaml is the French SML ;)
vladvasiliu 6y ago
One problem that I think is somewhat related to the top-down, bureaucratic situation is that whatever big project they try to do is a copy of something else. They didn't want to build Google / Facebook / Whatever before those existed. Instead, they want to build a "French Google". Qwant is an example of that. Whatever they're trying to accomplish with Orange in the cloud business is just a "French AWS". During the lockdown when everyone was using Zoom, some politician was unhappy that EU countries would depend on foreign technology. Solution? Build a European Zoom! I find this kind of ironic, seeing how Skype used to be European...
thiht 6y ago
> The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world leader in computing. Do you have arguments or is it just a blank criticism? OVH for instance is built in part on OpenStack, what's so very wrong with it?
eloisant 6y ago
There was Cloudwatt also, that was supposed to be the "French AWS", and as you said got hundreds of millions from the government, was created with the help of big, old companies (Orange, Thales, Bull) and was an utter failure. I hope they learned their mistakes and won't do them again but I fear they'll just do it the same way. What the French government doesn't understand is that you don't create a tech giant the same way you create the TGV, the Ariane rocket or Airbus. That model worked for those giant industrial projects, but it doesn't work for tech.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
I'm Italian, living in San Francisco. Sadly, the same thing you say about France, are more or less true for Italy.
simias 6y ago
I agree that these efforts have been very hit or miss but on the other hand... What should they do instead? Just give up and accept that we're going to simply be technological vassals to America? Or should Macron and Merkel learn Javascript and take the matter into their own hands? We could've gone the Chinese way and just close the door to American companies, effectively forcing the local populace to use home-grown tools, but we're too nice for that. Instead we try to compete fairly in an open market, except that in practice most multinational corporations manage not to pay taxes in most European countries and they have a huge headstart so it's not really all that fair in the end. It's easy to be cynical about it but again, tech is too important to just say "well, we lost, I guess we'll increase wine production instead". I want the EU to keep trying. >Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies. What alternative is there though? The government also tried to help small start ups and incubators with fiscal advantages. We have the brains, we have the means, the government is just trying to make it happen. The hope is that eventually it'll manage to seed the industry. We also do have significant tech companies in Europe today that actually do interesting work, so it's a bit unfair to say that we only have "ridiculous projects" that are "never actually doing anything remotely useful". I'm French too, I know that we love to be cynical about everything, always see the glass half empty but it's not a very productive attitude. "MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts", as if France was suddenly the most corrupt country in the world. Look around, see what the rest of the world is doing. We're not doing that poorly.
- Pedrit0 6y ago
  Merci de le dire... Parfois cette mentalité collective qui nous caractérise me rend dingue... Le Français passe son temps à cracher sur tout et tout le monde, et surtout sur son propre pays. Donc ça fait du bien de voir des concitoyens qui restent lucides et positifs. Big up.
- touisteur 6y ago
  Listening to French entrepreneurs, the usual suspects (labor laws, taxes...) are not so much of a problem. They all seem to rally around an kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare of interacting with anything state-related... Especially orgs collecting payroll taxes... The stories I see, where you get nailed huge fines every year, for small nitpicky details. They all talk of nightmares where some admin comes and destroy their company with a single inscrutable letter...
maga20yes 6y ago
This so many times. There's no accountability for government sponsored projects in France. They believe they are discovering the wheel and so they will pour a few million in a born-dead team. And so after a while, they call it done, and everyone is happy even if product has zero usage.
jpfr 6y ago
The French minister of economy (and finance) is very clear on the goals of GAIA-X. Just watch these two minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9kJrwkfNp4&t=1320 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9kJrwkfNp4&t=1320
ur-whale 6y ago
Thank you for this, couldn't have put it better myself. I'll go one step further and make conjecture that the entire Gaia-X thingie is likely from the get-go a nice little scheme to milk public money directly into the pockets of the proponents of the whole affair. Brussels is teeming with firms whose specialty and sole purpose is fabricating bogus "projects" to squeeze EU research grant money into their and their clients pockets.
baud147258 6y ago
Though Bull doesn't exist anymore as independent company. I did an internship there (before it was bought, in 2012), the river of public money had mostly dried up and I felt like the company didn't really knew what to do, even if there was some nifty tech being developed here and there.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
I sometimes use Qwant from Germany.

by thamer 6y ago

linksnapzz 6y ago

Or Outscale; the "French AWS" owned by Dassault Systemes...they did do a great job of cloning the AWS console feature set; but the backend was supposedly all VMware & Cisco UCS. Surprisingly not Bull hw, given that the people responsible for it came from there. Coulden't be cheap to run, and I've always wondered who used it outside of 3DS.

orwin 6y ago
If you want a real "French AWS", you should look at Scaleway (well, their VPS will be entering beta Q3 2020 so it's not AWS yet, but it's coming closer and closer)
- iagovar 6y ago
  The only real competitor to AWS is OVH, and it's not even close. Shameless plug: http://iagovar.com/european-web-hosting-alternatives http://iagovar.com/european-web-hosting-alternatives

GuiA 6y ago

There has been no better example of this mindset recently than the development of the StopCovid app. It makes no sense on a number of levels, but there are so many government officials pushing it in the name of “la souveraineté de l’État sur la santé”.

tastroder 6y ago

In terms of technology and innovation the German side is likely similar, though I wouldn't go as far as calling it corruption. Larger companies like Deutsche Telekom have been doing local cloud stuff for years now, leading to amusing overviews such as [1]. Having interacted with some of the folks at conferences I'm pretty sure there's a core of people in there somewhat committed to open source which was nice to see. But in terms of innovation none of the projects branded as "German X as a service" over the last decades stood out as particularly innovative or remotely well managed. [1] https://cloud.telekom.de/resource/blob/data/90924/61960634736a807d12b3c99c3d044b87/telekom-cloud-iaas-paas-portfolio.jpg https://cloud.telekom.de/resource/blob/data/90924/6196063473...

cyberpunk 6y ago
OTC is just a rebranded openstack, with a super unreliable api -- we have to use it for certain reasons at a client of mine and they're very keen to get off it.

adev_ 6y ago

Pretty good summary yes. The idea itself of supporting Europeans alternative to face American and Chinese tech giants is by itself noble (and I think necessary). However, the usual way it is done is a disaster: top-bottom, funding some existing behemoth company that will have no capacity whatsoever to innovate, nor will to do so. But they will get the money because they have good connections. If you think about it, it is not very different of the American military-industrial complex and the way the DoD/Army/DoE fund their programs (F-35 ?). Creating a good environment for startups and giving grants to several ones in parallel to create an internal competitive market would be both cheaper and more effective. But that would imply first a generation switch....

realusername 6y ago
> However, the usual way it is done is a disaster: top-bottom, funding some existing behemoth company that will have no capacity whatsoever to innovate, nor will to do so. But they will get the money because they have good connections. That's the tragedy of the government-backed tech in France. You also have a lot of very skilled tech companies there, but they are not the ones getting government support to grow further.
- adev_ 6y ago
  >That's the tragedy of the government-backed tech in France. You also have a lot of very skilled tech companies there, but they are not the ones getting government support to grow further. That's almost an universal tragedy. The good techies, the innovative engineers or the avant-garde researchers... Typically, the one doing the work... are generally not the one doing outreach, going around in convention, networking, making connections with politicians.... And getting Grants. On the other side, many conference/convention/"one-man-show" dudes are generally much better to talk than to produce anything useful. Their is a million of example of that, in both side of the Atlantic ocean. I would say it is less tragic in America, mainly because there is a Venture Capitalism culture there that Europe do not have.
  - WanderPanda 6y ago

polotics 6y ago

The Qwant story is even worse than this, the level of cronyism and ineptitude, the extreme turnover of engineers, the lies from well connected french oligarchy hustlers...

iagovar 6y ago
Is there any place where I can read a bit about their history?
- ohgodplsno 6y ago
  This article is in french, but NextImpact did a pretty solid job at showing the _latest_ bullshit: https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108986-six-ans-apres-son-lancement-qwant-netait-quun-prototype-selon-dinum.htm https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108986-six-ans-apres-son-lan... https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108320-qwant-mail-fail-linagora.htm https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108320-qwant-mail-fail-linag... turnover and employee discontent: https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108123-le-cahier-doleances-salaries-qwant.htm https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108123-le-cahier-doleances-s... Deepl (https://www.deepl.com/en/translator https://www.deepl.com/en/translator) will do a great job at translating those articles.
  - iagovar 6y ago
    No problem, I can read french :)

boudin 6y ago

On the other hand there's already some well established hosting companies in both countries. I would hope that this initiative will not be built from the ground up but capitalizing on that. Qwant is poorly managed, but that doesn't mean every project is doomed to fail. If you would judge Google success based on their failed projects, it would be the same conclusion.

iagovar 6y ago
Well but Qwant has its core product in its infancy, if they can't even manage that, you tell me. The problem has many layers, Europe is not really united, which makes most markets small, the governments are pretty bad at managing investiments in tech fields, and there's not enough private capital going around pouring money into this.
- boudin 6y ago
  You're a bit harsh, it does work, so they do manage that. I don't think there's the intent to kill google or become as big. Competing against Google is also a huge task... It's far from perfect, there's definitely stuff they do wrong, but it's also far from being the Quaero fiasco.
  - iagovar 6y ago
    Well, maybe you're right, but I tried to give them some feedback about spanish results and the difficulty to use quotes and even when I really tried, it was impossible. And yes results are bad in spanish.

Udik 6y ago

I agree completely: as a European, I find these projects pathetic. We need the humility to learn something from the US and create an environment and a framework in which private companies can thrive, instead of being constantly dragged down by bureaucracy, regulations, and a legal-judiciary system eager not to help but to assert its power.

pinkfoot 6y ago
Learn to pay your programmers properly.
- icelancer 6y ago
  No kidding. When I was in France I was appalled at the rates they were paying software developers. For a collection of countries that boasts better living standards for people, the comparative gap in pay for technical positions is absurd.
  - enriquto 6y ago
    A junior developer cannot at all afford renting an appartment in Paris with his basis salary. For other jobs outside of software, it is even worse.
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      > For other jobs outside of software, it is even worse. My understanding is that it’s the opposite. Software is significantly underpaid but you can do quite well with a typical paper-pushing bullshit job.
      - enriquto 6y ago
        An entry-level tenured professor or a nurse at a hospital earn less than 2000 EUR per month. This gives them barely enough to rent a small room in a shared apartment.
    - 6y ago

ginko 6y ago

Well yes, but sometimes this approach gets you things like Airbus.

barry-cotter 6y ago
No, this approach doesn’t. Complex working systems are built on a core of simpler working systems. Picking winners works incredibly rarely. Industrial policy and the infant industry argument barely ever works. You’re far more likely to get the Argentine or Indian car industry[1] or the Irish steel industry than the Korean ship building industry. Airbus did not arise from the government putting out a tender for an airline company to be delivered in working order. There were many smaller, working, profitable aviation companies first. [1] They all disappeared absent subsidies/tariffs.

ryuukk_ 6y ago

what a nice traitor, i bet you are proud of yourself ;)

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago

as for your link about OpenStack, was there anything in 2013 which would have been an alternative to OpenStack? If you wanted to build your own cloud infra back then this was the standard to do it with, no?

Rerarom 6y ago

Also see Quaero

jansan 6y ago
Right, that was pathetic. IIRC they burnt 400 million € without producing any tangible results.
- hef19898 6y ago
  I do have some VC backed companies that did the same recently. Dog-walking, for example.

icelancer 6y ago

How do they think Google became what it is, or most American companies like Amazon? That the US government funded it and kickstarted them with VC funds? A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts. But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies? Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general in Europe is ridiculously low for a comparable position in the United States, or even Japan. How are they going to retain talent?

turbinerneiter 6y ago
I.e. Germany has: * A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950 The US is close to becoming a failed state due to the increasing wealth and income gap. Also, please do me a favour and read up a bit on the history of silicon valley and us innovation. It's hard to claim the government investment isn't a big factor. The DoD is behind a lot of stuff. And I say this with envy - the US model of government investment is way better than the European one. OP correctly described the issues we have. (Not saying Germany is perfect and the US is pure shit, I was being overly provocative to establish an extreme counter point)
- tpush 6y ago
  > * A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950 None of these things (for good or bad) have anything to do with making good tech products.
  - readarticle 6y ago
    The implication is these factors will suffice in attracting and retaining talent, instead of simply paying them more. Completely delusional in the face of the past thirty years or so, but it remains a worryingly common talking point in WE “tech adjacent” circles.

enriquto 6y ago

While it is easy to laugh at these modern "maginot lines" that the french love to build, the concept of "technological sovereignity" seems very reasonable.

woodpanel 6y ago
When many goverment bodies more or less have to use foreign software-infrastructure, then "maginot lines" sound reasonable. Very reasonable indeed IMO if e.g. German police has to use AWS because of lack of alternatives, or the countless local authorities running on windows. On the other hand, it is not the US to blame for their tech-supremacy. It is Germany and France to blame. There might be many reasons to cite why we lack behind. But the whole spirit behind a government-google, a government-aws, government-yaddayadda comes across as being more part of the problem than part of the solution.
Nasrudith 6y ago
I am personally very cynical about sovereignty as a concept - it just means "nobody is willing to try to pay the heavy price to try to stop us" dressed up as something noble. Every whinge about loss of sovereignty is a complaint that they cannot control others anymore. While there may be some good for avoiding outside control it is a cover for their drooling about shoving others inside their domain of control.

flr03 6y ago

Honestly there are very capable and smart engineers in France, and I don't blame the country ambition to develop its own solutions, but the SSII mafia (or how are they called now?) is killing innovation. It's a very top to bottom decision process (starting from the Government/MP), with big bucks involved, and very little understanding of how to drive these tech projects, all the way to the bottom. What I don't understand is the status-quo after years and years of failed projects. What a waste of tax payer money.

Nextgrid 6y ago
> there are very capable and smart engineers in France I would not be so sure. I looked at the IT salaries there (both as a permanent and as a contractor) and it just doesn’t make sense to stay there when you could earn way more money elsewhere in Europe.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  that's assuming money is the one important thing in your life though :p I'd personally need at least 3 times my current french salary to start thinking about compromising my other life choices
- thiht 6y ago
  That's not how it works, not everyone wants to move country just for a (way) better salary.
  - realusername 6y ago
    There's definitely an IT brain drain in France due to low salaries, very few people of my former school actually work for a french company anymore, they almost all went somewhere else to get a better pay. In the post-covid world of increased remote working, the brain drain will likely increase tenfold since developers won't even have to leave the country anymore.
    - namdnay 6y ago

piokoch 6y ago

That's very true. Another thing is that it is not like EU is somehow very far behind the US in terms of services hosting or "the cloud". There is French OVH provider and there is German Hetzner. While the former has an opinion of being cheap but no so great (especially in terms of support), the Hetzner really shines. Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especially dedicated servers are first class. In many, many situations it makes much more sense (both from costs perspective and ease of migration to other provider) to use dedicated servers and hire someone who will manage them, than throwing tons of money into Amazon pockets to get "X-large instances" that have power of old Celeron laptop (exaggerating a bit, but not that much).

mondaygreens 6y ago
France also has online.net (now Scaleway?) which I haven't used recently but was very good and reliable for me 3 years ago. Been using Hetzner ever since, which has set the new bar.
speedgoose 6y ago
OVH's support is not great but at least it's cheap and they have some transparency. Azure and AWS have shitty support too for small customers but they are expensive. Hetzner is nice. We also have Scaleway in the same category.
- holstvoogd 6y ago
  > Azure and AWS have shitty support too for small customers but they are expensive oh yeah, AWS is terrible with support! I have to rely on their support forum for any support as 20% of our spend for crappy support is just not feasible. I.e. I get no support whatsoever. You can trick them a bit by wrapping it up in a sales inquiry though.
AmericanChopper 6y ago
This is basically the same line of reasoning used by people that say you could replace your corporate slack with IRC. Of course you could, but there's a good reason that people don't. If you just want to compare one VPS to another, the only thing you're comparing is cost and availability. But really there's many more factors that people are interested in considering beyond just that. Even if the only service you're interested in using is a VPS, using an AWS EC2 would have so many benefits over a Hetzner VPS that I'd struggle to list them. Amazon, and Google, and Microsoft... don't win cloud business because people are dumb, they win it because they offer a better product.

jansan 6y ago

Europe: Politicians want "something great", so there is a verdict that "something great" will be developed. A huge budget is provided, but it must be ensured that the usual suspects (public or semi-public research institutions) get most of the share. The whole project structure becomes fragmented beyond believe, nobody cares about commercial success. The project fails, but not in the eyes of the researchers, who claim that there was never the goal to create a commercial product. With the bazillion of research money they gained "valuable insight" into the whole problem and made "considerable progress". US: Andy von Bechtolsheim meets with two bright guys, sees the huge potential of their algorithm, walks back to his Porsche, signs them a 100,000$ cheque, and a few years later we have a global tech giant called Google who the rest of the world either admires or is afraid of.

iagovar 6y ago
Basically. In Spain you can get such cheque, but it would be 30K and your chances of getting 1/10 lower.
9q9 6y ago
"something great" Also: this "something great" must be something they (EU politicians deciding about funding) have heard about! And what have they heard about? Something US companies have already been commercialising, hence started a big PR offensive. That's why the EU started big funding of research on cloud computing after Amazon made money with it, started big funding of research on search engine when Google made money with it, started big funding of research on AI/ML after Google made money with it ... I predict that the EU will go all in on supporting research on quantum computing when Google sells it in a big way.

hwj 6y ago

> French X for any X OCaml is the French SML ;)

vladvasiliu 6y ago

One problem that I think is somewhat related to the top-down, bureaucratic situation is that whatever big project they try to do is a copy of something else. They didn't want to build Google / Facebook / Whatever before those existed. Instead, they want to build a "French Google". Qwant is an example of that. Whatever they're trying to accomplish with Orange in the cloud business is just a "French AWS". During the lockdown when everyone was using Zoom, some politician was unhappy that EU countries would depend on foreign technology. Solution? Build a European Zoom! I find this kind of ironic, seeing how Skype used to be European...

thiht 6y ago

> The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world leader in computing. Do you have arguments or is it just a blank criticism? OVH for instance is built in part on OpenStack, what's so very wrong with it?

eloisant 6y ago

There was Cloudwatt also, that was supposed to be the "French AWS", and as you said got hundreds of millions from the government, was created with the help of big, old companies (Orange, Thales, Bull) and was an utter failure. I hope they learned their mistakes and won't do them again but I fear they'll just do it the same way. What the French government doesn't understand is that you don't create a tech giant the same way you create the TGV, the Ariane rocket or Airbus. That model worked for those giant industrial projects, but it doesn't work for tech.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

I'm Italian, living in San Francisco. Sadly, the same thing you say about France, are more or less true for Italy.

simias 6y ago

I agree that these efforts have been very hit or miss but on the other hand... What should they do instead? Just give up and accept that we're going to simply be technological vassals to America? Or should Macron and Merkel learn Javascript and take the matter into their own hands? We could've gone the Chinese way and just close the door to American companies, effectively forcing the local populace to use home-grown tools, but we're too nice for that. Instead we try to compete fairly in an open market, except that in practice most multinational corporations manage not to pay taxes in most European countries and they have a huge headstart so it's not really all that fair in the end. It's easy to be cynical about it but again, tech is too important to just say "well, we lost, I guess we'll increase wine production instead". I want the EU to keep trying. >Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies. What alternative is there though? The government also tried to help small start ups and incubators with fiscal advantages. We have the brains, we have the means, the government is just trying to make it happen. The hope is that eventually it'll manage to seed the industry. We also do have significant tech companies in Europe today that actually do interesting work, so it's a bit unfair to say that we only have "ridiculous projects" that are "never actually doing anything remotely useful". I'm French too, I know that we love to be cynical about everything, always see the glass half empty but it's not a very productive attitude. "MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts", as if France was suddenly the most corrupt country in the world. Look around, see what the rest of the world is doing. We're not doing that poorly.

Pedrit0 6y ago
Merci de le dire... Parfois cette mentalité collective qui nous caractérise me rend dingue... Le Français passe son temps à cracher sur tout et tout le monde, et surtout sur son propre pays. Donc ça fait du bien de voir des concitoyens qui restent lucides et positifs. Big up.
touisteur 6y ago
Listening to French entrepreneurs, the usual suspects (labor laws, taxes...) are not so much of a problem. They all seem to rally around an kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare of interacting with anything state-related... Especially orgs collecting payroll taxes... The stories I see, where you get nailed huge fines every year, for small nitpicky details. They all talk of nightmares where some admin comes and destroy their company with a single inscrutable letter...

maga20yes 6y ago

This so many times. There's no accountability for government sponsored projects in France. They believe they are discovering the wheel and so they will pour a few million in a born-dead team. And so after a while, they call it done, and everyone is happy even if product has zero usage.

jpfr 6y ago

The French minister of economy (and finance) is very clear on the goals of GAIA-X. Just watch these two minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9kJrwkfNp4&t=1320 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9kJrwkfNp4&t=1320

ur-whale 6y ago

Thank you for this, couldn't have put it better myself. I'll go one step further and make conjecture that the entire Gaia-X thingie is likely from the get-go a nice little scheme to milk public money directly into the pockets of the proponents of the whole affair. Brussels is teeming with firms whose specialty and sole purpose is fabricating bogus "projects" to squeeze EU research grant money into their and their clients pockets.

baud147258 6y ago

Though Bull doesn't exist anymore as independent company. I did an internship there (before it was bought, in 2012), the river of public money had mostly dried up and I felt like the company didn't really knew what to do, even if there was some nifty tech being developed here and there.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

I sometimes use Qwant from Germany.