22 ms·

EU shoots for €10B ‘industrial cloud’ to rival US

179 points by colinjoy 6y ago

colinjoy 6y ago
„€10B over 7 years [...] to rival foreign corporations such as Amazon, Google and Alibaba“ Does not sound like lot when compared to the annual invest of even just one of the IaaS giants.
- dtech 6y ago
  They hope to get additional investing from industry, which sounds quite reasonable in this case.
- est31 6y ago
  You have to start somewhere. Total annual EU budget is 150 billion EUR.
- dragonelite 6y ago
  Not even that, those companies have already been investing in their services for years if not decades. And have decades of institutional knowledge build up to scale their compute resources. Seeing those low key IT effort and the failing of corona containment im really thinking of emigrating to either Asia or north america once corona stuff has been settled.
faggot 6y ago
Lol. Europe is such a joke. I bet they waste it all with nothing to little to show for it.
Fumtumi 6y ago
Yes! Let us use your own cloud provider which are not on top. This leads to issues for everyone who is then limited to EU cloud providers. General speaking, perhaps its good enough for base load of small companies but you do not want to develop on a telekom based cloud platform. They are much slower and basically non innvative.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
bsaul 6y ago
As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the private sector in europe is currently unable to produce GAFA-sized companies in the IT sector. My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings. EDIT : and i should add, helping politicians look good. All in all it will only help everybody pretend they're doing something, while letting the ship sink even more.
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  100%
- throwaway7281 6y ago
  The recent COVID-App is a prime example of that. SAP plus German Telekom, neither of which is known for innovation, grab a 60M plus deal to develop a single app. In Italy a startup took over the job for 1/50 of the price and with at least as good or better job. Is the above play a problem for Germany? No. Do you they even understand an problem? I don't think so.
  - 88840-8855 6y ago
    Excellent example with the app. It's an app that could have been designed and made with 100k, less people and better quality. And quicker. The current app is a nightmare. It shows that i had already 2 low risk encounters - but it doesn't show me when and where! I NEED this info to adapt my behavior! very bad app.
    - justoreply 6y ago
      the app doesn't store location information by design for privacy reasons
      - 88840-8855 6y ago
        if you ask normal people, they will hate this - only some data fanatics want this feature. people die. the economy is suffering. millions lose jobs. still, some guys making 140k in their it engineering jobs working from home and relaxing are telling me sth about "data privacy as priority". i disagree. people disagree. Taiwan did a FANTASTIC job leveraging data. we are either not capable of that or just fanatic.... maybe both.
88840-8855 6y ago
you cannot "force" funding. if you lack behind the competition, you must embrace protectionism. China is successful in that sphere compared to India because they closed the market and developed sustainable and partially better alternatives to American products. Europe must so the same - tax and limit American products. Let the home market copy and adapt then innovate. This is THE ONLY way.
- fakedang 6y ago
  You forget that unlike the US, innovators in the EU will have to fend off the bigwig corporates. And the country-level governments are firmly in the pockets of these few corporates. One could argue the same for the US, but the US is moving into the position where the EU is right now.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  It seems difficult to be protectionist when it comes to online services... And do you really want to live in that world? Do you want your government to build a great firewall and limit your access to content from outside of your country?
  - 88840-8855 6y ago
    yes. i do want that. i do not like American products at all. i would love to see alternatives that actually work and are competitive.
    - tachyonbeam 6y ago
      You want your access to Google, Duckduckgo, YouTube, Uber, Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Netflix, etc to be blocked?
      - 88840-8855 6y ago
        Yes. I want that. This would lead to a local tech scene, actually REALLY localised products (where you dont have to wait till google decides to roll out features in Germany after 7 years) and best of all: JOBS. This would lead to millions of jobs. It would make Europe super interesting for high skilled labor and bring a nice twist into the migration problem we are facing now. Yes, this would hurt America, but yeah... who cares? They are not paying taxes anyway. And look at China. Look at their amazing apps and services they have there. We have NOTHING here. It is time to do the right thing and to say bye to American companies. We can make our own companies.
goatinaboat 6y ago
Governments can, or at least did* outperform the private sector in some technologies, but not in all and I would be surprised if cloud computing was one of them. The experience of government trying this is littered with failure e.g. ICL mainframes. Who’s going to take the lead on this, Groupe Bull?? * e.g. aerospace not withstanding companies like SpaceX.
juskrey 6y ago
This smells a bit Soviet. Instead of allowing small businesses to breathe more freely, take more risk and grow to US size companies (in 3x larger internal market!) they try to build a top down copy using an army of grant and procurement funds eaters.. despicable.
- adventured 6y ago
  Which market is 3x larger? The US and EU are comparable markets in size; minus Britain the EU is economically moderately smaller than the US (by 20%-25%) however still a solid direct comparison. The estimates for 2020 so far by the IMF have the US at $20.8 trillion, China at $15.2 trillion, and the EU at $14.9 trillion (this will be the first year since the EU's inception that China will have a larger economy than the EU).
  - juskrey 6y ago
    Ok, I can be at fault here, still nothing stops EU from making local businesses more comfortable on ANY market.
- libertine 6y ago
  Let's not be naive here - US comes to EU to buy tech companies with cheap cash... EU should simply make the conditions of selling to US to be less favorable than growing it in EU. Heavy taxation on these aggressive takeovers, and tax benefits to continue to do business in EU, would be a great incentive.
- kazen44 6y ago
  this is no way comparable to the soviet command economy system. For one, the EU is not an authoritarian state with absolute power over every facet of life. Also, it is not legally the owner of all assets in it's territory. In no way comparable.
  - juskrey 6y ago
    They (EU bureaucrats) may not own everything but have enough power and money to corrupt natural processes or create top-down toxic abominations absolutely in the same way.
oakfr 6y ago
what could go wrong
WanderPanda 6y ago
A great opportunity for Siemens to collect money for their abysmal Mindsphere IIoT platform... I get a feeling the EU is on a very bad trajectory into a more and more planned, copycat economy. Someone develops some product / service (e.g. flexible infrastructure as a service aka "cloud") market decides if it is good. EU falls behind in that category. EU commission throws money at pet projects that in best case will come close to the original offering but will just burn money (/ flood money in certain pockets) in most cases. Farewell market economy (or what is left of it)
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  The EU has been in that program going all the way back to agricultural subsidies. I see those subsidies and research funds as the historically first form of a massive UBI scheme, an electorate-friendly scheme. Its just that the Income comes with a lot of bureaucracy and a menial job. The scheme is not sustainable but at least it prevents social upheaval
pdimitar 6y ago
As an EU citizen, I don't believe for a second that this will result in anything useful, ever. There's too much vested interest that's quietly making the politicians do what the big business wants. Has been the case for a long time now. The only thing that's going to happen is that those big and old companies will get their hands on that funding while fulfilling exactly zero of their promises.
- christophilus 6y ago
  It’s pretty similar here in the US. What do you think the solution is? I don’t like the consolidation and regulatory capture I see everywhere.
  - petre 6y ago
    The solution is de-regulation. In France if you want to run an open WiFi you need a license from the national comms authority for instance. But it won't happen. Too much bureaucracy. It's in the European mindset.
    - ivanovb 6y ago
      On the other part of E.U., in Romania, no matter what kind of business you want to start you need to battle with the bureaucracy. Out of high-tech domain, I was thinking that my grandma could sell the jam she makes - but she can't sell it legally if it's produced in her own house - no matter how low is the production. Maybe just at some kind of farmers market, but that is iffy. If I want to invoice some custom development for software, I can not do it as an individual. I either need a BS in Compute Science or setup a SRL. The romantic view of starting out in the garage is quite illegal in these parts. You need to spend a lot just to test a business idea. And what yous spend is not actually investing in the business, but just wasting time and resources with the bureaucracy.
      - umvi 6y ago
        What's the point of having social safety nets if you can't exercise them taking risks? Seems like a crying shame.
topbanana 6y ago
Ridiculous. You just can't buy innovation. You have to set up the right environment for it
- 88840-8855 6y ago
  Agree. But this would mean: follow the China approach. - close the market - limits or ban American products. there is no reason why Amazon or Google cannot be copied and made better. 2 main objectives i see there: - protectionism and ban of American stuff speaks against our "transatlanic"""friendship""" and our "common" values meme - we have a terrible fragmented market. chinese have a 1.4bn people population, Americans do have almost 400m. Try to make an app here in Europe for 20 languages, 20 law systems. it's a nightmare.
  - worldofmatthew 6y ago
    What would stop the US from taking revenge with targeted sanctions? The EU has caused this for themselves. It is nearly impossible to start a small tech company in the EU, due to the vaugeness of the GDPR (Yes, I know people will claim it helps privacy but people are not willing to pay for online content so it will be unprofitable in the EU). Not even going into the future plans of the EU to "regelate" tech that make it literally impossible to start the next Google or Youtube.
    - 88840-8855 6y ago
      Nothing would stop them and they would retaliate. This is nothing new though - there are import taxes on airplanes, cars, steel and many other products from Europe.
    - adventured 6y ago
      > What would stop the US from taking revenge with targeted sanctions? The US would of course immediately respond in kind. The EU's actions would essentially eliminate the WTO and any pretense that there is a system of functional global trade or globalism; it would amplify the notion that we've entered a new era of hyper nationalism. The EU bet would be: the US benefits a lot more from its tech dominance in Europe, than the EU benefits from having the US tech companies in the EU. That's a correct bet. The more serious problem is, the only proper and fair response is to ban all EU products across the board from the US market so as to match the scale of the economic limitation (given the US dominance in tech is so outsized). Just banning EU tech from the US wouldn't be nearly enough. Since it would be declaring a new era of overt nationalism, the US should also then pull all troops and military gear from EU member nations, revoke all military alliances with EU members, void NATO, and tell Russia to have as much fun as it wants to with Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Scandinavia, Moldova, Romania and the Baltics. Declare that the US no longer has any interest in Europe's security, the US will not interfere; declare annexation season open. Russia will almost immediately begin taking territory from its neighbors (in all sorts of contrived ways). In net this will massively increase the cost of defense for all EU members, will weaken the EU as a value proposition (Russia will offer a security blanket if you join their side, which some will go for), and will severely burden their economies. This will de facto destroy the EU dream, gradually splitting Europe backward into West and East. Unfortunately what would also happen next, is the US would perceive the EU as a hostile competing power. To the hawks in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the US system, that would put toppling weaker governments in Europe back on the table as a reasonable exercise (as in the immediate post WW2 decades), to attempt to install governments more favorable to the US. This would cause severe chaos and instability all over Europe and also new European wars inevitably.
juskrey 6y ago
BTW Hetzner is a top notch EU cloud with an excellent proposal to finally learn Linux and deploy whatever you want on their industrial grade networking and storage. Instead of feeding an exploding complexities and costs of AWS, Google and Alibaba. I hope they will come to other continents soon.
- the_duke 6y ago
  I recently tried out Hetzner Cloud, after using their dedicated servers for years, and have come away positively surprised. It works well, and the pricing is very appealing. But it's not even remotely in the same league as AWS/GC/Azure. All you get is DNS, private networks, load balancers VMs and storage volumes. That's it. Sure, you can self-host Kubernetes, and they even have a CSI driver for mounting volumes and an official Terraform provider. Which is great. But you miss out on the incredibly rich service offerings you get from the others. It's a great start though, and I hope they keep expanding their offerings.
  - barumi 6y ago
    > It works well, and the pricing is very appealing. But it's not even remotely in the same league as AWS/GC/Azure. IMHO Hetzner is far above AWS/GC/Azure in price and simplicity. The only drawback I see in Hetzner is that they don't have a lot of data centers with a relevant geographic dispersion, but that's only relevant for a Unicorn-level scale, or applications that require TP99.99 latency in the lower-end of the double-digit scale uniformly throughout the globe.
    - Cederfjard 6y ago
      You skipped over without mentioning the gist of the comment you replied too, which was the large amount of additional services that those other companies offer, but Hetzner does not.
      - barumi 6y ago
        If you're referring to AWS's "serverless" offering, they are mostly managed instances of FLOSS offerings with the exception of dynamodb, and arguably are far from justifying the colossal premium they charge for using them. I mean, does anyone claim with a straight face that without AWS it's practically impossible to get a database or a message broker up and running?
ganzuul 6y ago
Given Conway's Law, I wonder what sort of structure this cluster will have. The companies which recieve this funding will have to report according to some standard, which becomes the metric which becomes the target. If the project does not succeed it really should spell the end of the EU's organizational structure... Does anyone know examples of EU-wide mega-engineering projects like this?
vander_elst 6y ago
This will be such a huge waste of money. Most of the work will be outsourced to private companies that will make sure that the project will cost 10x as planned and will never be delivered. Time to found a new company?
peteretep 6y ago
Feels like it would make more sense to simply insist that European companies must house sensitive data in EU-owned providers, and use this money to subsidise the cost difference. That said, Asian Tigers have shown directed economy can work
aflinik 6y ago
There has been a similar project developed in Poland already. (https://en.media.pkobp.pl/78483-strategic-partnership-between-operator-chmury-krajowej-and-google-for-digitization-of-the-polish-economy https://en.media.pkobp.pl/78483-strategic-partnership-betwee...) In practice it's not much more than government-branded version of Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. So far it serves well as a marketing vehicle for a handful of the biggest corporations, but it's barely used by anyone. I can see it could make sense as a solution to some particular problems though – European regulations often forbid banks from processing/storing customer data in other countries, so even though the tech is provided by the American tech giants, having everything hosted locally makes it possible for local financial services to finally move away from hosting everything on premises.
- durnygbur 6y ago
  So they're reselling Google Cloud services? Subsidized by our tax money?
  - keinewasser 6y ago
    They provide cloud migration services for Polish enterprises and also run their own semi-public cloud infrastructure.
worldmerge 6y ago
Whenever I think of the EU I can't think of a single tech giant from there, countries that come to mind for me are the US, China, Japan and Taiwan. The only things I know about the EU when it comes to tech is it trying to push massive global regulations around tech. For reference I'm a 23 year old from the US. Nothing I have is made in Europe and I don't deal with any EU companies. Even my bike computer was made by a US company and built in China. What EU tech companies should I check out? What ones are on your radar?
- draklor40 6y ago
  Zalando has some interesting software https://github.com/zalando https://github.com/zalando
- WanderPanda 6y ago
  From a consumer perspective: Logitech (okay not directly EU), Spotify, AVM (great networking equipment like routers etc.) and to a lesser extend Phillips come to my mind
- colinjoy 6y ago
  I think SAP would qualify as a tech giant. Not very visible to consumers, but throw a stone at some large organization (state, university, corporate) and you have a decent chance there’s a SAP footprint in their processes.
  - 88840-8855 6y ago
    It is. And there is no innovation behind the lock-in effect and the "build processes around SAP workflows for maximum efficiency" meme.
- Vinnl 6y ago
  Spotify, Booking.com, Adyen, Takeaway.com, ASML are a couple I'm aware of - with a bias to the country I happen to be from. Also note that the EU is not always trying to push for global regulations - it's trying to push for EU-wide regulations which, by virtue of being strictest and a superset of global regulations, often end up as global regulations.
dalbasal 6y ago
What's the actual content of this stuff? The form of this article exemplifies a common problem: Money is only part of the equation. What, in practice, is the money going into? What's supposed to come out?
- fulafel 6y ago
  The mentioned Gaia-X seems to have some. eg https://www.ovh.com/blog/gaia-x-catalogue-search-engine-under-the-hood/ https://www.ovh.com/blog/gaia-x-catalogue-search-engine-unde...
wrnr 6y ago
I feel a lot of anger in this thread, and I share your frustration. Is there anything we can do about this jokers? I feel that the EU is very toxic in the way it tries to make us all work together. Maybe things like FIWARE are, I don't know what is FIWARE? https://www.fiware.org https://www.fiware.org
- durnygbur 6y ago
  These projects must be doing something. In the end there are people coming over to work, and well... working on them... another example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project One thing is certain - they are bloody expensive.
- throwawaymanbot 6y ago
  Jokers? Toxic??? lmao... what sort of account posts stuff comments like this??
richliss 6y ago
I see that the EU is wasting money in the same corrupt way the UK is right now with Deloitte and other consultancies. Let’s face it - our politicians are bought and paid for and local tech companies want to skim from the gravy train.
johnchristopher 6y ago
As a European I can't help thinking that this amount of money is the result of lobbying from the tech scene and that they are now waiting to bid for public contracts to win projects that they set up themselves through consultancy jobs that also were public call for tenders.
SayItStraight 6y ago
You are a retard.
- rewq4321 6y ago
  This is not how discussions work on HN. 4chan might be a better place for you to hang out.
  - mechnesium 6y ago
    Yes we’ve all heard it before. It “strictly lowers the signal to noise ratio. We are trying to do something different here.” No, this goal is not helping. This makes HN just like every other shithole online that censors its users. It makes the conversations inorganic and inauthentic. Ad hominems, while in poor taste, are protected by freedom of speech, and armchair expert white knights like yourself are only contributing to the lower SNR.
    - rewq4321 6y ago
      From the guidelines[0]: > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." If users don't like those rules, they can go to other platforms. I think part of the reason why people come to HN is specifically because of rules like this. I don't think that you can argue that you're being politically oppressed on HN because of rules like this. You're free to articulate your opinions (political or otherwise), and in fact these rules are designed to help you do that - even if your opinion is an unpopular one. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - mechnesium 6y ago
        > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. If you read closely, it’s phrased like a suggestion, not a rule. It uses language like “please” instead of “you shall.” It doesn’t sound like something that absolutely needs to be followed, as it is phrased. Guidelines have a way of morphing into rigid rules and censorship enforcement mechanisms when nobody is watching. However noble they may seem, they are a slippery slope, and I’d rather not buy into it.
SayItStraight 6y ago
You are a retard.
SayItStraight 6y ago
You are a retard.
SayItStraight 6y ago
You are a retard.
- 88840-8855 6y ago
  very very insightful comment lol. does it qualify as "opinion" already or is just a grunt?
durnygbur 6y ago
Let me guess, SAP and Deutsche Telekom will grab the funding? It will be the most expensive and unreliable "cloud services" with arrogant customer service and 24 months contracts.
- nix23 6y ago
  >Deutsche Telekom Hehe, the most expansive one is the direct copper to vm (DCtV) with unlimited Volume ;))
  - durnygbur 6y ago
    > unlimited Volume [1] [1] after exceeding 3GB of storage the IO operations are limited to 32kbit/s
cblconfederate 6y ago
Oh good, more sales for IBM, Dell etc
klaudius 6y ago
Remember Quaero* ? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero
- durnygbur 6y ago
  Honorable body of most prestigious establishments producing no output whatsoever.
- Kankuro 6y ago
  In France in 2012, there was also Numergy and Cloudwatt, funded by state money and associated to existing large groups (Orange, the largest telco, Thales, military, SFR, other large telco, Bull, a prehistoric computer company). Now there are dead. Such projects were weird because back then OVH was already the largest European hosting company. Maybe the owner was not a good friend of the politicians or he wanted to keep full control…
tasubotadas 6y ago
Another hard earned €10B gonna go down the drain. It's pathetic that people in Germany and other countries have to pay 50% taxes for BS like this.
- brazzy 6y ago
  People in Germany do not pay 50% taxes, not even close.
  - 1023bytes 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven...
    - brazzy 6y ago
      Ah, you were not talking about income tax alone. Fair enough. Well, "this BS" is an insignificant part of what those taxes cover. Germany pays about 1/3 of the EU budget, so its share of these 10 Billion is less than a tenth of this year's federal coronavirus relief budget.
  - odiroot 6y ago
    You can easily pay ~42% (yes, contributions included) and still not be considered rich.
    - brazzy 6y ago
      The specific number of 42% sounds like you're talking about taxes, but it's the second-to-maximum marginal tax rate, not the effective tax rate (which is below 30% for the vast majority of people). If you include social contributions, you can go above 50% - but those are things which benefit yourself quite directly, most notably health insurance. Which gives you the benefit of not being one medical emergency away from bankruptcy as so many people are in the USA.
      - 6y ago
Proven 6y ago
European central planners ... Like Lenin, only 100 years slower.
amadeuspagel 6y ago
Whenever I read about the EU's struggles to compete with american tech companies (also SAP vs Salesforce), I think of Steve Yegge's rant on AWS, quote: > So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses. > His Big Mandate went something along these lines: > All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. > Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. > There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. > It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care. > All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. > Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired. Emphasis mine. Good luck trying that in europe. Full rant: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
- brazzy 6y ago
  You're seriously claiming that the EU cannot compete with US companies because you can't credibly threaten to fire people to show that you're serious about a policy decision?
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    I think they're claiming that it's important to have a real, credible, well communicated threat of consequences for not following the mandate.
    - durnygbur 6y ago
      No one would bother, because: 1. In Europe salaries are not worth personal sacrifices 2. No compay aims for IPO, few are public Maybe, if you'd hire only desperate people from Spain, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Romania, AND they all had a mortgage... then squeeze like this would work.
jeffbee 6y ago
So, Airbus, essentially.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  Well if it ends up working like that, that would be a huge success. But that's very unlikely here.
pkz 6y ago
Can't help but think that the Schrems II court judgment should be viewed as the intro to EU industrial policy in cloud computing...
lazyjones 6y ago
This money will find its way into the pockets of corrupt officials, as always in Europe.
bumblebritches5 6y ago
the EU is incredibly hostile towards the U.S. lately.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
The cynic in me is reminded of something similar from about a decade ago, european search engine, and so on. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos_Europe https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos_Europe https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Mohn https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Mohn I don't remember the amount of money anymore, but it was huge, and dead for me from the moment of announcement of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertelsmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertelsmann involvement.
- durnygbur 6y ago
  This at least looks like a hopeless initiative of German media company and Spanish telecom without EU money involved.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Nonono! There was EU money involved. It made headlines in the local print media at the times. Just couldn't find it all atm. And then Bertelsmann was in, and that was a big bummer.
odiroot 6y ago
Call me a pessimist but I think it's gonna end up as usual. Some European BigCos are gonna grab big bucks and show barely anything for it. Smaller fish are going to massively milk the program for grants that vaguely have something to do with the cloud. All the while the eurocrats are going to gather political points.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
The internet means ‘winner take all’ Alibaba wants to spend $30B just to compete: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/20/alibaba-to-invest-28-billion-in-cloud-as-it-battles-amazon-microsoft.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/20/alibaba-to-invest-28-billion... If the EU wants to win, it would have to spend an order of magnitude more, and even then, there is a risk that such a top down endeavor wont work. That’s probably why it was scaled back to 10B, because it would be more amenable. They should try to move to where the ball is going. Invest the money in decentralized resource management. Incentivize citizens to install software that contributes computational power to something bigger than itself that is useful for everyone.
fierarul 6y ago
I often think it's part of the Western mentality to think what must be added to fix a problem. These EU folks can't take a step back to see what could be removed to get there? In an era of cheap money, when investors don't know where to put their money the EU believes tech needs state funding? Really? #Bureaucracy

179 points by colinjoy 6y ago

„€10B over 7 years [...] to rival foreign corporations such as Amazon, Google and Alibaba“ Does not sound like lot when compared to the annual invest of even just one of the IaaS giants.

dtech 6y ago
They hope to get additional investing from industry, which sounds quite reasonable in this case.
est31 6y ago
You have to start somewhere. Total annual EU budget is 150 billion EUR.
dragonelite 6y ago
Not even that, those companies have already been investing in their services for years if not decades. And have decades of institutional knowledge build up to scale their compute resources. Seeing those low key IT effort and the failing of corona containment im really thinking of emigrating to either Asia or north america once corona stuff has been settled.

faggot 6y ago

Lol. Europe is such a joke. I bet they waste it all with nothing to little to show for it.

Fumtumi 6y ago

Yes! Let us use your own cloud provider which are not on top. This leads to issues for everyone who is then limited to EU cloud providers. General speaking, perhaps its good enough for base load of small companies but you do not want to develop on a telekom based cloud platform. They are much slower and basically non innvative.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

bsaul 6y ago

As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the private sector in europe is currently unable to produce GAFA-sized companies in the IT sector. My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings. EDIT : and i should add, helping politicians look good. All in all it will only help everybody pretend they're doing something, while letting the ship sink even more.

jbverschoor 6y ago
100%
throwaway7281 6y ago
The recent COVID-App is a prime example of that. SAP plus German Telekom, neither of which is known for innovation, grab a 60M plus deal to develop a single app. In Italy a startup took over the job for 1/50 of the price and with at least as good or better job. Is the above play a problem for Germany? No. Do you they even understand an problem? I don't think so.
- 88840-8855 6y ago
  Excellent example with the app. It's an app that could have been designed and made with 100k, less people and better quality. And quicker. The current app is a nightmare. It shows that i had already 2 low risk encounters - but it doesn't show me when and where! I NEED this info to adapt my behavior! very bad app.
  - justoreply 6y ago
    the app doesn't store location information by design for privacy reasons
    - 88840-8855 6y ago
      if you ask normal people, they will hate this - only some data fanatics want this feature. people die. the economy is suffering. millions lose jobs. still, some guys making 140k in their it engineering jobs working from home and relaxing are telling me sth about "data privacy as priority". i disagree. people disagree. Taiwan did a FANTASTIC job leveraging data. we are either not capable of that or just fanatic.... maybe both.

88840-8855 6y ago

you cannot "force" funding. if you lack behind the competition, you must embrace protectionism. China is successful in that sphere compared to India because they closed the market and developed sustainable and partially better alternatives to American products. Europe must so the same - tax and limit American products. Let the home market copy and adapt then innovate. This is THE ONLY way.

fakedang 6y ago
You forget that unlike the US, innovators in the EU will have to fend off the bigwig corporates. And the country-level governments are firmly in the pockets of these few corporates. One could argue the same for the US, but the US is moving into the position where the EU is right now.
tachyonbeam 6y ago
It seems difficult to be protectionist when it comes to online services... And do you really want to live in that world? Do you want your government to build a great firewall and limit your access to content from outside of your country?
- 88840-8855 6y ago
  yes. i do want that. i do not like American products at all. i would love to see alternatives that actually work and are competitive.
  - tachyonbeam 6y ago
    You want your access to Google, Duckduckgo, YouTube, Uber, Facebook, Dropbox, Amazon, Netflix, etc to be blocked?
    - 88840-8855 6y ago
      Yes. I want that. This would lead to a local tech scene, actually REALLY localised products (where you dont have to wait till google decides to roll out features in Germany after 7 years) and best of all: JOBS. This would lead to millions of jobs. It would make Europe super interesting for high skilled labor and bring a nice twist into the migration problem we are facing now. Yes, this would hurt America, but yeah... who cares? They are not paying taxes anyway. And look at China. Look at their amazing apps and services they have there. We have NOTHING here. It is time to do the right thing and to say bye to American companies. We can make our own companies.

goatinaboat 6y ago

Governments can, or at least did* outperform the private sector in some technologies, but not in all and I would be surprised if cloud computing was one of them. The experience of government trying this is littered with failure e.g. ICL mainframes. Who’s going to take the lead on this, Groupe Bull?? * e.g. aerospace not withstanding companies like SpaceX.

juskrey 6y ago

This smells a bit Soviet. Instead of allowing small businesses to breathe more freely, take more risk and grow to US size companies (in 3x larger internal market!) they try to build a top down copy using an army of grant and procurement funds eaters.. despicable.

adventured 6y ago
Which market is 3x larger? The US and EU are comparable markets in size; minus Britain the EU is economically moderately smaller than the US (by 20%-25%) however still a solid direct comparison. The estimates for 2020 so far by the IMF have the US at $20.8 trillion, China at $15.2 trillion, and the EU at $14.9 trillion (this will be the first year since the EU's inception that China will have a larger economy than the EU).
- juskrey 6y ago
  Ok, I can be at fault here, still nothing stops EU from making local businesses more comfortable on ANY market.
libertine 6y ago
Let's not be naive here - US comes to EU to buy tech companies with cheap cash... EU should simply make the conditions of selling to US to be less favorable than growing it in EU. Heavy taxation on these aggressive takeovers, and tax benefits to continue to do business in EU, would be a great incentive.
kazen44 6y ago
this is no way comparable to the soviet command economy system. For one, the EU is not an authoritarian state with absolute power over every facet of life. Also, it is not legally the owner of all assets in it's territory. In no way comparable.
- juskrey 6y ago
  They (EU bureaucrats) may not own everything but have enough power and money to corrupt natural processes or create top-down toxic abominations absolutely in the same way.

oakfr 6y ago

what could go wrong

WanderPanda 6y ago

A great opportunity for Siemens to collect money for their abysmal Mindsphere IIoT platform... I get a feeling the EU is on a very bad trajectory into a more and more planned, copycat economy. Someone develops some product / service (e.g. flexible infrastructure as a service aka "cloud") market decides if it is good. EU falls behind in that category. EU commission throws money at pet projects that in best case will come close to the original offering but will just burn money (/ flood money in certain pockets) in most cases. Farewell market economy (or what is left of it)

cblconfederate 6y ago
The EU has been in that program going all the way back to agricultural subsidies. I see those subsidies and research funds as the historically first form of a massive UBI scheme, an electorate-friendly scheme. Its just that the Income comes with a lot of bureaucracy and a menial job. The scheme is not sustainable but at least it prevents social upheaval

pdimitar 6y ago

As an EU citizen, I don't believe for a second that this will result in anything useful, ever. There's too much vested interest that's quietly making the politicians do what the big business wants. Has been the case for a long time now. The only thing that's going to happen is that those big and old companies will get their hands on that funding while fulfilling exactly zero of their promises.

christophilus 6y ago
It’s pretty similar here in the US. What do you think the solution is? I don’t like the consolidation and regulatory capture I see everywhere.
- petre 6y ago
  The solution is de-regulation. In France if you want to run an open WiFi you need a license from the national comms authority for instance. But it won't happen. Too much bureaucracy. It's in the European mindset.
  - ivanovb 6y ago
    On the other part of E.U., in Romania, no matter what kind of business you want to start you need to battle with the bureaucracy. Out of high-tech domain, I was thinking that my grandma could sell the jam she makes - but she can't sell it legally if it's produced in her own house - no matter how low is the production. Maybe just at some kind of farmers market, but that is iffy. If I want to invoice some custom development for software, I can not do it as an individual. I either need a BS in Compute Science or setup a SRL. The romantic view of starting out in the garage is quite illegal in these parts. You need to spend a lot just to test a business idea. And what yous spend is not actually investing in the business, but just wasting time and resources with the bureaucracy.
    - umvi 6y ago
      What's the point of having social safety nets if you can't exercise them taking risks? Seems like a crying shame.

topbanana 6y ago

Ridiculous. You just can't buy innovation. You have to set up the right environment for it

88840-8855 6y ago
Agree. But this would mean: follow the China approach. - close the market - limits or ban American products. there is no reason why Amazon or Google cannot be copied and made better. 2 main objectives i see there: - protectionism and ban of American stuff speaks against our "transatlanic"""friendship""" and our "common" values meme - we have a terrible fragmented market. chinese have a 1.4bn people population, Americans do have almost 400m. Try to make an app here in Europe for 20 languages, 20 law systems. it's a nightmare.
- worldofmatthew 6y ago
  What would stop the US from taking revenge with targeted sanctions? The EU has caused this for themselves. It is nearly impossible to start a small tech company in the EU, due to the vaugeness of the GDPR (Yes, I know people will claim it helps privacy but people are not willing to pay for online content so it will be unprofitable in the EU). Not even going into the future plans of the EU to "regelate" tech that make it literally impossible to start the next Google or Youtube.
  - 88840-8855 6y ago
    Nothing would stop them and they would retaliate. This is nothing new though - there are import taxes on airplanes, cars, steel and many other products from Europe.
  - adventured 6y ago
    > What would stop the US from taking revenge with targeted sanctions? The US would of course immediately respond in kind. The EU's actions would essentially eliminate the WTO and any pretense that there is a system of functional global trade or globalism; it would amplify the notion that we've entered a new era of hyper nationalism. The EU bet would be: the US benefits a lot more from its tech dominance in Europe, than the EU benefits from having the US tech companies in the EU. That's a correct bet. The more serious problem is, the only proper and fair response is to ban all EU products across the board from the US market so as to match the scale of the economic limitation (given the US dominance in tech is so outsized). Just banning EU tech from the US wouldn't be nearly enough. Since it would be declaring a new era of overt nationalism, the US should also then pull all troops and military gear from EU member nations, revoke all military alliances with EU members, void NATO, and tell Russia to have as much fun as it wants to with Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Scandinavia, Moldova, Romania and the Baltics. Declare that the US no longer has any interest in Europe's security, the US will not interfere; declare annexation season open. Russia will almost immediately begin taking territory from its neighbors (in all sorts of contrived ways). In net this will massively increase the cost of defense for all EU members, will weaken the EU as a value proposition (Russia will offer a security blanket if you join their side, which some will go for), and will severely burden their economies. This will de facto destroy the EU dream, gradually splitting Europe backward into West and East. Unfortunately what would also happen next, is the US would perceive the EU as a hostile competing power. To the hawks in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the US system, that would put toppling weaker governments in Europe back on the table as a reasonable exercise (as in the immediate post WW2 decades), to attempt to install governments more favorable to the US. This would cause severe chaos and instability all over Europe and also new European wars inevitably.

juskrey 6y ago

BTW Hetzner is a top notch EU cloud with an excellent proposal to finally learn Linux and deploy whatever you want on their industrial grade networking and storage. Instead of feeding an exploding complexities and costs of AWS, Google and Alibaba. I hope they will come to other continents soon.

the_duke 6y ago
I recently tried out Hetzner Cloud, after using their dedicated servers for years, and have come away positively surprised. It works well, and the pricing is very appealing. But it's not even remotely in the same league as AWS/GC/Azure. All you get is DNS, private networks, load balancers VMs and storage volumes. That's it. Sure, you can self-host Kubernetes, and they even have a CSI driver for mounting volumes and an official Terraform provider. Which is great. But you miss out on the incredibly rich service offerings you get from the others. It's a great start though, and I hope they keep expanding their offerings.
- barumi 6y ago
  > It works well, and the pricing is very appealing. But it's not even remotely in the same league as AWS/GC/Azure. IMHO Hetzner is far above AWS/GC/Azure in price and simplicity. The only drawback I see in Hetzner is that they don't have a lot of data centers with a relevant geographic dispersion, but that's only relevant for a Unicorn-level scale, or applications that require TP99.99 latency in the lower-end of the double-digit scale uniformly throughout the globe.
  - Cederfjard 6y ago
    You skipped over without mentioning the gist of the comment you replied too, which was the large amount of additional services that those other companies offer, but Hetzner does not.
    - barumi 6y ago
      If you're referring to AWS's "serverless" offering, they are mostly managed instances of FLOSS offerings with the exception of dynamodb, and arguably are far from justifying the colossal premium they charge for using them. I mean, does anyone claim with a straight face that without AWS it's practically impossible to get a database or a message broker up and running?

ganzuul 6y ago

Given Conway's Law, I wonder what sort of structure this cluster will have. The companies which recieve this funding will have to report according to some standard, which becomes the metric which becomes the target. If the project does not succeed it really should spell the end of the EU's organizational structure... Does anyone know examples of EU-wide mega-engineering projects like this?

vander_elst 6y ago

This will be such a huge waste of money. Most of the work will be outsourced to private companies that will make sure that the project will cost 10x as planned and will never be delivered. Time to found a new company?

peteretep 6y ago

Feels like it would make more sense to simply insist that European companies must house sensitive data in EU-owned providers, and use this money to subsidise the cost difference. That said, Asian Tigers have shown directed economy can work

aflinik 6y ago

There has been a similar project developed in Poland already. (https://en.media.pkobp.pl/78483-strategic-partnership-between-operator-chmury-krajowej-and-google-for-digitization-of-the-polish-economy https://en.media.pkobp.pl/78483-strategic-partnership-betwee...) In practice it's not much more than government-branded version of Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. So far it serves well as a marketing vehicle for a handful of the biggest corporations, but it's barely used by anyone. I can see it could make sense as a solution to some particular problems though – European regulations often forbid banks from processing/storing customer data in other countries, so even though the tech is provided by the American tech giants, having everything hosted locally makes it possible for local financial services to finally move away from hosting everything on premises.

durnygbur 6y ago
So they're reselling Google Cloud services? Subsidized by our tax money?
- keinewasser 6y ago
  They provide cloud migration services for Polish enterprises and also run their own semi-public cloud infrastructure.

worldmerge 6y ago

Whenever I think of the EU I can't think of a single tech giant from there, countries that come to mind for me are the US, China, Japan and Taiwan. The only things I know about the EU when it comes to tech is it trying to push massive global regulations around tech. For reference I'm a 23 year old from the US. Nothing I have is made in Europe and I don't deal with any EU companies. Even my bike computer was made by a US company and built in China. What EU tech companies should I check out? What ones are on your radar?

draklor40 6y ago
Zalando has some interesting software https://github.com/zalando https://github.com/zalando
WanderPanda 6y ago
From a consumer perspective: Logitech (okay not directly EU), Spotify, AVM (great networking equipment like routers etc.) and to a lesser extend Phillips come to my mind
colinjoy 6y ago
I think SAP would qualify as a tech giant. Not very visible to consumers, but throw a stone at some large organization (state, university, corporate) and you have a decent chance there’s a SAP footprint in their processes.
- 88840-8855 6y ago
  It is. And there is no innovation behind the lock-in effect and the "build processes around SAP workflows for maximum efficiency" meme.
Vinnl 6y ago
Spotify, Booking.com, Adyen, Takeaway.com, ASML are a couple I'm aware of - with a bias to the country I happen to be from. Also note that the EU is not always trying to push for global regulations - it's trying to push for EU-wide regulations which, by virtue of being strictest and a superset of global regulations, often end up as global regulations.

dalbasal 6y ago

What's the actual content of this stuff? The form of this article exemplifies a common problem: Money is only part of the equation. What, in practice, is the money going into? What's supposed to come out?

fulafel 6y ago
The mentioned Gaia-X seems to have some. eg https://www.ovh.com/blog/gaia-x-catalogue-search-engine-under-the-hood/ https://www.ovh.com/blog/gaia-x-catalogue-search-engine-unde...

wrnr 6y ago

I feel a lot of anger in this thread, and I share your frustration. Is there anything we can do about this jokers? I feel that the EU is very toxic in the way it tries to make us all work together. Maybe things like FIWARE are, I don't know what is FIWARE? https://www.fiware.org https://www.fiware.org

durnygbur 6y ago
These projects must be doing something. In the end there are people coming over to work, and well... working on them... another example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project One thing is certain - they are bloody expensive.
throwawaymanbot 6y ago
Jokers? Toxic??? lmao... what sort of account posts stuff comments like this??

richliss 6y ago

I see that the EU is wasting money in the same corrupt way the UK is right now with Deloitte and other consultancies. Let’s face it - our politicians are bought and paid for and local tech companies want to skim from the gravy train.

johnchristopher 6y ago

As a European I can't help thinking that this amount of money is the result of lobbying from the tech scene and that they are now waiting to bid for public contracts to win projects that they set up themselves through consultancy jobs that also were public call for tenders.

SayItStraight 6y ago

You are a retard.

rewq4321 6y ago
This is not how discussions work on HN. 4chan might be a better place for you to hang out.
- mechnesium 6y ago
  Yes we’ve all heard it before. It “strictly lowers the signal to noise ratio. We are trying to do something different here.” No, this goal is not helping. This makes HN just like every other shithole online that censors its users. It makes the conversations inorganic and inauthentic. Ad hominems, while in poor taste, are protected by freedom of speech, and armchair expert white knights like yourself are only contributing to the lower SNR.
  - rewq4321 6y ago
    From the guidelines[0]: > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." If users don't like those rules, they can go to other platforms. I think part of the reason why people come to HN is specifically because of rules like this. I don't think that you can argue that you're being politically oppressed on HN because of rules like this. You're free to articulate your opinions (political or otherwise), and in fact these rules are designed to help you do that - even if your opinion is an unpopular one. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - mechnesium 6y ago
      > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. If you read closely, it’s phrased like a suggestion, not a rule. It uses language like “please” instead of “you shall.” It doesn’t sound like something that absolutely needs to be followed, as it is phrased. Guidelines have a way of morphing into rigid rules and censorship enforcement mechanisms when nobody is watching. However noble they may seem, they are a slippery slope, and I’d rather not buy into it.

SayItStraight 6y ago

You are a retard.

SayItStraight 6y ago

You are a retard.

SayItStraight 6y ago

You are a retard.

88840-8855 6y ago
very very insightful comment lol. does it qualify as "opinion" already or is just a grunt?

durnygbur 6y ago

Let me guess, SAP and Deutsche Telekom will grab the funding? It will be the most expensive and unreliable "cloud services" with arrogant customer service and 24 months contracts.

nix23 6y ago
>Deutsche Telekom Hehe, the most expansive one is the direct copper to vm (DCtV) with unlimited Volume ;))
- durnygbur 6y ago
  > unlimited Volume [1] [1] after exceeding 3GB of storage the IO operations are limited to 32kbit/s

cblconfederate 6y ago

Oh good, more sales for IBM, Dell etc

klaudius 6y ago

Remember Quaero* ? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

durnygbur 6y ago
Honorable body of most prestigious establishments producing no output whatsoever.
Kankuro 6y ago
In France in 2012, there was also Numergy and Cloudwatt, funded by state money and associated to existing large groups (Orange, the largest telco, Thales, military, SFR, other large telco, Bull, a prehistoric computer company). Now there are dead. Such projects were weird because back then OVH was already the largest European hosting company. Maybe the owner was not a good friend of the politicians or he wanted to keep full control…

tasubotadas 6y ago

Another hard earned €10B gonna go down the drain. It's pathetic that people in Germany and other countries have to pay 50% taxes for BS like this.

brazzy 6y ago
People in Germany do not pay 50% taxes, not even close.
- 1023bytes 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven...
  - brazzy 6y ago
    Ah, you were not talking about income tax alone. Fair enough. Well, "this BS" is an insignificant part of what those taxes cover. Germany pays about 1/3 of the EU budget, so its share of these 10 Billion is less than a tenth of this year's federal coronavirus relief budget.
- odiroot 6y ago
  You can easily pay ~42% (yes, contributions included) and still not be considered rich.
  - brazzy 6y ago
    The specific number of 42% sounds like you're talking about taxes, but it's the second-to-maximum marginal tax rate, not the effective tax rate (which is below 30% for the vast majority of people). If you include social contributions, you can go above 50% - but those are things which benefit yourself quite directly, most notably health insurance. Which gives you the benefit of not being one medical emergency away from bankruptcy as so many people are in the USA.
    - 6y ago

Proven 6y ago

European central planners ... Like Lenin, only 100 years slower.

amadeuspagel 6y ago

Whenever I read about the EU's struggles to compete with american tech companies (also SAP vs Salesforce), I think of Steve Yegge's rant on AWS, quote: > So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses. > His Big Mandate went something along these lines: > All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. > Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. > There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. > It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care. > All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. > Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired. Emphasis mine. Good luck trying that in europe. Full rant: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

brazzy 6y ago
You're seriously claiming that the EU cannot compete with US companies because you can't credibly threaten to fire people to show that you're serious about a policy decision?
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  I think they're claiming that it's important to have a real, credible, well communicated threat of consequences for not following the mandate.
  - durnygbur 6y ago
    No one would bother, because: 1. In Europe salaries are not worth personal sacrifices 2. No compay aims for IPO, few are public Maybe, if you'd hire only desperate people from Spain, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Romania, AND they all had a mortgage... then squeeze like this would work.

jeffbee 6y ago

So, Airbus, essentially.

benhurmarcel 6y ago
Well if it ends up working like that, that would be a huge success. But that's very unlikely here.

pkz 6y ago

Can't help but think that the Schrems II court judgment should be viewed as the intro to EU industrial policy in cloud computing...

lazyjones 6y ago

This money will find its way into the pockets of corrupt officials, as always in Europe.

bumblebritches5 6y ago

the EU is incredibly hostile towards the U.S. lately.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

The cynic in me is reminded of something similar from about a decade ago, european search engine, and so on. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos_Europe https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos_Europe https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Mohn https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Mohn I don't remember the amount of money anymore, but it was huge, and dead for me from the moment of announcement of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertelsmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertelsmann involvement.

durnygbur 6y ago
This at least looks like a hopeless initiative of German media company and Spanish telecom without EU money involved.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Nonono! There was EU money involved. It made headlines in the local print media at the times. Just couldn't find it all atm. And then Bertelsmann was in, and that was a big bummer.

odiroot 6y ago

Call me a pessimist but I think it's gonna end up as usual. Some European BigCos are gonna grab big bucks and show barely anything for it. Smaller fish are going to massively milk the program for grants that vaguely have something to do with the cloud. All the while the eurocrats are going to gather political points.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

The internet means ‘winner take all’ Alibaba wants to spend $30B just to compete: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/20/alibaba-to-invest-28-billion-in-cloud-as-it-battles-amazon-microsoft.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/20/alibaba-to-invest-28-billion... If the EU wants to win, it would have to spend an order of magnitude more, and even then, there is a risk that such a top down endeavor wont work. That’s probably why it was scaled back to 10B, because it would be more amenable. They should try to move to where the ball is going. Invest the money in decentralized resource management. Incentivize citizens to install software that contributes computational power to something bigger than itself that is useful for everyone.

fierarul 6y ago

I often think it's part of the Western mentality to think what must be added to fix a problem. These EU folks can't take a step back to see what could be removed to get there? In an era of cheap money, when investors don't know where to put their money the EU believes tech needs state funding? Really? #Bureaucracy