4 ms·

Out of curiosity, what are the European alternatives to GSuite?

DangerousPie 6y ago
The biggest competitors are obviously not European (eg. MS, Fastmail) but there are smaller companies like mailbox.org that offer less polished but functional alternatives. I'm not saying that those would be a perfect replacement for everything that Google offers, but they get close enough that they might do the trick for a large number of people (which would then give them the income to make further improvements to their platform).
jariel 6y ago
There's nothing, not even close and it's obviously a problem. The reason a lot of this antagonism exists is because the EU is not able to compete in a lot of these areas. While there's a lot of good impetus is privacy legislation, there should be 10x more effort into gearing themselves to be more competitive. Edit: Europe's inability to materially face this problem is by far the #1 issue. There definitely is an acceptance, on some level, behind closed doors certainly there is discussion and some action, but much more energy seems to be devoted to punishing foreign, successful companies. It's a bad position to be in to try to legislate foreign behemoths than to have your own, and be worried about how foreign nations may be regulating your own behemoths. Edit 2: I've made a similar comment a few times and it's guaranteed to be down-voted (again, that's fine, I don't mind it's not a personal issue I have no problem with votes) - but assuming that this is more than likely Europeans down-voting as a rough measure of disagreement, it's really quite a disturbing sentiment that at least popularly, there's difficulty in accepting the obvious lack of competitiveness in these areas. This is why I say it's the #1 challenge - until there is acceptance, there will no progress.
GrantZvolsky 6y ago
LibreOffice, to some extent. But more pertinently, the Czech search engine Seznam[1], founded in 1996, was the most used search engine in the Czech Republic until Google took over in 2014 due to the influence of Android. Seznam is well diversified and it shouldn't be difficult for it to expand into other markets given the opportunity. It is a major regional player in search, maps, email, news, real estate, jobs, ecommerce, video streaming, advertising, and probably more. Its portfolio, which includes a chromium-based web browser, is quite impressive given that the Czech market consists of some 11 million people. [1]: https://seznam.cz https://seznam.cz
smoldesu 6y ago
Spinning up a Nextcloud instance for $5 a month will replace almost everything that Google did in your life, as well as giving you a lot more granular control over your data.
npteljes 6y ago
ONLYOFFICE and NextCloud can do a whole bunch of cloud things, both for personal and business use, although I guess you could mention several things that are great in GSuite and not offered at all by these two.

The biggest competitors are obviously not European (eg. MS, Fastmail) but there are smaller companies like mailbox.org that offer less polished but functional alternatives. I'm not saying that those would be a perfect replacement for everything that Google offers, but they get close enough that they might do the trick for a large number of people (which would then give them the income to make further improvements to their platform).

jariel 6y ago

There's nothing, not even close and it's obviously a problem. The reason a lot of this antagonism exists is because the EU is not able to compete in a lot of these areas. While there's a lot of good impetus is privacy legislation, there should be 10x more effort into gearing themselves to be more competitive. Edit: Europe's inability to materially face this problem is by far the #1 issue. There definitely is an acceptance, on some level, behind closed doors certainly there is discussion and some action, but much more energy seems to be devoted to punishing foreign, successful companies. It's a bad position to be in to try to legislate foreign behemoths than to have your own, and be worried about how foreign nations may be regulating your own behemoths. Edit 2: I've made a similar comment a few times and it's guaranteed to be down-voted (again, that's fine, I don't mind it's not a personal issue I have no problem with votes) - but assuming that this is more than likely Europeans down-voting as a rough measure of disagreement, it's really quite a disturbing sentiment that at least popularly, there's difficulty in accepting the obvious lack of competitiveness in these areas. This is why I say it's the #1 challenge - until there is acceptance, there will no progress.

GrantZvolsky 6y ago

LibreOffice, to some extent. But more pertinently, the Czech search engine Seznam[1], founded in 1996, was the most used search engine in the Czech Republic until Google took over in 2014 due to the influence of Android. Seznam is well diversified and it shouldn't be difficult for it to expand into other markets given the opportunity. It is a major regional player in search, maps, email, news, real estate, jobs, ecommerce, video streaming, advertising, and probably more. Its portfolio, which includes a chromium-based web browser, is quite impressive given that the Czech market consists of some 11 million people. [1]: https://seznam.cz https://seznam.cz

smoldesu 6y ago

Spinning up a Nextcloud instance for $5 a month will replace almost everything that Google did in your life, as well as giving you a lot more granular control over your data.

npteljes 6y ago

ONLYOFFICE and NextCloud can do a whole bunch of cloud things, both for personal and business use, although I guess you could mention several things that are great in GSuite and not offered at all by these two.