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The Microsoft-Dilemma – Europe as a Software Colony – Full Documentary

102 points by jrepinc 2y ago

roenxi 2y ago
One of the interesting things about real colonialism is that the Europeans had wildly better legal infrastructure, that supported wildly better economic infrastructure, which supported wildly better military technology, which supported colonies. The proof in the pudding is that Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that, they are either going to have to do without or use foreign software.
- zabzonk 2y ago
  are you saying that europe has a structure that supports much better military tech than the us?
  - ZoomerCretin 2y ago
    had
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  This just sounds like "might makes right" with more words. Most wealth is not a metric for how ethical a place is. At a certain point it is negative inference.
  - alexey-salmin 2y ago
    The topic (for better or for worse) was not ethics. The question was why some countries manage to maintain colonies, some don't, and some do but then lose it over time. Having superior infrastructure and economy is definitely a huge part of the answer, I believe the majority of it. This holds true all the way back to Roman and Byzantine empires.
    - kwhitefoot 2y ago
      > some countries manage to maintain colonies, some don't, and some do but then lose it over time. They all lose them over time, or are themselves dissolved and absorbed.
      - alexey-salmin 2y ago
        Of course, and everything turns to dust and entropy in the end. This doesn't make it any less interesting to study the current affairs.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  Things seem to change in France though. It's relatively easy to open a startup and get tax discounts for research and innovative work. Then you fly-in employees (I'm one of them) on passeport talent which is very easy to get and lasts 4 years. Average IT salaries in Europe are much lower than in US, which is unpleasant but allows to run an IT startup with less funding and healthier economics. However the gap to close is huge and France alone is not big enough to compete with US, it has to be the whole EU. Will see where it goes.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - eastbound 2y ago
    So you say the best thing about France is that we can hire someone else than French people. And you are kind of right: We have a thing against companies with large high-low salary difference (something like a rest of revenge against the rich), and make them simply not possible, hindering the ability to build megacorporations. Apple wouldn’t have been possible here. We simply halt growth at median size and earn a good second spot on the market. That was true at the time of Dailymotion (second of Youtube), that is true in the times of AI.
    - alexey-salmin 2y ago
      Silicon valley was largely built by immigrants too. I believe in this concept, people who have enough determination to move are already above some potential energy threshold. And this threshold despite being relatively low still cuts off a huge part of local population who didn't have to pass it. I've seen it at work both for internal and international moves.
      - eastbound 2y ago
        By focussing on immigration, you missed the main point. I’ll simplify as: French people eat the rich.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft Nah, what hinders software development at that scale is literally just... scale and network effects. Europe has a significantly better legal infrastructure than Russia or China (which routinely kills entire sectors for random reasons) but Europe is not a homogenous isolated market of hundreds of millions people speaking the same language. That's literally it. Looking at it another way, what's the American competition for Microsoft? You're just one company ahead of Europe in most cases, and most of them ironically sit in a state that looks like Europe in regulatory terms. If the vast majority of American states can't produce much competition, most of them extremely lax in terms of the legal environment, that's an indicator that this isn't what actually matters.
  - raverbashing 2y ago
    > Looking at it another way, what's the American competition for Microsoft? Yeah this is another point that people seem to forget We're talking about 2 or 3 cities in the US that punch way above their level. But we don't hear too often how there isn't a competitive cloud made in Boston or where's the FB competitor from Minnesota etc
    - roenxi 2y ago
      There are roughly two perspectives on that. "Gee, these industrial clusters are super rare and delicate! We have to make the conditions as favourable for them as possible".. "This company is making lots of money but I disagree how they are doing it! We should force them to behave in a way that is more in line with how everyone else does things. All these big companies are the same and the wealth isn't going to go anywhere". Europe puts a barriers in place that will kill off an entrepreneur's dream here or there. They only have to kill one or two key companies to do trillions of dollars of self-harm (which is what they appear to have done). In fact, everyone does this just to a greater or lesser degree; for example we can see how much prosperity China's manufacturing created with less blockers than in the USA leading to a few key industrial clusters.
  - yobbo 2y ago
- raverbashing 2y ago
  I think you need to look into what favoured the creation of MS or Apple in the first place MS is from Seattle but it didn't start there Culture and investment/market conditions (sure, with the help of laws) play a much stronger part on that You couldn't get them without available hardware and without a market willing to experiment. And you couldn't have that without strong CS/EE departments that had strong investment in the decades prior that had spun a whole semiconductor industry And you wouldn't have had that without some welcoming immigration laws (at the decades prior) and some worldwide conflicts neither and a specific country that touches both main oceans and has decided that farther away areas might be safer for some developments. If you want to understand why laws in France are the way they are you need to take a look at what happened in the past 250 yrs more or less.
- sharpneli 2y ago
  Another issue are non competes. Everyone wants to get a tech sector like California but insist on having non competition agreements being either valid or conditionally valid meaning there is a gray area that stifles innovation.
  - rurban 2y ago
    > gray area that stifles innovation Innovation by theft? Well, California is a very special outlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Innovation by theft is how Hollywood got its start. too far from New Jersey for the patent protections of Thomas Edison to be enforced, independent filmmakers were able to make movies without paying royalties
    - relistan 2y ago
      Many other places would like to be an outlier like California. Paying more attention to what makes it that way is probably a good place to start.
    - sharpneli 2y ago
      And that is why we use products made by companies in California. Non competes are good for the big incubent companies, but bad for the economy and the workers.
  - snowpid 2y ago
    In Germany there are practically no non-competition agreements. Im not sureb
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      In Austria non-competes are legal and often found in employment contracts.
- troupo 2y ago
  > Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that You're phrasing it in a way that makes this scale seem like a good thing. Is it? I'm not convinced that the scale of supranational grow-at-all-costs uncontrollable corporations is good
  - ratg13 2y ago
    The complaint that because Europe doesn’t support monopolies as well as America that makes them “behind” is likely the silliest argument I will read today. Yet, here it is the top comment. It reflects strongly on the American audience here.
    - hulitu 2y ago
      > The complaint that because Europe doesn’t support monopolies as well as America Depends how much they pay.
    - 7bit 2y ago
      Well, it gives the USA tremendous power, no? Imagine Microsoft would prevent Europe to access Azure and M365 tomorrow... It creates jobs in the USA, which is also good. So of course people will defend that. In my opinion, what they fail to understand is that this power doesn't have any significant impact on their personal lives. It favours only those who are already in power.
    - Aerroon 2y ago
      It reflects the importance of software. It's not like Europe foregoes using this software. No, we just use the American/Chinese software instead and become dependent on it.
- Gud 2y ago
  Not every European country is the same, the rules and regulations vastly differ. It is true that the EU is "well regulated", but other countries with other legal frameworks and business culture do exist. Even within the EU, doing work and business can be very different. My personal favorites to work in are the Netherlands and Switzerland. Easy going people, flat hierarchies, cooperative and forgiving of mistakes, though YMMV as always.
- silvestrov 2y ago
  The Elephant in the room: all the different languages in Europe and it is only recently (past 10-20 years) that English proficiency has become high enough. This made communication difficult and still makes it very difficult to get people to move to another country. (edit: you need to know the local language to get any kind of social life). Compare getting someone to move from Chicago to San Francisco (same language, same culture) versus getting someone to move from Norway to Italy (completely different language, very different culture). So USA had a much larger effective work force when a company wanted to hire developers and much easier marketing of the products. Europe had a lot of computer hardware companies in the 1980's but they were never able to capture the full European market. So they died out due to lack of scale. There is also the problem of every single country wanting to be a king, so there was no political will to say "we need to join forces and create one single SV" (or one single unix company). Still today EU can't create an European Silicon Valley as you don't get a SV by saying "we want a SV here", you get it by saying "everywhere else is NOT going to be a SV".
- thrance 2y ago
  Honestly, I really don't see the point of having such megacoroporations here. What has Apple and Microsoft done for Americans ? They pay little to no taxes, they spy on everyone, they provide increasingly terrible products...
  - TMWNN 2y ago
    If you don't think any other country (not just in Europe) wouldn't kill for the next big American big tech company to have been founded within its borders instead, I don't know what to tell you.
  - kenutusabhik 2y ago
    so terrible product, that the whole world use them and apple is the largest tax payer in the world. These are some of the most innovative companies out there.
- eric-burel 2y ago
  I am mesmerized at how much the comments analyze Europe under the perspective of the United States, eg we need a Silicon Valley otherwise we don't exist from a technological standpoint, we should become an homogeneous market etc. We are not the USA and I feel fine with it, we are still able to figure the most advanced technologies on our own
kfk 2y ago
The challenge with Microsoft in Europe is that it is so convenient, it doesn’t make business sense to consider alternatives. See how easily MS won market share over Slack (MS Teams) and PowerBI (Tableau / Qlik). They have such a big bundle of services that any single player has to be either amazingly good, or specialized, to win maybe 1-2% of market share. The only way I see Europe doing something about it is antitrust laws that break the bundles.
- oneshtein 2y ago
  The problem is that when data is stored in the cloud, I don't have full control over it. My data hold as hostage against me. We need to break up data storage from data processing. Imagine if all your data was stored in a secure, independent location, like a large vault. You could then choose which services could access your data, allowing you to use multiple services simultaneously. Better, if this will be on browser side, where I have full control. IMHO, small independent providers should unite and develop something like File API, but for web (for a NAS with web interface).
  - dijit 2y ago
    How would that even help? Are we forgetting decades of office suite incompatibility? The main reason most european companies use Office365 over alternatives is: 1. Fear of retraining 2. Fear of untrodden path but most crucially: 3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses
    - Chiba-City 2y ago
      [dead]
    - croes 2y ago
      >3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF. Most of Words featured aren't used anyway because most people don't know them. The rest is some Excel tools somebody once created which heavily rely on VBA but nobody can support them because they guy who made them already has left the company. Have seen that more than once.
fulafel 2y ago
Anyone have a gut feeling about Teams and Office penetration % in Asia/India/Africa?
- willi59549879 2y ago
  Asia India and Africa don't care so much about licensing. Many companies have people working on their own pc. They'll work with pirated software and send files around by email. Usually there is a lot less infrastructure
personomas 2y ago
Come on, let's not go down this rabbit hole. We have real problems in this world: WW3, Climate Crisis. The West has to be comfortable trusting each other. Microsoft is by the way more trust worthy than European governments!
- wazoox 2y ago
  Ever heard of Edward Snowden by any chance?
  - personomas 2y ago
    Yes, I don't trust the state's either. But we have to keep things in proportion. Europe can't throw its efforts and forces now at trying to become independent from the US. We first have to defeat Russia, China, etc. Become independent of them and even defeat them before we start trying to peel off dependency on the US. US is an ally, and in the near future we have to rely on them. That's it.
    - LtWorf 2y ago
      US isn't an ally… They do their best interest and nobody else's.
      - personomas 2y ago
        That's utter nonsense.
        wazoox 2y ago
        On the contrary, that's cold hard truth. The US repeatedly forces foreign companies into obedience for US companies' profit. For instance, the US forced Alstom to sell its power branch to GE by actually taking hostage one of Alstom directors into high security prison. They repeatedly menaced an punished foreign companies to force them to comply to US policy. The US is a merciless imperial power.
        2y ago
neglesaks 2y ago
That is a quite apt way to put it.
Kwpolska 2y ago
What viable European alternatives to Microsoft Office are there? Google Docs is also a US-based cloud service. LibreOffice is ugly, its UX is sometimes worse than Office 2003 (especially Calc, where pivot tables have to be blindly configured in a modal dialog, and there is no equivalent to the Table feature from Excel), and they still haven't implemented automatically downloading updates.
- MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
  LibreOffice isn't going to win any beauty pageants, but it does everything you need in an office setting. Some specialists can't live without MS Excel and all of its extensions (banking), but that's not the common case. Common case is word processing, slide presentations, and task management (in spreadsheets).
  - troupo 2y ago
    MS Excel is the most common case. Some multi-billion-dollar businesses are run from Excel
    - nonrandomstring 2y ago
      > Some multi-billion-dollar businesses are run from Excel And that's a problem because it isn't even particularly great software [0,1,2]. Of course all complex calculation tools have bugs, but compare the code quality of Excel with something like Matlab or R and it looks amateurish. [0] https://www.microassist.com/software-tips/real-world-risks-of-spreadsheet-errors/ https://www.microassist.com/software-tips/real-world-risks-o... [1] https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-the-worst-excel-errors https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-t... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
      - johannes1234321 2y ago
        Yeah, but it allows amateurs to do quite some stuff and is available everywhere. All other systems have a way steeper learning curve.
librasteve 2y ago
hot news - microsoft is a monopoly
- MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
  They're not a monopoly, but they've vendor locked education, government, and much of industry. It's brilliant.
heyycppl 2y ago
Linux on the desktop is utopian. Even in 2024, it is plagued with millions of bugs. I can't use Linux for an hour on a desktop PC without encountering some issue. On the other hand, MacBooks and Windows PCs just work seamlessly, without any problems whatsoever. This is solely the fault of Linux developers, who, instead of developing one system well, create dozens of half-baked package managers, desktop environments, and other components. Unfortunately, none of these work well.
- apexalpha 2y ago
  "Since the cocky, self absorbed, nerds at Canonical have decided to rotate their logo 90 degrees clockwise in the 'about' menu of Nautilus we have decided enough is enough and will fork the entire distro. We are pleased to announce <abc...xyz>buntu fork #87126378215!"
- pjmlp 2y ago
  As someone that learned UNIX when Microsoft still sold Xenix, and used multiple flavours of it, was a Linux Journal subscriber since its early days, I occasionanly go down into one of those Desktop Linux rabbit holes only to repent myself afterwards. Latest adventure an UEFI only motherboard (no BIOS backwards compatibility available), that no matter what, refuses to reckognise SSD NVMe that hold Linux instead of Windows. Yes, one can complain the pesky OEMs still not being Linux Desktop friendly after 30 years, which in pratice doesn't matter to the regular consumer.
- javcasas 2y ago
  Windows on the desktop is dystopian. It works seamlessly when it's not installing candy crush pretending it's a security update, or when it decides to search the web for that word document you wrote yesterday, or when it decides your browser is bad because it's not edge. So yeah, it works flawlessly, but only for Microsoft.
- npteljes 2y ago
  Most of these statements are false. Linux on the desktop is a reality. I'm on one, it's my main OS, I even play my games on it. It having bugs is nothing special. Other systems have them as well. Windows is not seamless at all. And if you'd like to debug, you're SOL, because often it's not helpful at all. The state of things is not up to developers. Developers are part of a project, and the projects are part of a culture. Companies have projects and culture too, producing the same effects, for example take a look at how many UI styles Windows has, or how Microsoft's one project supports and contributes to open source, while another part of them actively destroys it.
usr1106 2y ago
This is a 43 minute video. Has anyone watched it in full length? I haven't, but I (European) agree with the title.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  It's nice, but there's probably nothing new there for your typical HN reader (unless if they're young I guess ?) It's also dangerously focused on Microsoft and complacent with "cloud" software. Google has already been winning their wrestling match over desktop computing for some time now, they shouldn't be helped. And with shittier software as a result. Also while using "Microsoft sounds" in the music is cute, I can't help but think that it's a bit like using Nazi music (Wagner ??) in a documentary critical of Nazis...
  - decide1000 2y ago
    It is focused on Microsoft because it is about the relationship between states and the European Commission with Microsoft. They show that Microsoft does not follow the same procedures like 'normal' tenders. Also MS employees have .gov email addresses and the states are not allowed to show how much money they pay M$. It is not biased against Microsoft. It is about Microsoft based on journalism and decent research.
    - BlueTemplar 2y ago
      We are in full agreement there, but my issue with this documentary remains.
tclover 2y ago
Not just software, full time US slave
decide1000 2y ago
Thanks for sharing this. Very inspiring.

102 points by jrepinc 2y ago

One of the interesting things about real colonialism is that the Europeans had wildly better legal infrastructure, that supported wildly better economic infrastructure, which supported wildly better military technology, which supported colonies. The proof in the pudding is that Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that, they are either going to have to do without or use foreign software.

zabzonk 2y ago
are you saying that europe has a structure that supports much better military tech than the us?
- ZoomerCretin 2y ago
  had
HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
This just sounds like "might makes right" with more words. Most wealth is not a metric for how ethical a place is. At a certain point it is negative inference.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  The topic (for better or for worse) was not ethics. The question was why some countries manage to maintain colonies, some don't, and some do but then lose it over time. Having superior infrastructure and economy is definitely a huge part of the answer, I believe the majority of it. This holds true all the way back to Roman and Byzantine empires.
  - kwhitefoot 2y ago
    > some countries manage to maintain colonies, some don't, and some do but then lose it over time. They all lose them over time, or are themselves dissolved and absorbed.
    - alexey-salmin 2y ago
      Of course, and everything turns to dust and entropy in the end. This doesn't make it any less interesting to study the current affairs.
alexey-salmin 2y ago
Things seem to change in France though. It's relatively easy to open a startup and get tax discounts for research and innovative work. Then you fly-in employees (I'm one of them) on passeport talent which is very easy to get and lasts 4 years. Average IT salaries in Europe are much lower than in US, which is unpleasant but allows to run an IT startup with less funding and healthier economics. However the gap to close is huge and France alone is not big enough to compete with US, it has to be the whole EU. Will see where it goes.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- eastbound 2y ago
  So you say the best thing about France is that we can hire someone else than French people. And you are kind of right: We have a thing against companies with large high-low salary difference (something like a rest of revenge against the rich), and make them simply not possible, hindering the ability to build megacorporations. Apple wouldn’t have been possible here. We simply halt growth at median size and earn a good second spot on the market. That was true at the time of Dailymotion (second of Youtube), that is true in the times of AI.
  - alexey-salmin 2y ago
    Silicon valley was largely built by immigrants too. I believe in this concept, people who have enough determination to move are already above some potential energy threshold. And this threshold despite being relatively low still cuts off a huge part of local population who didn't have to pass it. I've seen it at work both for internal and international moves.
    - eastbound 2y ago
      By focussing on immigration, you missed the main point. I’ll simplify as: French people eat the rich.
Barrin92 2y ago
>Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft Nah, what hinders software development at that scale is literally just... scale and network effects. Europe has a significantly better legal infrastructure than Russia or China (which routinely kills entire sectors for random reasons) but Europe is not a homogenous isolated market of hundreds of millions people speaking the same language. That's literally it. Looking at it another way, what's the American competition for Microsoft? You're just one company ahead of Europe in most cases, and most of them ironically sit in a state that looks like Europe in regulatory terms. If the vast majority of American states can't produce much competition, most of them extremely lax in terms of the legal environment, that's an indicator that this isn't what actually matters.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  > Looking at it another way, what's the American competition for Microsoft? Yeah this is another point that people seem to forget We're talking about 2 or 3 cities in the US that punch way above their level. But we don't hear too often how there isn't a competitive cloud made in Boston or where's the FB competitor from Minnesota etc
  - roenxi 2y ago
    There are roughly two perspectives on that. "Gee, these industrial clusters are super rare and delicate! We have to make the conditions as favourable for them as possible".. "This company is making lots of money but I disagree how they are doing it! We should force them to behave in a way that is more in line with how everyone else does things. All these big companies are the same and the wealth isn't going to go anywhere". Europe puts a barriers in place that will kill off an entrepreneur's dream here or there. They only have to kill one or two key companies to do trillions of dollars of self-harm (which is what they appear to have done). In fact, everyone does this just to a greater or lesser degree; for example we can see how much prosperity China's manufacturing created with less blockers than in the USA leading to a few key industrial clusters.
- yobbo 2y ago
raverbashing 2y ago
I think you need to look into what favoured the creation of MS or Apple in the first place MS is from Seattle but it didn't start there Culture and investment/market conditions (sure, with the help of laws) play a much stronger part on that You couldn't get them without available hardware and without a market willing to experiment. And you couldn't have that without strong CS/EE departments that had strong investment in the decades prior that had spun a whole semiconductor industry And you wouldn't have had that without some welcoming immigration laws (at the decades prior) and some worldwide conflicts neither and a specific country that touches both main oceans and has decided that farther away areas might be safer for some developments. If you want to understand why laws in France are the way they are you need to take a look at what happened in the past 250 yrs more or less.
sharpneli 2y ago
Another issue are non competes. Everyone wants to get a tech sector like California but insist on having non competition agreements being either valid or conditionally valid meaning there is a gray area that stifles innovation.
- rurban 2y ago
  > gray area that stifles innovation Innovation by theft? Well, California is a very special outlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Innovation by theft is how Hollywood got its start. too far from New Jersey for the patent protections of Thomas Edison to be enforced, independent filmmakers were able to make movies without paying royalties
  - relistan 2y ago
    Many other places would like to be an outlier like California. Paying more attention to what makes it that way is probably a good place to start.
  - sharpneli 2y ago
    And that is why we use products made by companies in California. Non competes are good for the big incubent companies, but bad for the economy and the workers.
- snowpid 2y ago
  In Germany there are practically no non-competition agreements. Im not sureb
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    In Austria non-competes are legal and often found in employment contracts.
troupo 2y ago
> Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that You're phrasing it in a way that makes this scale seem like a good thing. Is it? I'm not convinced that the scale of supranational grow-at-all-costs uncontrollable corporations is good
- ratg13 2y ago
  The complaint that because Europe doesn’t support monopolies as well as America that makes them “behind” is likely the silliest argument I will read today. Yet, here it is the top comment. It reflects strongly on the American audience here.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > The complaint that because Europe doesn’t support monopolies as well as America Depends how much they pay.
  - 7bit 2y ago
    Well, it gives the USA tremendous power, no? Imagine Microsoft would prevent Europe to access Azure and M365 tomorrow... It creates jobs in the USA, which is also good. So of course people will defend that. In my opinion, what they fail to understand is that this power doesn't have any significant impact on their personal lives. It favours only those who are already in power.
  - Aerroon 2y ago
    It reflects the importance of software. It's not like Europe foregoes using this software. No, we just use the American/Chinese software instead and become dependent on it.
Gud 2y ago
Not every European country is the same, the rules and regulations vastly differ. It is true that the EU is "well regulated", but other countries with other legal frameworks and business culture do exist. Even within the EU, doing work and business can be very different. My personal favorites to work in are the Netherlands and Switzerland. Easy going people, flat hierarchies, cooperative and forgiving of mistakes, though YMMV as always.
silvestrov 2y ago
The Elephant in the room: all the different languages in Europe and it is only recently (past 10-20 years) that English proficiency has become high enough. This made communication difficult and still makes it very difficult to get people to move to another country. (edit: you need to know the local language to get any kind of social life). Compare getting someone to move from Chicago to San Francisco (same language, same culture) versus getting someone to move from Norway to Italy (completely different language, very different culture). So USA had a much larger effective work force when a company wanted to hire developers and much easier marketing of the products. Europe had a lot of computer hardware companies in the 1980's but they were never able to capture the full European market. So they died out due to lack of scale. There is also the problem of every single country wanting to be a king, so there was no political will to say "we need to join forces and create one single SV" (or one single unix company). Still today EU can't create an European Silicon Valley as you don't get a SV by saying "we want a SV here", you get it by saying "everywhere else is NOT going to be a SV".
thrance 2y ago
Honestly, I really don't see the point of having such megacoroporations here. What has Apple and Microsoft done for Americans ? They pay little to no taxes, they spy on everyone, they provide increasingly terrible products...
- TMWNN 2y ago
  If you don't think any other country (not just in Europe) wouldn't kill for the next big American big tech company to have been founded within its borders instead, I don't know what to tell you.
- kenutusabhik 2y ago
  so terrible product, that the whole world use them and apple is the largest tax payer in the world. These are some of the most innovative companies out there.
eric-burel 2y ago
I am mesmerized at how much the comments analyze Europe under the perspective of the United States, eg we need a Silicon Valley otherwise we don't exist from a technological standpoint, we should become an homogeneous market etc. We are not the USA and I feel fine with it, we are still able to figure the most advanced technologies on our own

kfk 2y ago

The challenge with Microsoft in Europe is that it is so convenient, it doesn’t make business sense to consider alternatives. See how easily MS won market share over Slack (MS Teams) and PowerBI (Tableau / Qlik). They have such a big bundle of services that any single player has to be either amazingly good, or specialized, to win maybe 1-2% of market share. The only way I see Europe doing something about it is antitrust laws that break the bundles.

oneshtein 2y ago
The problem is that when data is stored in the cloud, I don't have full control over it. My data hold as hostage against me. We need to break up data storage from data processing. Imagine if all your data was stored in a secure, independent location, like a large vault. You could then choose which services could access your data, allowing you to use multiple services simultaneously. Better, if this will be on browser side, where I have full control. IMHO, small independent providers should unite and develop something like File API, but for web (for a NAS with web interface).
- dijit 2y ago
  How would that even help? Are we forgetting decades of office suite incompatibility? The main reason most european companies use Office365 over alternatives is: 1. Fear of retraining 2. Fear of untrodden path but most crucially: 3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses
  - Chiba-City 2y ago
    [dead]
  - croes 2y ago
    >3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF. Most of Words featured aren't used anyway because most people don't know them. The rest is some Excel tools somebody once created which heavily rely on VBA but nobody can support them because they guy who made them already has left the company. Have seen that more than once.

fulafel 2y ago

Anyone have a gut feeling about Teams and Office penetration % in Asia/India/Africa?

willi59549879 2y ago
Asia India and Africa don't care so much about licensing. Many companies have people working on their own pc. They'll work with pirated software and send files around by email. Usually there is a lot less infrastructure

personomas 2y ago

Come on, let's not go down this rabbit hole. We have real problems in this world: WW3, Climate Crisis. The West has to be comfortable trusting each other. Microsoft is by the way more trust worthy than European governments!

wazoox 2y ago
Ever heard of Edward Snowden by any chance?
- personomas 2y ago
  Yes, I don't trust the state's either. But we have to keep things in proportion. Europe can't throw its efforts and forces now at trying to become independent from the US. We first have to defeat Russia, China, etc. Become independent of them and even defeat them before we start trying to peel off dependency on the US. US is an ally, and in the near future we have to rely on them. That's it.
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    US isn't an ally… They do their best interest and nobody else's.
    - personomas 2y ago
      That's utter nonsense.
      - wazoox 2y ago
        On the contrary, that's cold hard truth. The US repeatedly forces foreign companies into obedience for US companies' profit. For instance, the US forced Alstom to sell its power branch to GE by actually taking hostage one of Alstom directors into high security prison. They repeatedly menaced an punished foreign companies to force them to comply to US policy. The US is a merciless imperial power.
      - 2y ago

neglesaks 2y ago

That is a quite apt way to put it.

Kwpolska 2y ago

What viable European alternatives to Microsoft Office are there? Google Docs is also a US-based cloud service. LibreOffice is ugly, its UX is sometimes worse than Office 2003 (especially Calc, where pivot tables have to be blindly configured in a modal dialog, and there is no equivalent to the Table feature from Excel), and they still haven't implemented automatically downloading updates.

MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
LibreOffice isn't going to win any beauty pageants, but it does everything you need in an office setting. Some specialists can't live without MS Excel and all of its extensions (banking), but that's not the common case. Common case is word processing, slide presentations, and task management (in spreadsheets).
- troupo 2y ago
  MS Excel is the most common case. Some multi-billion-dollar businesses are run from Excel
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    > Some multi-billion-dollar businesses are run from Excel And that's a problem because it isn't even particularly great software [0,1,2]. Of course all complex calculation tools have bugs, but compare the code quality of Excel with something like Matlab or R and it looks amateurish. [0] https://www.microassist.com/software-tips/real-world-risks-of-spreadsheet-errors/ https://www.microassist.com/software-tips/real-world-risks-o... [1] https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-the-worst-excel-errors https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-t... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
    - johannes1234321 2y ago
      Yeah, but it allows amateurs to do quite some stuff and is available everywhere. All other systems have a way steeper learning curve.

librasteve 2y ago

hot news - microsoft is a monopoly

MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
They're not a monopoly, but they've vendor locked education, government, and much of industry. It's brilliant.

heyycppl 2y ago

Linux on the desktop is utopian. Even in 2024, it is plagued with millions of bugs. I can't use Linux for an hour on a desktop PC without encountering some issue. On the other hand, MacBooks and Windows PCs just work seamlessly, without any problems whatsoever. This is solely the fault of Linux developers, who, instead of developing one system well, create dozens of half-baked package managers, desktop environments, and other components. Unfortunately, none of these work well.

apexalpha 2y ago
"Since the cocky, self absorbed, nerds at Canonical have decided to rotate their logo 90 degrees clockwise in the 'about' menu of Nautilus we have decided enough is enough and will fork the entire distro. We are pleased to announce <abc...xyz>buntu fork #87126378215!"
pjmlp 2y ago
As someone that learned UNIX when Microsoft still sold Xenix, and used multiple flavours of it, was a Linux Journal subscriber since its early days, I occasionanly go down into one of those Desktop Linux rabbit holes only to repent myself afterwards. Latest adventure an UEFI only motherboard (no BIOS backwards compatibility available), that no matter what, refuses to reckognise SSD NVMe that hold Linux instead of Windows. Yes, one can complain the pesky OEMs still not being Linux Desktop friendly after 30 years, which in pratice doesn't matter to the regular consumer.
javcasas 2y ago
Windows on the desktop is dystopian. It works seamlessly when it's not installing candy crush pretending it's a security update, or when it decides to search the web for that word document you wrote yesterday, or when it decides your browser is bad because it's not edge. So yeah, it works flawlessly, but only for Microsoft.
npteljes 2y ago
Most of these statements are false. Linux on the desktop is a reality. I'm on one, it's my main OS, I even play my games on it. It having bugs is nothing special. Other systems have them as well. Windows is not seamless at all. And if you'd like to debug, you're SOL, because often it's not helpful at all. The state of things is not up to developers. Developers are part of a project, and the projects are part of a culture. Companies have projects and culture too, producing the same effects, for example take a look at how many UI styles Windows has, or how Microsoft's one project supports and contributes to open source, while another part of them actively destroys it.

usr1106 2y ago

This is a 43 minute video. Has anyone watched it in full length? I haven't, but I (European) agree with the title.

BlueTemplar 2y ago
It's nice, but there's probably nothing new there for your typical HN reader (unless if they're young I guess ?) It's also dangerously focused on Microsoft and complacent with "cloud" software. Google has already been winning their wrestling match over desktop computing for some time now, they shouldn't be helped. And with shittier software as a result. Also while using "Microsoft sounds" in the music is cute, I can't help but think that it's a bit like using Nazi music (Wagner ??) in a documentary critical of Nazis...
- decide1000 2y ago
  It is focused on Microsoft because it is about the relationship between states and the European Commission with Microsoft. They show that Microsoft does not follow the same procedures like 'normal' tenders. Also MS employees have .gov email addresses and the states are not allowed to show how much money they pay M$. It is not biased against Microsoft. It is about Microsoft based on journalism and decent research.
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    We are in full agreement there, but my issue with this documentary remains.

tclover 2y ago

Not just software, full time US slave

decide1000 2y ago

Thanks for sharing this. Very inspiring.