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It'll be interesting to see what this will mean for European dependence on US tech companies. I'm not personally against companies like Microsoft as such, in fa

It'll be interesting to see what this will mean for European dependence on US tech companies. I'm not personally against companies like Microsoft as such, in fact I think they are one of the better IT business partners for non-tech Enterprise. Often what they sell is vastly underestimated by their critics within the EU, not that I disagree with the problematic nature of depending on foreign tech companies either. With the proposed deregulation of US tech and their "freeing", however, I wonder if a lot of organisations will be capable of continuing using US tech services or it'll move in the direction of how Chinese (and other) services aren't legally available for a lot of things.

physicsguy 2y ago
I work for a European company and we already have strict rules about what data we’re allowed to remit into the US. Typically we’re only allowed to use cloud products hosted within UK + EU. It’s actually causing problems for us now with some of the generative AI stuff since the Azure offering doesn’t match fully the APIs of OpenAI for e.g.
- Quothling 2y ago
  It's similar for us. Since I work in the energy industry we're required to have plans for how to exit Microsoft if the EU deems it too dangerous for too much of the energy industry to be reliant on Microsoft. Which is part of why I worry, because we honestly can't. We can leave Azure, but we can't easily leave the 365 platform. By easily I mean that we may not survive as a company if we have to do it. It can obviously be done, we just don't have the resources required to do it.
  - GTP 2y ago
    I'm genuinely curious to hear why it would be so hard to leave the Office 365 platform, to the point that it could mean have to shut down the company. I know it isn't something that can be done overnight, but this is on a whole different level than what I assumed the case to be. To make my question more concrete, let's say the EU gives you two years to move away from Office 365, why would this jeopardize your company?
    - margorczynski 2y ago
      Most corpos and banks are basically built on Excel, Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint, etc. If you pluck that out it completely freezes 50%+ of their operations, people really don't get how much stuff in modern companies is reliant on MS stuff (and thus why they are one of the richest companies on the globe)
      - GTP 2y ago
        Yes, but there are comparable alternatives. Sure, the transition requires resources and effort, but to the point of making a company bankrupt?
        margorczynski 2y ago
        In some cases I would say yes if there was a hard limit (even few years) to migrate. Again, most people that didn't work in many really big corpos and banks don't comprehend how reliant those businesses are on the MS office stack.
    - the5avage 2y ago
      One very mundane reason a company I had worked for switched to Office365, was that emails from our own domain would often end up in the spam filter. It can cost a lot when that happens.
      - GTP 2y ago
        I see this being a problem in the current situation, where most businesses use either Google or Microsoft for their emails. But in the case of an EU-wide change, I think the situation would be different. Plus, there are other providers that could be used that aren't blocked by MS' and Google's spam filters.
        octacat 2y ago
        yeah, the real selling point of the google mail is that they have the power to just remove mail from other providers. Or the risk of removing is enough motivation of using gmail only. And as a major mail provider, they could change the ways we handle mail (to make it more reliable), they just choose not to.
- onli 2y ago
  Which is a nonsensical policy of course, since the US made clear in the past that regardless of where the server is located, US companies have to give access to data. See the CLOUD act.
- amai 2y ago
  My experience is that most companies in Europe just don‘t care about data privacy and continue to use whatever Microsoft sells them. Vendor-Lockin is a huge issue.
RickarySanchez 2y ago
European wise I think we're really failing to build significant homegrown tech companies. I'm not sure of the exact reason although I've heard that startup support it low and too much regulation / diversity of regulation are issues.
- xnorswap 2y ago
  It's a like a paradox of tolerance issue. You have countries that are willing to turn a blind eye toward their tech companies when those companies ignore laws to grow. In some ways it's "obvious" they'll outgrow companies from countries which have a culture of corporate adherence to laws.
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  >I'm not sure of the exact reason Left wing politics doesn't promote economic growth.
  - maccard 2y ago
    What European country would you describe as having a left wing party in power over the last decade?
    - nicce 2y ago
      GDPR et. al. does not fit for the US big tech since you need to respect the user.
    - Tainnor 2y ago
      Spain has had a left-wing government for a while, and the current German one could maybe be described as centre-left. Agreeing with you though that the EU as a whole isn't really "left-wing".
    - selfmodruntime 2y ago
      Germany just suffered 3 years of a left-leaning coalition that is just now imploding.
TrackerFF 2y ago
If Trump goes through with his wide-sweeping tariffs, there will be trade wars. That goes for tech, too. And keep in mind, if he installs nothing but loyalists and sycophants, who's to stop him from these half-baked ideas?
- briandear 2y ago
  Are you aware of the tariffs other countries have? Try importing California wine into France or Spain as an example. Try importing American cars into China or South Korea. There is also the de facto tariffs from Chinese currency manipulation. Hard to be intellectually honest about tariffs without looking what much of the rest of the world already does.
  - TrackerFF 2y ago
    Tariffs can work well. Sometimes you want to have tariffs, depending on the functionalities and industries you want to keep domestic. But imposing all-encompassing tariffs is just plain nonsense. It is dangerous nonsense. Replacing federal taxes with those tariffs is even worse. Again, Trump is fixated with tariffs. At least his idea of it. The last time he tried, ask farmers how that went.
DeathArrow 2y ago
The EU beaurocracy is into self sabotage. They don't promote a climate where European tech companies can grow and they hamper the usage of US tech companies products.
- vixen99 2y ago
  Absolutely undeniable. I wish those 'not liking' your comment would say why they do not agree. I'm not innocent of knee-jerk down-voting but I would like to cure myself of the habit. I wonder to what extent the extreme political and cultural polarization that prevails in the West results from a general reluctance on the part of adherents to engage in debate. At least that's my impression.
mrtksn 2y ago
Europe is still very much pro-American: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/overall-opinion-of-the-u-s/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/overall-opinio... However, the numbers are much worse than before and on the previous Trump presidency they crashed(recovered with Biden but crashed again): https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/appendix-a-favorability-of-the-united-states-since-2000-us-image-2024/gap_2024-06-11_us-image-2024_a_a_01/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/appendix-a-fav... The anti-establishment movements in EU are also predominantly anti-US, leftists are often anti-US too. I got the impression of many Americans online believing that Europeans are tech and progress loving, bureaucracy hating people under tyranny of EU which is a building in Brussels that churns rules and regulations. However that's not true, most Europeans love the big government hate new tech and prefer the slow and worry free life over the daily hustling. If Trump follows up with its promises, I only imagine EU parting with US on more stuff. I also see many Americans apparently believing that EU is mostly museums and there's no technology. Also not true, EU is made of countries that are traditionally tool-makers and Europeans are anti-tech and anti-change only when it comes to adoption of tech into their daily lives, not when creating tools and machines. ASML is not a coincidence, all kind of precision tooling and machinery is the bread and butter of European industry. So, if EU parts with US, I imagine that American stuff will be quickly replaced with European made stuff. The dominance of American tech in the daily lives is mostly due to network effect, a forced change will result in what resulted in Russia and China: local alternatives. Europe is worse off than the US only in Energy and demographics. Two massive issues but there are no quick-fixes for those, so they are European realities with or without the US.
- ttepasse 2y ago
  > I imagine that American stuff will be quickly replaced with European made stuff. I am in the process of (very slowly) decluttering my life. One weird observation that I had, is that I have very few hardware from the USA, even when I think liberally about "from" as designed and not just manufactured. I found a (crappy) HP printer, (wonderful) Apple hardware and two Zippos. There may be more, but it's not obvious labelled. Software and some online services on the other hand are different. From this European perspective the USA is very much a service export and not a stuff export economy.
elminjo 2y ago
The first time Trump was elected was a shock, but now we understand. It wasn't a simple mistake. I have only few customers who use Google Workspace for their emails and only one who uses Dropbox for files. Initially (about 2002) companies moved away from U.S.-based cloud services. However, now I have an increasing number of customers who want to cancel cloud services entirely. But for my customers, there is no alternative to Windows.
Molitor5901 2y ago
I'm more curious about the NYT tech union strike. They went forward with the strike and.. it doesn't appear anything bad happened. That might completely undermine the union's arguments...

physicsguy 2y ago

I work for a European company and we already have strict rules about what data we’re allowed to remit into the US. Typically we’re only allowed to use cloud products hosted within UK + EU. It’s actually causing problems for us now with some of the generative AI stuff since the Azure offering doesn’t match fully the APIs of OpenAI for e.g.

Quothling 2y ago
It's similar for us. Since I work in the energy industry we're required to have plans for how to exit Microsoft if the EU deems it too dangerous for too much of the energy industry to be reliant on Microsoft. Which is part of why I worry, because we honestly can't. We can leave Azure, but we can't easily leave the 365 platform. By easily I mean that we may not survive as a company if we have to do it. It can obviously be done, we just don't have the resources required to do it.
- GTP 2y ago
  I'm genuinely curious to hear why it would be so hard to leave the Office 365 platform, to the point that it could mean have to shut down the company. I know it isn't something that can be done overnight, but this is on a whole different level than what I assumed the case to be. To make my question more concrete, let's say the EU gives you two years to move away from Office 365, why would this jeopardize your company?
  - margorczynski 2y ago
    Most corpos and banks are basically built on Excel, Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint, etc. If you pluck that out it completely freezes 50%+ of their operations, people really don't get how much stuff in modern companies is reliant on MS stuff (and thus why they are one of the richest companies on the globe)
    - GTP 2y ago
      Yes, but there are comparable alternatives. Sure, the transition requires resources and effort, but to the point of making a company bankrupt?
      - margorczynski 2y ago
        In some cases I would say yes if there was a hard limit (even few years) to migrate. Again, most people that didn't work in many really big corpos and banks don't comprehend how reliant those businesses are on the MS office stack.
  - the5avage 2y ago
    One very mundane reason a company I had worked for switched to Office365, was that emails from our own domain would often end up in the spam filter. It can cost a lot when that happens.
    - GTP 2y ago
      I see this being a problem in the current situation, where most businesses use either Google or Microsoft for their emails. But in the case of an EU-wide change, I think the situation would be different. Plus, there are other providers that could be used that aren't blocked by MS' and Google's spam filters.
      - octacat 2y ago
        yeah, the real selling point of the google mail is that they have the power to just remove mail from other providers. Or the risk of removing is enough motivation of using gmail only. And as a major mail provider, they could change the ways we handle mail (to make it more reliable), they just choose not to.
onli 2y ago
Which is a nonsensical policy of course, since the US made clear in the past that regardless of where the server is located, US companies have to give access to data. See the CLOUD act.
amai 2y ago
My experience is that most companies in Europe just don‘t care about data privacy and continue to use whatever Microsoft sells them. Vendor-Lockin is a huge issue.

RickarySanchez 2y ago

European wise I think we're really failing to build significant homegrown tech companies. I'm not sure of the exact reason although I've heard that startup support it low and too much regulation / diversity of regulation are issues.

xnorswap 2y ago
It's a like a paradox of tolerance issue. You have countries that are willing to turn a blind eye toward their tech companies when those companies ignore laws to grow. In some ways it's "obvious" they'll outgrow companies from countries which have a culture of corporate adherence to laws.
DeathArrow 2y ago
>I'm not sure of the exact reason Left wing politics doesn't promote economic growth.
- maccard 2y ago
  What European country would you describe as having a left wing party in power over the last decade?
  - nicce 2y ago
    GDPR et. al. does not fit for the US big tech since you need to respect the user.
  - Tainnor 2y ago
    Spain has had a left-wing government for a while, and the current German one could maybe be described as centre-left. Agreeing with you though that the EU as a whole isn't really "left-wing".
  - selfmodruntime 2y ago
    Germany just suffered 3 years of a left-leaning coalition that is just now imploding.

TrackerFF 2y ago

If Trump goes through with his wide-sweeping tariffs, there will be trade wars. That goes for tech, too. And keep in mind, if he installs nothing but loyalists and sycophants, who's to stop him from these half-baked ideas?

briandear 2y ago
Are you aware of the tariffs other countries have? Try importing California wine into France or Spain as an example. Try importing American cars into China or South Korea. There is also the de facto tariffs from Chinese currency manipulation. Hard to be intellectually honest about tariffs without looking what much of the rest of the world already does.
- TrackerFF 2y ago
  Tariffs can work well. Sometimes you want to have tariffs, depending on the functionalities and industries you want to keep domestic. But imposing all-encompassing tariffs is just plain nonsense. It is dangerous nonsense. Replacing federal taxes with those tariffs is even worse. Again, Trump is fixated with tariffs. At least his idea of it. The last time he tried, ask farmers how that went.

DeathArrow 2y ago

The EU beaurocracy is into self sabotage. They don't promote a climate where European tech companies can grow and they hamper the usage of US tech companies products.

vixen99 2y ago
Absolutely undeniable. I wish those 'not liking' your comment would say why they do not agree. I'm not innocent of knee-jerk down-voting but I would like to cure myself of the habit. I wonder to what extent the extreme political and cultural polarization that prevails in the West results from a general reluctance on the part of adherents to engage in debate. At least that's my impression.

mrtksn 2y ago

Europe is still very much pro-American: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/overall-opinion-of-the-u-s/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/overall-opinio... However, the numbers are much worse than before and on the previous Trump presidency they crashed(recovered with Biden but crashed again): https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/appendix-a-favorability-of-the-united-states-since-2000-us-image-2024/gap_2024-06-11_us-image-2024_a_a_01/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/appendix-a-fav... The anti-establishment movements in EU are also predominantly anti-US, leftists are often anti-US too. I got the impression of many Americans online believing that Europeans are tech and progress loving, bureaucracy hating people under tyranny of EU which is a building in Brussels that churns rules and regulations. However that's not true, most Europeans love the big government hate new tech and prefer the slow and worry free life over the daily hustling. If Trump follows up with its promises, I only imagine EU parting with US on more stuff. I also see many Americans apparently believing that EU is mostly museums and there's no technology. Also not true, EU is made of countries that are traditionally tool-makers and Europeans are anti-tech and anti-change only when it comes to adoption of tech into their daily lives, not when creating tools and machines. ASML is not a coincidence, all kind of precision tooling and machinery is the bread and butter of European industry. So, if EU parts with US, I imagine that American stuff will be quickly replaced with European made stuff. The dominance of American tech in the daily lives is mostly due to network effect, a forced change will result in what resulted in Russia and China: local alternatives. Europe is worse off than the US only in Energy and demographics. Two massive issues but there are no quick-fixes for those, so they are European realities with or without the US.

ttepasse 2y ago
> I imagine that American stuff will be quickly replaced with European made stuff. I am in the process of (very slowly) decluttering my life. One weird observation that I had, is that I have very few hardware from the USA, even when I think liberally about "from" as designed and not just manufactured. I found a (crappy) HP printer, (wonderful) Apple hardware and two Zippos. There may be more, but it's not obvious labelled. Software and some online services on the other hand are different. From this European perspective the USA is very much a service export and not a stuff export economy.

elminjo 2y ago

The first time Trump was elected was a shock, but now we understand. It wasn't a simple mistake. I have only few customers who use Google Workspace for their emails and only one who uses Dropbox for files. Initially (about 2002) companies moved away from U.S.-based cloud services. However, now I have an increasing number of customers who want to cancel cloud services entirely. But for my customers, there is no alternative to Windows.

Molitor5901 2y ago

I'm more curious about the NYT tech union strike. They went forward with the strike and.. it doesn't appear anything bad happened. That might completely undermine the union's arguments...