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I guess "Make America Great" may spawn a big Cloud Industry in Europe. If I was in Europe, I would never use any US Tech products. Maybe Linux will end up mak

• y-curious 2y ago
  I thought you were being serious til I read your last paragraph. Well done
• SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
  A new term seen recently: "The MAGA cloud companies": Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon.
  • scarab92 2y ago
    Except, MAGA hate all those companies. They view them as non-ideologically diverse breeding grounds for progressives.
    • michh 2y ago
      That was true for Trump 1. This time round, things appear to have changed. The CEOs of these companies sitting front-row at the inauguration is the most visible sign of their newfound mutual love. MAGA have found out these companies will just bend to their ideological will in the interest of shareholder value and it shows.
      • scarab92 2y ago
        Maybe in future, but for now these companies are not liked in MAGA-land, and simply attending the inauguration of a president hasn’t really changed anything.
        • SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
          It has demonstrated those companies willingness to comply. I don't agree that "it hasn't changed anything".
        • dragonwriter 2y ago
          It may not have changed how the rank and file see them, but that's not who they are currying favor with.
      • atlgator 2y ago
        Not just for Trump 1. It was true right up until January 1 of this year. Their "conversion" just started and it remains to be seen whether there is any depth to it or it's a publicity stunt to avoid Trump's ire over the next 4 years.
    • SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
      MAGA hates basically everything modern. What matters is if those companies bend the knee. And in 2025 they do.
    • microtonal 2y ago
      Three of them (AGA) had tech bosses at prime seats at the inauguration. MAGA might hate them, but the Musk, Thiel, etc. crowd that seem to be in control of the While House are big tech. MAGA was only for the MAGA electorate to get into power. Sadly poor/angry voters will happily vote against their own interests if you can make them hate (immigrants, liberals, DEI, woke, whatever does the job).
      • SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
        Microsoft did issue congratulations: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/satyanadella_congratulations-to-president-trump-and-vice-activity-7287187976097316864-Gi4g/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/satyanadella_congratulations-... On the one hand, this is a bland, press-release congratulations letter that could apply to any new president. On the other hand, it signals "business as usual".
  • odiroot 2y ago
    Why Apple? Oracle would probably fit better with others. Or even IBM.
    • SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
      > Why Apple? https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/01/20/tim-cook-joins-big-tech-leaders-for-trumps-inauguration https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/01/20/tim-cook-joins-bi... > Why not Oracle or even IBM. a) They're not as prominent as the 4 mentioned b) as an acronym, "MAGAFIO" doesn't have the same punch to it. It's cluttered. We get the idea that the 2nd tier tech oligarchs are on board anyway.
      • fud101 2y ago
        Oracle CEO was next to Trump in that 500bil AI thing.
      • int_19h 2y ago
        MAFIAGO sounds great, though.
• newsclues 2y ago
  Where are they going to get their power? Russian gas? Suddenly build nuclear?
  • ojl 2y ago
    Who are “they”? Several European countries have nuclear power (together with some other source as well of course) and are planning to build more. It will probably take a long time though.
  • amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Don't they still have North Sea oil?
    • hedora 2y ago
      They also have a strong windmill industry.
• radlad 2y ago
  Isn't that what Russia already does?
• baxtr 2y ago
  I get your point. It’s almost impossible at the stage we are at right now. But what’s the alternative?
  • SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    There’s not a great alternative in the next few months, perhaps not in the next few years, but in the longer term European countries should take this as a critical warning. Failing to cultivate a domestic software industry in 2025 is like failing to cultivate a domestic manufacturing industry in 1825.
  • drysine 2y ago
    Russia can do that, so can Europe.
    • sam_lowry_ 2y ago
      Russia struggles as well. habr.ru is full of stories about rebranded western software and hardware sold at exorbitant prices with fake certificate of local produce )
      • drysine 2y ago
        Rebranded western software? Some open source projects are rebranded as Russian with minimal changes, that happens, yes, but that's the result of gaming the system that incentivizes development of Russian software, not the result of sanctions. Russian replacements of Office 365 and Google Docs seem to be doing well. As for hardware, the EU is not yet under American sanctions.
• watwut 2y ago
  The law about EU data having to be on the servers located in EU already exists.
  • croes 2y ago
    Doesn‘t matter thanks to the CloudAct.
  • jorvi 2y ago
    Yup you already can specifically sequester your data to Microsoft's or Amazon's EU-only servers, and even smaller companies like 1Password offer to store your data on 1password.eu instead of 1password.com. However there can be weirdness sometimes. I vaguely remember a case where Microsoft had to hand over EU data to a US law enforcement agency due to a court order, but giving that data would violate Irish law. I know there's a new variant of the EU-US Privacy Shield, but with the current US administration that could get ignored very easily. Which raises the question: can for example Microsoft-the-US-entity in de jure sense cleave off Microsoft-the-EU-entity whilst still maintaining de facto connection between the two? If not, there are definitely big opportunities abound.
    • miki123211 2y ago
      That's not the way. What Microsoft might end up doing is following the China model, essentially giving control over their EU servers (probably only those in a special region) to an EU company, while still supplying the software and taking a (very large) cut of the profits.
      • smueller1234 2y ago
        https://www.s3ns.io/en https://www.s3ns.io/en This is Google + Thales doing the 3rd party operator model, with the operator being a subsidiary of Thales and not Google. (NB: I work for Google in the EU.)
    • g8oz 2y ago
      Data residency is not data sovereignty.
• vachina 2y ago
  European companies are so deeply entrenched in American software ecosystem I can’t even. Just this past week my EU company deployed an agentic LLM hosted on Microsoft Azure with models developed by… Microsoft, on top of the existing GPT hosted on the same platform. They also recently moved their entire in-house HR platform to Oracle. It’s no mistake China banned foreign companies with infinite money from setting up shop there. It is dangerous and expensive in the long run.
  • toomuchtodo 2y ago
    But would they still if the EU used tariff like policy to prohibit it? "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the next best time is now." Make the law, enforce the law, encourage the behavior and outcomes necessary to achieve the success criteria. As someone with an infra background a lifetime ago, I am confident I could spin up Kubernetes and Deepseek R1 in OVH or Hetzer within a few days. The primitives exist, the EU simply needs to lean into cultivating and supporting them (orgs, platforms, etc) to push EU entities consuming these services away from US Tech. Perhaps the tech stack is a national security interest, just as a manufacturing base and supply chain is. Better to be prepared than to be entrenched in the US Tech ecosystem and then suddenly be held hostage for reasons.
    • petercooper 2y ago
      If you look at other countries/regions that impose high tariffs, their companies continue to buy and use American technologies and absorb the cost (to their local customers' detriment). I'd certainly enjoy the case studies of European enterprises jumping from full-scale Azure and AWS deployments to OVHcloud or Hetzner, though. That'd make for some interesting reading.
      • toomuchtodo 2y ago
        But what if they outright ban it, as the US was going to do with TikTok (for national security reasons)? This it the tech services version of Nord Stream.
• znpy 2y ago
  > I guess "Make America Great" may spawn a big Cloud Industry in Europe. Unlikely. I've worked at an american cloud provider and (in another job) i've worked with an european cloud provider (in this context, when I say "worked with" I mean i was in contact with the people actually managing the hardware as well as the software that serves the "cloud"). It's just a completely different mindset, and I don't see that changing any time soon. The main issue i see is that european cloud providers mostly have technically-ignorant upper management for which providing a cloud offering essentially boils down to "buy this software component from company xyz (likely an american company) and install this open source product abc, then slap a cloud marketing name and unleash the salespeople". They can't even contemplate the idea hiring somebody with FAANG-level skills, paying it FAANG-level money and let it do FAANG-level work. They hire a few underpaid 20-somethings and have them manage, at best, an OpenStack installation. I kid you not: in late 2021 i was in a meeting with (among the others) the head of cloud engineering of one such companies and asked when are they planning on offering ipv6 connectivity. The guy had a loud laugh and said they had no plans to even consider ipv6 connectivity. And that was at a company that does both "cloud" computing infrastructure and connectivity (!!!). That's the mindset. I don't see europe building a realistic alternative to american cloud providers, and the core issue is not technical.
  • scarab92 2y ago
    They also move too slowly, so they fall further and further behind each year. For example, Hetzner has great potential, but they’re only just now releasing object storage after 4 years in the cloud space, and they don’t even have managed database yet.
    • everfrustrated 2y ago
      And they certainly didn't develop the software themselves either.
    • dijit 2y ago
      "4 years in the cloud space" Hetzner has existed for a really long time, I'm not even sure what "cloud" means in your context. Object storage and VMs is what made AWS "cloud" 15 years ago, so by that definition Hetzner only just became a cloud provider.
• whatever1 2y ago
  Not only cloud, but the entire defense industry that was hibernating for the past 70 years, for you know good reasons. All of these nice F35s made in USA, will soon have no buyers except the USA itself.
  • BoredPositron 2y ago
    Germany pretty much only ordered the F-35 to carry US nuclear weapons because their current platform (Tornado) is getting retired. They didn't want to hand over Typhoon schematics to retrofit it. They pretty much only had the choice between F18s or F35s.
    • cheaprentalyeti 2y ago
      You know, if we were really adversarial, it would be really really wise to reconsider allowing German planes, whether home built or bought from the US, "loaner" nuclear weapons to carry into battle.
      • BoredPositron 2y ago
        What? At least read a wiki article before commenting because it looks like you have no idea about the extended nuclear umbrella and how it works.
  • nosianu 2y ago
    That is very optimistic. Given that for today's election here in Germany actual problems barely played a role. Not just that, over the last two decades very little was done. For example, we have skyrocketing rents due to a general lack of housing, which leads to all kinds of problems apart from affordability. For example worker mobility. Who dares to move to another job and city when it's so hard to find a flat? That's par for the course for almost all big problems. I think the probability is high that the new German government is going to try to sit this one out. After all, they survived Trump the last time, and it's only four years, right? Worse, they would have to do many things that will be very unpopular with one or the other interest group. Unless somebody puts a gun to the heads of all those in government they will procrastinate rather than make any big changes. I see little chance that they will cancel the order for US military hardware. They might actually buy a lot more, to appease Trump. After all, not getting the F-35 would have repercussions for the nuclear sharing agreement with the US. They need the F-35 to have a certified platform for nuclear bombs they are supposed to get from the US, stored in Germany for that purpose. That would mean they would need a European approach to nuclear weapon sharing and weapons. The German government regularly has trouble even just to work together with only France, due to wildly different philosophies and interests. Europe is far too divided, and the German government sees its role in doing as little as possible when it comes to radical change. I think part of it is that the leadership of all our big parties mostly consists of politicians whose whole life is just that. They don't have anything else. Even if they get a job at a company it's for their political connections. They won't risk this, and they barely have any strong opinions! They look at polls and change what they stand for accordingly and easily. I'm not saying this to sound mean, I think that this is a mostly accurate description. Opposing the US would take spine! It's a lot of trouble and uncertainty. They will try to avoid that if at all possible. ---------- By the way, it's not just F-35. Germany also ordered the Israeli-American Arrow 3 long-range missile defense system, sixty CH-47 Chinook, and 380 other contracts worth 23 billion just from the "Sondervermögen" (special fund) of 100 billion. Surely that will just become more, given that Germany continues to need to purchase things like Patriot missiles. The strategy was - to the chagrin of the French if I understood the news articles written at the time right - to rather buy something proven and quickly available from the Americans rather than start a lengthy inter-European development process.
• tbrownaw 2y ago
  So we're about to finally get the year of Linux on the desktop?
  • qwerty456127 2y ago
    Almost every EU company I worked with, migrated from Windows to Ubuntu at some point.
    • century19 2y ago
      I've worked with many and it was always Windows, with some use of MacBooks in recent years. Never once seen Linux desktops.
  • mattmaroon 2y ago
    It's been one year away for 30 years!
  • DaSHacka 2y ago
    More like "Year of the EU computing independence" this time, totally for real guys!
• Workaccount2 2y ago
  Linux will gain traction as soon as people have difficultly figuring out how to open a terminal window - by design. The main problem with linux, or specifically linux distros, is that they are designed and maintained by people who like using linux, which eternally damns it to ~5% market penetration.
• petercooper 2y ago
  The EU hasn't even got a home-built social network with significant market reach, let alone the wherewithal to pull off ditching Microsoft and Google. It'd be nice to see that change, but there's surely some sort of blocker after 25 years of the Web being a mainstream technology.
  • hedora 2y ago
    Mastodon is German: https://joinmastodon.org/about https://joinmastodon.org/about (So is SAP, for that matter.)
  • toomuchtodo 2y ago
    There is an active effort currently to have the EU contribute towards funding https://freeourfeeds.com/ https://freeourfeeds.com/ (to enable a distributed, global AT Proto network). Does the EU need the network to be home grown or have the valuation matter? I argue no, it is a utility, not a business to be captured and squeezed by investors or other potential controlling interests. (as of this comment, Bluesky has ~32M users and counting)
  • bloomingkales 2y ago
    They can fork phpbb. You didn’t really think these social networks are anything more than that? We just need to see if phpbb can scale to a billion, and if not, why not.
    • petercooper 2y ago
      Well, I'm all for the return of the classic forum experience! The UK's largest "social" sites are pretty much forums (e.g. Mumsnet, The Student Room, DigitalSpy, MoneySavingExpert) and while they're good for their respective topics, they don't cover the Reddit/Facebook/Instagram use cases (they could be arguably considered on a par with individual sub-reddits).
      • bloomingkales 2y ago
        Well, I'm all for the return of the classic forum experience! If you make each individual bulletin board receive broadcasts from a central server, then you get the network effects of Facebook and Reddit. Individual boards can just sub to the central server keeping them connected to the hivemind or not. Your community can remain isolated or throttled (only 30% of global updates get through). We do this manually here, where not all global posts get through (you'd be hard pressed to push a Reddit post to the top here). It's the simplest way to federate using existing technology. This model is already at play. X, Bluesky, Reddit, Truth Social, and Rumble are basically heavily funded private message boards with a large mindshare subscriber base. Taking our message boards back is proving to be difficult, especially because trying to move the userbase off of it is the same as trying to move people off drugs.
• pton_xd 2y ago
  > I guess "Make America Great" may spawn a big Cloud Industry in Europe. Have you tried using OVH? It's... not ready for prime time. Don't get me wrong, I love it for cheap EU servers, but man is it a pain in the ass to deal with.
• dmix 2y ago
  Europe is already pretty experienced in increasing their costs of doing business to avoid any sort of risk already so I’m sure they’ll figure something out.
• cgcrob 2y ago
  I think the impact is going to be far greater than that. I have seen, at least here in the UK, some people speaking about moving entirely back to hardware that is controlled by the organisation. The case is there on a cost basis already but people are reluctant to admit this. If another magical guarantee expires such as a security one, then the reason can be shifted to that and the cost justification is collateral. Getting out of PaaS systems is going to be horrible and expensive though. We never should have gone further than IaaS. I suspect the idea of the cloud as it stands today may die fairly quickly.
• huang_chung 2y ago
  [flagged]
• paganel 2y ago
  Maybe of the "liberal" Europeans techies are commenting on this American website and complaining about how bad America is, apparently with no self-awareness and how European governments and not only should boycott American stuff. The same goes for commenting the same thing on American website Reddit.
• jaybrendansmith 2y ago
  Europe has done this before. Airbus did not exist but now it is the best aircraft maker since Boeing decided to retire all their senior engineers in favor of quick profits. Europe created Airbus, they can do the same with a new Cloud provider.
  • layer8 2y ago
    This presumes that today’s Europe is comparable to the one ca. 60 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Airbus#1970%E2%80%932000:_Airbus_Industrie_GIE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Airbus#1970%E2%80... (I’m not disputing the chances, just the logic of the analogy with Airbus.)
  • _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    Don't forget Boeing moved their headquarters and leadership to DC. Making the widgets is just the inconvenient part management doesn't really care about/need to be involved with, the focus worthy part of their business is government extraction in Boeing corporate's minds. Our corporate class is such short sigted trash.
  • kichimi 2y ago
    They can do even better. I don't know how much I can say but there is an EU funded alternative in the works.
  • Hikikomori 2y ago
    Evroc in Sweden is trying to do this.
• odiroot 2y ago
  On the other hand, many of us in Europe still have the memories (or our parents tales) of our governments spying on everything we say and do. With all the chilling consequences. Half a century of communist rule showed us not to trust our governments. Every now and then, the Brussels bureaucrats show us how much do they value our privacy and electronic safety.
  • hedora 2y ago
    The US govt would never do that.
• qwerty456127 2y ago
  > If I was in Europe, I would never use any US Tech products. Could you possibly name any specific riscs?
  • Xenoamorphous 2y ago
    Trump.
    • throwup238 2y ago
      Not just Trump but any potential future administration. We’re no longer reliable partners who can keep continuity of our bureaucracy and foreign policy going for longer than four years without a geopolitical seizure.
  • PessimalDecimal 2y ago
    Some specific RISCs: RISC-V, MIPS, ARM, POWER, PowerPC.
    • Lennie 2y ago
      Some others: SPARC and SuperH.
• Xenoamorphous 2y ago
  Not just cloud but military and many other things. I think MAGA is good for Europe, there’s a big incentive to remove any kind of US dependency.
• CooCooCaCha 2y ago
  That's the problem with adversarial competition instead of collaboration. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you think the other entity is a shark, then your going to start acting like a shark too in order to protect yourself.
• bittermandel 2y ago
  Definitely is, it triggered us at Molnett, Clever Cloud, Safespring and others to start believing in competing with the hyperscalers!
• tensor 2y ago
  There is already a decent cloud industry in Europe. OVH has been around for decades, and many companies in North America even use them because they are often a bit cheaper. But you also have newer players like Scaleway and CDNs like Bunney.net that are growing fast. I think the harder services to replace are things like Github and O365/Google Workplace.
  • matt-p 2y ago
    Are OVH decent? I'm not entirely sure that they're even passable and what other options would you have in Europe?
    • everfrustrated 2y ago
      https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/10/ovh/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/10/ovh/
  • aerhardt 2y ago
    "Cloud" is not boxes like OVH and Hetzner sell. Cloud is a gigantic software layer offering all kinds of features and abstractions. I think it'd be faster and cheaper to replicate GitHub or even Office, which are complex but fairly feature-stable, than to offer a real cloud competitor with a fraction of the services that Amazon, Microsoft or Google offer in their cloud portfolios. I heard an interesting thought on the Lex Friedman podcast though. If software engineering really becomes cheaper and more readily available thanks to AI, maybe more companies will start building more of their own services. Then, maybe then, will the European enterprise be able to wean itself off from the big cloud vendors.
    • tensor 2y ago
      I know what Cloud is, and OVH has a cloud, with many of the same services as AWS. Even Bunny can be configured via terraform. So the reality today is that AWS and other cloud offerings have strong alternatives, but Office and Github don't.
  • rahkiin 2y ago
• docmars 2y ago
  As intended. European independence and sovereignty would be a great outcome from all this.
• templeOSdotcom 2y ago
  I am all for more European development. It seems like the EU makes it harder to build anything-- from what I've read I should say.