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The EU majorly screwed up by not focusing on a homegrown software ecosystem. The Chinese, due to either luck or competence or both, have a parallel big tech eco

The EU majorly screwed up by not focusing on a homegrown software ecosystem. The Chinese, due to either luck or competence or both, have a parallel big tech ecosystem compared to America and that is a huge advantage.

jjani 1y ago
In the Chinese case, competence. Korea also has such an ecosystem - and is a much better example for the EU to look towards - but stems from more of a mix between competence and luck.
- crop_rotation 1y ago
  Where are the Korean cloud providers? Even Samsung uses American ones.
  - alephnerd 1y ago
    Naver Cloud [0] and Samsung SDS Cloud [1] which is basically a Samsung managed AWS ecosystem (sort of like how AWS China is whitelabeled Tencent Cloud). Those tend to be used by a plurality of Korean organizations within Korea. Unlike in Europe, both Naver and Samsung began investing in building their own domestic cloud capabilities in the early 2010s. [0] - https://www.navercloudcorp.com/ https://www.navercloudcorp.com/ [1] - https://cloud.samsungsds.com/serviceportal/index.html https://cloud.samsungsds.com/serviceportal/index.html
    - cess11 1y ago
      Scaleway and OVHcloud, much better comparisons than Hetzner, started in the late nineties. UpCloud and Exoscale, arguably even better comparisons, started in 2011. Then there are many more which I can't be bothered looking at their founding dates, like gridscale, Elastx, Open Telecom Cloud, Fuga, Seeway.
      - alephnerd 1y ago
        I think you meant to reply to my other comment. But anyhow, none of those compare to even the Korean clouds excluding Open Telekom Cloud, which is white labeled AWS. That said, my point still stands. All the major examples you mentioned (OVH, Scaleway, gridscale) have largely limited FDI and headcount to within France or Germany, while GCP's Warsaw office owns the product leadership for much of GKE globally, AWS Bucharest owns a major part of AWS's Privacy and Data Security portfolio, MS Praha owns a significant portion of CoreAI, and Ireland is one of MS Azure's major DC hubs. Most French and German PR about "digital sovereignity" rings hollow when the French and German vendors who stand to benefit have largely kept Capex and headcount within France and Germany. Why should Poland, Romania, Czechia, Ireland, and Bulgaria lose hundreds of well paying high income tax bracket jobs and billions in FDI and income tax to subsidize French and German industry? And this is why just about every EU grand strategy conversation falls apart - the individual member states will look out for themselves over the collective. For example, France's recent objection to Germany, the UK, and the Nordics buying American weapons to send to Ukraine instead of buying French [0] and Dassault's lobbying of France to withdraw from FCAS if it doesn't get 80% workshare [1] German politicians don't answer to Polish voters. Greek politicians don't answer to Irish voters. Either the EU removes national soverignity and becomes a truly federal and centralized union, or the EU has to gradually reduce the political aspects and return to the 1990s and 2000s style defense and economic cooperation union that it was. [0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-donald-trump-weapons-aid-war-in-ukraine-nato/ https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-donald-trump-weapons-... [1] - https://www.ft.com/content/a38f6f36-6284-428c-b8af-fe6d6d7db0dd https://www.ft.com/content/a38f6f36-6284-428c-b8af-fe6d6d7db...
        cess11 1y ago
        Repeating the same talking points in every post makes you seem like a bot or astroturfing effort. The US is a criminal state that should have zero presence in Europe from that reason alone, regardless of european politics and societal characteristics. Bickering about mega-clown jobs and presenting US imperial practice as obviously a good thing isn't going to change that.
        1y ago
    - jjani 1y ago
      I'm nitpicking, as your main point is still completely accurate; it is indeed miles ahead in sovereignty compared to the EU! But > Those tend to be used by a plurality of Korean organizations within Korea. I've seen from the inside the IT infra of several chaebol subsidiaries (of different groups), of Korean big tech, as well as Korean startups, and really only some of the chaebol subsidiaries made use of these local clouds. Near 0% for startups, low single digits for big tech (besides Naver themselves obviously) and even for the big corps I'd estimate <30%. Azure and AWS are plenty popular, as well as of course on-prem still having a much higher market share than in the West. Not sure if most big corps have a random unused database on Naver Cloud to satisfy some government statistic but talking about meaningful usage here.
      - alephnerd 1y ago
        > I'm nitpicking No worries. I've tended to glaze over the Korean market so I'm glad to get some more granular info > Azure and AWS are plenty popular I was under the assumption that Samsung Cloud is largely a white label of AWS (sort of like Open Telekom Cloud in Germany), and much of the AWS spend can be treated as Samsung SDS. Is that correct?
tsimionescu 1y ago
Most shamefully for the EU, even Russia, a much, much smaller and poorer country, has a full set of replacements for the US tech hegemony, at least on the software side. However, we are all complicit in this state of affairs, with pushing dreams of a broderless internet. If the EU had tried to limit Facebook or Google access to the EU markets, or just favored some inferior EU alternatives, people on this very forum would have been up in arms about government overreach, balkanization of the Internet, and Brussels bureaucrats trying to stay relevant.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  > even Russia, a much, much smaller and poorer country, has a full set of replacements for the US tech hegemony, at least on the software side Not really. Meta and Alphabet products like FB, IG, and YouTube remain heavily used in Russia, even in spite of domestic alternatives like VK or Yandex. That said, pre-2022, Russia definitely had a strong VC and entrepreneurship scene compared to the the rest of Europe. NGINX, Yandex, VK, and Kasperskey were all able to be formed in Russia in the 2000s due to a much less risk averse capital market. Same with Ukraine (eg. Grammarly, Ring) and Belarus (eg. Wargaming) Aside from Romania and Czechia, I don't see a similar ecosystem anywhere in Europe (even Poland and Ireland's tech industry are largely dominated by FDI from large American players like Google and Bulgaria's from contractor and freelancer shenanigans). Ofc, unlike France and Germany, Czechia and Romania are way less combative to American tech companies and capital, so it's easier for them to justify investing for the long haul. Romanian successes like UIPath show that the only way a competitive European tech player can develop is through cooperation with the US.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    The fact that VK and Yandex (and Telegram, I would add) exist at all, and have a clear presence in the public in Russia and several Russian-speaking countries around them, already puts them way ahead of the EU on this front, even if they have not replaced FB, IG, etc like WeChat did in China. Otherwise, I generally completely agree with you. The EU tech scene is overall either US controlled or anemic. I'd note that Romania hardly has a real local tech scene. While we have a very large number of programmers and programming positions, it's almost entirely either US (and a few EU, Canadian, Israeli) companies' local offices or explicit outsourcing companies. The exceptions are UIPath, BitDefender, and a few companies that work exclusively on government contracts (and are deeply embedded with the political establishment). If relations with the USA worsened significantly, it's very hard to see how the Romanian programming/tech sector would survive. There is very very little local leadership on the business side.
Frieren 1y ago
> The Chinese, due to either luck or competence or both China banned foreign tech to allow for local tech to grow. The EU has tried to be in good relationship with the USA allowing big tech to dominate the old continent. I think that the arrangement worked well for both the USA and EU for a long time. But now that big tech is highly politically motivated to support the far-right that win-win situation has ended. The only way for the EU to grow domestic tech is to do what the Chinese did, ban USA tech and let local companies to thrive. I just hope that it is done in an open standard-base way instead of the big tech monopolies of the USA.
arkh 1y ago
You'll note one common thing between those two successful examples: one language only. That's the big difference in the EU when you are a start-up and want to go from the $10-50M range to $500M+: in the US and China, you have one big market with a shared language and one rule of law. In Europe? The second you want to expand to a market bigger than 50M people you have to adapt to different languages, cultures and laws. If you have not baked it in at the start that can be a huge roadblock. And if you have baked it in at the start you may have missed your chance due to the delay you incurred. Then you're just a target to be eaten by a US or Chinese company with a big war chest earned in their own market. That's why part of the EU rules is about trying to unify its member countries laws. Yes GDPR can seem like a protectionist framework from outside, but the main goal was to make all country in the EU have one shared legal system to handle personal data. So sharing them becomes easier inside the EU. We can expect more of this kind of laws to be written but they'll always be too late.
- NicuCalcea 1y ago
  > The second you want to expand to a market bigger than 50M people you have to adapt to different languages, cultures and laws So do US companies which operate in the EU. I doubt that's the main limiting factor.
  - arkh 1y ago
    > So do US companies which operate in the EU. Yes, but before operating in the EU those companies benefited from the fact the US market is a 300 million people one to scale up. And that's not factoring in the number of other English speaking countries with similar legal systems and treaties with the US.
- pjc50 1y ago
  People forget that China also has multiple languages. It's just that, per national mythology, a thousand years ago an emperor invented both "unified written language" and "civil service". To the extent that Brits will sometimes use "mandarin" as slang for civil servant.

jjani 1y ago

In the Chinese case, competence. Korea also has such an ecosystem - and is a much better example for the EU to look towards - but stems from more of a mix between competence and luck.

crop_rotation 1y ago
Where are the Korean cloud providers? Even Samsung uses American ones.
- alephnerd 1y ago
  Naver Cloud [0] and Samsung SDS Cloud [1] which is basically a Samsung managed AWS ecosystem (sort of like how AWS China is whitelabeled Tencent Cloud). Those tend to be used by a plurality of Korean organizations within Korea. Unlike in Europe, both Naver and Samsung began investing in building their own domestic cloud capabilities in the early 2010s. [0] - https://www.navercloudcorp.com/ https://www.navercloudcorp.com/ [1] - https://cloud.samsungsds.com/serviceportal/index.html https://cloud.samsungsds.com/serviceportal/index.html
  - cess11 1y ago
    Scaleway and OVHcloud, much better comparisons than Hetzner, started in the late nineties. UpCloud and Exoscale, arguably even better comparisons, started in 2011. Then there are many more which I can't be bothered looking at their founding dates, like gridscale, Elastx, Open Telecom Cloud, Fuga, Seeway.
    - alephnerd 1y ago
      I think you meant to reply to my other comment. But anyhow, none of those compare to even the Korean clouds excluding Open Telekom Cloud, which is white labeled AWS. That said, my point still stands. All the major examples you mentioned (OVH, Scaleway, gridscale) have largely limited FDI and headcount to within France or Germany, while GCP's Warsaw office owns the product leadership for much of GKE globally, AWS Bucharest owns a major part of AWS's Privacy and Data Security portfolio, MS Praha owns a significant portion of CoreAI, and Ireland is one of MS Azure's major DC hubs. Most French and German PR about "digital sovereignity" rings hollow when the French and German vendors who stand to benefit have largely kept Capex and headcount within France and Germany. Why should Poland, Romania, Czechia, Ireland, and Bulgaria lose hundreds of well paying high income tax bracket jobs and billions in FDI and income tax to subsidize French and German industry? And this is why just about every EU grand strategy conversation falls apart - the individual member states will look out for themselves over the collective. For example, France's recent objection to Germany, the UK, and the Nordics buying American weapons to send to Ukraine instead of buying French [0] and Dassault's lobbying of France to withdraw from FCAS if it doesn't get 80% workshare [1] German politicians don't answer to Polish voters. Greek politicians don't answer to Irish voters. Either the EU removes national soverignity and becomes a truly federal and centralized union, or the EU has to gradually reduce the political aspects and return to the 1990s and 2000s style defense and economic cooperation union that it was. [0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-donald-trump-weapons-aid-war-in-ukraine-nato/ https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-donald-trump-weapons-... [1] - https://www.ft.com/content/a38f6f36-6284-428c-b8af-fe6d6d7db0dd https://www.ft.com/content/a38f6f36-6284-428c-b8af-fe6d6d7db...
      - cess11 1y ago
        Repeating the same talking points in every post makes you seem like a bot or astroturfing effort. The US is a criminal state that should have zero presence in Europe from that reason alone, regardless of european politics and societal characteristics. Bickering about mega-clown jobs and presenting US imperial practice as obviously a good thing isn't going to change that.
        1y ago
  - jjani 1y ago
    I'm nitpicking, as your main point is still completely accurate; it is indeed miles ahead in sovereignty compared to the EU! But > Those tend to be used by a plurality of Korean organizations within Korea. I've seen from the inside the IT infra of several chaebol subsidiaries (of different groups), of Korean big tech, as well as Korean startups, and really only some of the chaebol subsidiaries made use of these local clouds. Near 0% for startups, low single digits for big tech (besides Naver themselves obviously) and even for the big corps I'd estimate <30%. Azure and AWS are plenty popular, as well as of course on-prem still having a much higher market share than in the West. Not sure if most big corps have a random unused database on Naver Cloud to satisfy some government statistic but talking about meaningful usage here.
    - alephnerd 1y ago
      > I'm nitpicking No worries. I've tended to glaze over the Korean market so I'm glad to get some more granular info > Azure and AWS are plenty popular I was under the assumption that Samsung Cloud is largely a white label of AWS (sort of like Open Telekom Cloud in Germany), and much of the AWS spend can be treated as Samsung SDS. Is that correct?

tsimionescu 1y ago

Most shamefully for the EU, even Russia, a much, much smaller and poorer country, has a full set of replacements for the US tech hegemony, at least on the software side. However, we are all complicit in this state of affairs, with pushing dreams of a broderless internet. If the EU had tried to limit Facebook or Google access to the EU markets, or just favored some inferior EU alternatives, people on this very forum would have been up in arms about government overreach, balkanization of the Internet, and Brussels bureaucrats trying to stay relevant.

alephnerd 1y ago
> even Russia, a much, much smaller and poorer country, has a full set of replacements for the US tech hegemony, at least on the software side Not really. Meta and Alphabet products like FB, IG, and YouTube remain heavily used in Russia, even in spite of domestic alternatives like VK or Yandex. That said, pre-2022, Russia definitely had a strong VC and entrepreneurship scene compared to the the rest of Europe. NGINX, Yandex, VK, and Kasperskey were all able to be formed in Russia in the 2000s due to a much less risk averse capital market. Same with Ukraine (eg. Grammarly, Ring) and Belarus (eg. Wargaming) Aside from Romania and Czechia, I don't see a similar ecosystem anywhere in Europe (even Poland and Ireland's tech industry are largely dominated by FDI from large American players like Google and Bulgaria's from contractor and freelancer shenanigans). Ofc, unlike France and Germany, Czechia and Romania are way less combative to American tech companies and capital, so it's easier for them to justify investing for the long haul. Romanian successes like UIPath show that the only way a competitive European tech player can develop is through cooperation with the US.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  The fact that VK and Yandex (and Telegram, I would add) exist at all, and have a clear presence in the public in Russia and several Russian-speaking countries around them, already puts them way ahead of the EU on this front, even if they have not replaced FB, IG, etc like WeChat did in China. Otherwise, I generally completely agree with you. The EU tech scene is overall either US controlled or anemic. I'd note that Romania hardly has a real local tech scene. While we have a very large number of programmers and programming positions, it's almost entirely either US (and a few EU, Canadian, Israeli) companies' local offices or explicit outsourcing companies. The exceptions are UIPath, BitDefender, and a few companies that work exclusively on government contracts (and are deeply embedded with the political establishment). If relations with the USA worsened significantly, it's very hard to see how the Romanian programming/tech sector would survive. There is very very little local leadership on the business side.

Frieren 1y ago

> The Chinese, due to either luck or competence or both China banned foreign tech to allow for local tech to grow. The EU has tried to be in good relationship with the USA allowing big tech to dominate the old continent. I think that the arrangement worked well for both the USA and EU for a long time. But now that big tech is highly politically motivated to support the far-right that win-win situation has ended. The only way for the EU to grow domestic tech is to do what the Chinese did, ban USA tech and let local companies to thrive. I just hope that it is done in an open standard-base way instead of the big tech monopolies of the USA.

arkh 1y ago

You'll note one common thing between those two successful examples: one language only. That's the big difference in the EU when you are a start-up and want to go from the $10-50M range to $500M+: in the US and China, you have one big market with a shared language and one rule of law. In Europe? The second you want to expand to a market bigger than 50M people you have to adapt to different languages, cultures and laws. If you have not baked it in at the start that can be a huge roadblock. And if you have baked it in at the start you may have missed your chance due to the delay you incurred. Then you're just a target to be eaten by a US or Chinese company with a big war chest earned in their own market. That's why part of the EU rules is about trying to unify its member countries laws. Yes GDPR can seem like a protectionist framework from outside, but the main goal was to make all country in the EU have one shared legal system to handle personal data. So sharing them becomes easier inside the EU. We can expect more of this kind of laws to be written but they'll always be too late.

NicuCalcea 1y ago
> The second you want to expand to a market bigger than 50M people you have to adapt to different languages, cultures and laws So do US companies which operate in the EU. I doubt that's the main limiting factor.
- arkh 1y ago
  > So do US companies which operate in the EU. Yes, but before operating in the EU those companies benefited from the fact the US market is a 300 million people one to scale up. And that's not factoring in the number of other English speaking countries with similar legal systems and treaties with the US.
pjc50 1y ago
People forget that China also has multiple languages. It's just that, per national mythology, a thousand years ago an emperor invented both "unified written language" and "civil service". To the extent that Brits will sometimes use "mandarin" as slang for civil servant.