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MS was slapped with lawsuits for anticompetitive practices. Now we have laws around that. If you offer alternatives that are very close to drop-in replacements

MS was slapped with lawsuits for anticompetitive practices. Now we have laws around that. If you offer alternatives that are very close to drop-in replacements for what people want, then you can have a pig chunk of the cloud. At least in the PaaS/IaaS markets and some managed offerings that are popular such S3 like services, managed databases and a few others. There is this oligopoly because Amazon/Microsoft/Google poured tens of billions into that. Google is still in the 3rd place with a very low market margin and keeps investing in the cloud because I guess they see the future potential for doing this. I don't see why an European company or a consortium can't make this happen since most of the technology used for cloud services is OSS and you just need some proprietary glue here and there to make everything work.

disgruntledphd2 1y ago
> I don't see why an European company or a consortium can't make this happen since most of the technology used for cloud services is OSS and you just need some proprietary glue here and there to make everything work. Two reasons, sort of which make sense together. 1. lack of capital. Enterprise is hard, and takes a long time and lots of salespeople (even if you had a perfect product) 2. Lack of business relationships. In order to get people to move, you need to be way better on at least one dimension or it's pointless. So you'd need to start somewhere and slowly land-grab over time. Much harder to do that when MS/AWS/Google all have these relationships and won't stand still as you work. Modulo cross-border data sharing being definitely killed (which would change the game) it would be a long hard slog.