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Another European agency shifts off US Tech as digital sovereignty gains steam
- tiredofthat 1y ago[flagged]
- chmod775 1y ago[flagged]
- jmclnx 1y agoI do not blame them for doing this. And if they move over to LibreOffice and a distro like SUSE replacing Microsoft products, they will eventually see support costs decreasing a lot. Cloud, I do not know if that will reduce costs, but at least they will know their data is more secure than with AWS, Microsoft and others.
- ArtTimeInvestor 1y agoAre there any publicly traded European cloud companies that will benefit from Europe hosting more of their stuff on their own? I looked at IONOS, but it seems they just let their cloud product rot away? The cloud backend looks outdated and lacks basic features like uploading private keys that can be used when provisioning new VMs. I also looked at OVH, but their website and interface look like total chaos to me. I felt lost all the time while I was trying to set up a VM, and while trying to use their AI APIs. Considering that Europe has an economy as large as the USA, it is puzzling how small these companies are. The combined market cap of IONOS and OVH is less than $10B.
- arbuge 1y agoHetzner comes to mind.
- ArtTimeInvestor 1y agoHetzner is not a publicly traded company.
- mentalgear 1y agomaybe for the better
- 9dev 1y agoThey have been a sustainable business from the start, and it shows.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rzerowan 1y agoThey would probably need a anchor client that would allow for predictable growth at scale - AWS always had Amazon.com GCP had its gmail and other workspace apps. Ideally the varoius goverments in the EU would commit to only hosting their work on them , however from one article read recently even the rules they come up with to test sovereignity claims are gamed to benefit the US providers.
- wiether 1y agoLike https://www.stackit.de/en/ https://www.stackit.de/en/ which is the cloud offering of Schwarz Group, owner of Lidl?
- rzerowan 1y agoYep,hopefully their API offerings are industry compatible and requisition of resources for clients is smooth. Would also help if they can onboard similar sized operations that are currently doing their own hosting or using one of the non-EU clouds.
- jschoe 1y agoEurope does not have the same market conditions as the US. The continent is divided into a gazillion amount of small countries, each with their own rules, laws, regulations, languages, customers, pension systems, healthcare systems, and taxes. Even the currency is not the same everywhere. Not to mention the cultural differences. Pretty hard economy to survive in.
- ArtTimeInvestor 1y agoUS companies seem to sell into Europe just fine? Amazon, Google, Microsoft - they all make tens of billions of revenue in Europe. Why wouldn't a company based in Europe be able to do the same?
- somanyphotons 1y agoUS companies get big first, only then try Europe once they have big revenue/headcount to handle the risk/complexity.
- kergonath 1y agoOne thing they have for them is a lot of money to invest from their American market, and enough momentum that they can afford barely sustainable European operations for a few years whilst they figure things out and streamline everything.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- consumer451 1y agoEU federalism would solve this issue, and likely cause others. The concept of European federalism is extremely interesting to me. The first I heard about it was at a house party in Prague, from a group of very excited young people. It feels both impossible and inevitable. Here is a subreddit on the topic: https://old.reddit.com/r/EuropeanFederalists/ https://old.reddit.com/r/EuropeanFederalists/
- deleted 1y ago
- TacticalCoder 1y ago[dead]
- thefz 1y ago> I also looked at OVH, but their website and interface look like total chaos to me. Lol. OVH is possibly the largest and most successful provider in Europe.
- ArtTimeInvestor 1y agoAre you using them?
- thefz 1y agoYes, lots. Why?
- ArtTimeInvestor 1y agoBecause I am interested to hear about the experience as a customer. How content are you with them? Have you tried alternatives? You don't think the web interface is chaotic?
- Havoc 1y agoEven if you can’t move all of it now the basic building blocks like VMs and databases aren’t exactly cutting edge tech so should be doable.
- toomuchtodo 1y agoPeople overestimate the technology required to build the utility stack, from physical servers to the first bit from an http server. Is it easy? It's straightforward. Can there be downtime? Tell me what us-east-1, Azure Front Door, Github, etc have looked like lately. Everyone uses cloud as an excuse for more uptime, but they're still down frequently, so this argument doesn't hold water. Eat some downtime, you're going to regardless if you manage your own infra or outsource. Can't build it yourself? That's fine, people like Oxide can build it for you, and you own all of it. The profits you don't pay to hyperscalers is investment in your sovereignty. Easy case to prioritize stakeholders over Google, Microsoft, and AWS shareholders, and the US government's ability to rug pull your access and data at any time. The argument isn't bare metal vs virtualized; the argument is "Do you own it?" You are spending a certain amount no matter what to get the technology capabilities needed. 37signals Leaves the Cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33260061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33260061 - October 2022 https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-elses-computer/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-else... https://oxide.computer/ https://oxide.computer/ (have built cloud infra for startups, fortune 100s, financial services firms, and on prem infra for high energy physics, non profits, public goods, etc; thoughts and opinions always my own)
- graemep 1y ago> Eat some downtime, you're going to regardless if you manage your own infra or outsource. If its outsourced the downtime is someone else's fault. People prefer opex to capex. You are right at a technical level, but short termism and personal incentives trump those.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago> You are right at a technical level, but short termism and personal incentives trump those. Agreed. Never let a crisis go to waste. This is that crisis. Like bankruptcy, change happens gradually, then suddenly.
- ArcHound 1y agoThese are great news. I was quite pessimistic about this transformation, but seems there are plenty institutions willing to make the leap. Are you aware of any tracking web that would display all these efforts? Wiki seems a bit outdated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_free_and_open-source_software_by_public_institutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_free_and_open-sour... EDIT: this seems to be a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732485
- mentalgear 1y agoWhy would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech? The U.S. government, through their executive orders and dissolving of the separations of powers, has demonstrated its ability to unilaterally disrupt or shut down private technology services at will. How can any business justify depending on U.S.-based tech infrastructure when its access could vanish overnight on a political whim by an unstable president? If there is no rule of law, capital, talent and trust are flowing out of that country - for good reason.
- danaris 1y ago> Why would ANY global business still rely on U.S. Tech? First and foremost, because it takes time to switch. Secondly, because there are a lot of things that just don't have realistic alternatives. For a large agency, especially one that has statutory or regulatory requirements on how they decide on and deploy hardware and software, even if they can legally choose to switch to open-source options, if they made that decision the day after the election last year, it might have been too late to get major proposals in for the 2025 fiscal year, so they'd have to wait until 2026 to do more than start planning. (This is, fairly obviously, a near-worst-case scenario; other agencies will have much more freedom to change as they please.) Even if they're less encumbered, the more users you have within an organization, the longer it takes to execute a migration like this, and it can be really really hard to operate for any length of time with a partial migration completed, especially for the support team. I could easily believe that some such migrations are already in the planning stage, but will take months to actually happen. And finally, because This Is How We've Always Done It is a very, very powerful force. For some organizations, unfortunately, it will take some kind of catastrophic event to realize that they really shouldn't be relying on a foreign and possibly hostile power for all their major enterprise IT vendors.
- graemep 1y agoI have also met the attitude that using hyperscalers is the right way to do it, and running anything of your own that you could outsource to them is weird and unprofessional.
- mentalgear 1y ago
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago[dupe] Austrian ministry kicks out Microsoft in favor of Nextcloud https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732485
- sipofwater 1y ago"Replacing Office365, how to keep OS secure": https://help.nextcloud.com/t/replacing-office365-how-to-keep-os-secure/223289 https://help.nextcloud.com/t/replacing-office365-how-to-keep... (help.nextcloud.com/t/replacing-office365-how-to-keep-os-secure/223289)
- sipofwater 1y ago[flagged]
- sipofwater 1y ago[flagged]
- jjtheblunt 1y agorage-bait retitling? title says Big Tech, not US Tech.
- 9dev 1y agoWhat other big tech is there really, apart from Chinese tech (which is already avoided across Europe)?
- jjtheblunt 1y agoopen source is pretty global, i'd say. it's also a theme in the linked article.
- tartoran 1y agoUS big tech is not just no longer reliable but toxic, predatory, prying, patronizing, etc.. I have to rely on office 365 at work for some minimal functions. I generally try to avoid it and only use it when necessary. The other day when I logged in to look for some document everything was hidden and Copilot AI was front and center. Copilot is the dumbest LLM possible, terrible integration, terrible responses, everything has become a headache for a simple task I had to do. How long would have until Microsoft corpo customers grind to a halt?
- codingbot3000 1y agoNever, because MS has over decades maintained itself in the perfect sweet spot where they sell to executives, and not to the poor people who have to suffer the products.
- anon291 1y agoI wish Europe would shift from leaching off of the defense tax money of the American people. Conveniently for them, we know that won't happen.
- cassepipe 1y agoMaintaining an empire has a cost and History has taught that isolationism is not kind to empires. You want to deal with problems before they arise not when you can't ignore them anymore. That was the lesson WWII taught the US and that it has now forgotten. Basically great power, great responsibility. You will regret that n% tax rebate when you children have to go fight overseas. It seems unfair that the US had both a great political foundation and the best geography and sometimes I feel like the US is too big too fail but you people sure are trying to test how robust the whole thing is. (I know the US is not exactly an empire but an alliance system where it has the dominant role but please don't interrupt during the class)
- anon291 1y agoAmerica came out unscathed and prosperous from WWII because it did nothing while the world destroyed itself and waited until the end when Russia had already done most of the hard work. Because of this American industry still existed and it sold to the world.
- codingbot3000 1y agoThat is quite a misrepresentation of history. Have you ever seen the American cemeteries from WWII in France or Italy? Then you would know that for doing "nothing" quite a lot of Americans have died to liberate Europe. And the part they liberated actually stayed free as opposed to the dictatorships installed by the Soviets.
- bfkwlfkjf 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties First graph.
- xbmcuser 1y agoI have been saying this for years most governments instead of spending 100s of billions on software subscription would have been better of supporting open source software. But that is too communist an ideal for these capitalist controlled governments at least they are now moving against foreign capitalist at least.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoAm I way off base, or is there a HUGE potential market for a new spreadsheet program compatible with xls/xlsx? It can't be that hard to make one, can it? (Famous last words, I know...)
- ironman1478 1y agoLibreOffice Calc can do this already. The main issue is the collaboration aspect of LibreOffice. I imagine though with funding LibreOffice can be upgraded to do this. If countries are already trying to migrate away from US tech, they could invest in this.
- rubenvanwyk 1y agoI know actually that LibreOffice specifically has lamented xlsx, apparently it’s a hard file format to design for.
- cassepipe 1y agoI personally think the future is a database like postgres or sqlite that is know to be very robust with a nice calc frontend. I believe Mathesar is on it. Watching them closely. Why ? Because falling back to SQL for big data would ne just great. Excel and Google Sheets seems to struggle.
- notepad0x90 1y agothe spreadsheet part is done already. the real power of excel these days is M365 cloud integration. Gsuite and Zoho try to compete but they don't come close.
- bfkwlfkjf 1y agoI think that's the wrong approach. No matter how hard or easy it is, Microsoft controls it and do you'll be putting huge amounts of effort forever, whereas they can break your stuff with little effort. Losing battle.
- submeta 1y agoToo little, too late. After the Snowden revelations there were no reasons to use US tech, for any org outside of the USA. It was obvious that US state actors do not respect any non-US actor. We Europeans need to treat US IT companies just like Russian or Chinese IT companies. And build our own infrastructure. The US does not care about alliences. It will treat any ally just like any other country. Edit: Office365 is a pile of horse poo. These tools do not allow you to do brain surgery. There are other alternatives to write text, do calculations, and send emails. Nothing that justifies being compromised by US state actors.
- jmyeet 1y agoThis administration in particular has done more to erode and destroy American soft power than any other and it's not even close. A lot of people fundamnetally misunderstand the source of the US's power. Some think it's because oil and other commodities are traded in US dollars. It's not. Oil is traded in US dollars because of American soft and hard power, not the other way around. Sell oil in euros and people will just trade their euros for USD for the exact same reasons. The ultimate source of American global power is the US military, period. Where the British Empire once was so powerful because it was the world's drug dealer (first tobacco, later opium), the US is the world's arms dealer. The US got incredibly wealthy from WW1 and WW2 and there are many conflicts to this day where each side is firing US sourced weapons at each other. It requires finesse to maintain this position. It's a bit like being a bank. A bank needs a certain facade of predictability, even neutrality, to continue to profit off whatever happens. People can revolt against the bank and the banking system. It's happened before (eg penny auctions in the Great Depression). What this administration is teaching the world is that the US is becoming unreliable. It's now a threat to sovereignty and national security to be reliant on the US, for anything. This goes well beyond cloud services and US tech giants. The US was always capable of turning on its protectorates and puppet states but it generally behaved in a far more restrained way to maintain the illusion of independance or at least to prioritize stability and predictability. I fully expect in the coming years that the EU is going to create their own competitors to things like AWS and they're going to do it by mandating its use by all government systems. It's going to be the new Airbus counter to Boeing. China is way ahead in this game. A lot of people (myself included) like to point to how much infrastructure, particularly rail, China has built in the last few decades. But fewer look at how they've done it. China originally bought European high speed intercity trains but that was temporary. They bootstrapped their own industries and produce their own trains now. And they use the same rolling stock on all metros and intercity lines to avoid the inefficiencies of localized procurement processes. I believe that a command economy like China will be the clear winner of the 21st century.
- kelnos 1y ago> I believe that a command economy like China will be the clear winner of the 21st century. I agree that the "command" aspect has been an asset for China, but the real drivers of their economic success has been cheap labor (fueled by weak labor protections), and indifference toward burning fossil fuels (until recently) and in general ignoring the externalities of their rapid industrialization. If US companies could pay people dirt, work them to death, and care even less than they do now about environmental externalities, a lot more manufacturing would have stayed on US soil. > This administration in particular has done more to erode and destroy American soft power than any other and it's not even close. Yup. It is still entirely bizarre to me that they don't see this. Or that they do see this, but think it's fine. Or that there is some other "plan" that actively seeks to destroy the US's dominance from within, and for some reason they think that's a good thing.
- notepad0x90 1y agoCompetition is good, but they should start from the OS level. Outside of Windows and MacOS, there is no OS ecosystem that works as well and at scale for an enterprise level deployment. I don't get the whole "US" aspect, why bring politics into this? We need alternatives and competition regardless of all that. I don't care if Europe, China or India make it, a viable alternative would be a game changer. For Europe, they're solving the wrong problem. Solve the problem of low pay for developers, and a stifling regulatory atmosphere that inhibits disruptive startups. If there is a good and viable alternative, why is it just for Europe? It could boost Europe's economy by selling to America and the rest of the world. The tech needs to be good, if the US can do it, why can't Europe? Replacing office or one app at at time only addresses surface level issues.
- Esophagus4 1y ago> I don't get the whole "US" aspect, why bring politics into this? There is some level of technology dependency after which it can become a national security risk (and therefore, political). This has happened a bunch in history (e.g. countries reducing reliance on adversaries oil supplies or foreign semiconductors). The few examples in the article are small and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but I think the article is trying to make the point that this is part of a larger divestiture from American tech companies. Whether that larger divestiture is happening, however, is probably a pretty dubious claim. This kind of reminds me of during COVID when everybody was writing articles like, “SF and NYC are dead and everyone is moving out!” Turns out… not so much. Journalists love taking a few small data points and extrapolating to what feels like should be happening and leading the reader to extreme conclusions. It’s much more fun to write that a hurricane is coming than it is to write, “we’re seeing some light rain today, and it’s probably within normal variance for this time of year.”
- notepad0x90 1y agoIt's just that this isn't like raw resources like oil. there is no "good" or "superior" oil. it's just oil. and there are some differences, but there is no "american refined gas" that is superior. But with tech, there is a question of quality and superiority. People that use M365 suite can work and collaborate more effectively, if not for actual superiority of the product and its OS integration, then simply because it is so well known and users prefer it the most (it does not repel talent as much). Why give talented european skilled people more reasons to leave the EU for US, as if existing issues aren't enough? Why not instead directly compete with Microsoft and Google. Why isn't the EU investing in that? They're caught in the "open source" trap. I hate to say it, but they need to make closed source proprietary software that is commercially competitive.
- dmje 1y agoDoes zdnet really auto autoplay audio when you open the page…?
- uvaursi 1y ago[flagged]
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago> EU would rather have China own them (see NXP) rather than US. Because EU-based companies are worthless, broke, and offshored already. As an individual, I prefer Euro sw/ tech way over Chinese sw/ tech and both 10 orders of magnitudesover american data-stealing, enshittifying klunk - as do many of my colleagues and friends...of late, and it's getting to more and more 'regular' people. Too. Could you elaborate on which EU companies are a) worthless - got names; b) broke - name one; and c) which ones are off-shored (meaning not Eu-pean)? Do you include EU
- preisschild 1y agoI agree with you regarding "Euro tech", but not on "Chinese sw/ tech", they are at least as data-stealing as the US and they have even less democratic controls over there.
- agile-gift0262 1y agoit's been years since the last time I go to zdnet. My experience when opening the link: I've been greeted by a dialog asking me to enable notifications, then the classic cookie dialog, and 5 seconds into reading the article, an auto-playing video with sound shows up pinned to the bottom of my screen. No thank you. Tab closed.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- OBELISK_ASI 1y ago[dead]