5 ms·
What alternatives to Microsoft, Google, IBM or AWS exist in Europe?
by shellwizard 10mo ago
What alternatives to Microsoft, Google, IBM or AWS exist in Europe?
- nephihaha 10mo agoIf these hadn't been allowed to emerge as monopolies we would have a wider selection.
- jonnybgood 10mo agoIs that really the case for the EU? The EU doesn’t seem to foster an environment for competitive companies that can operate at the necessary scale the above listed can.
- fxtentacle 10mo agoLIDL the supermarket chain is German and is running a large cloud operation inside the EU. And OVH from France is also pretty big. You’re correct that few EU companies get as large as US monopolies, but that’s kind of the goal when you want a functioning market.
- concinds 10mo agoA "functioning market" doesn't prevent oligopolies. Oligopolies are natural and optimal (desirable) in many industries, if not most. That's where regulations come in.
- ivan_gammel 10mo agoYou probably mean Schwarz Gruppe, the owner of Lidl, and their subsidiary StackIT. Yes, they are growing. Schwarz is also building 11B€ AI data center in Lubbenau, so I fully agree with you. We will be fine without American digital services.
- youngtaff 10mo agoIt’s going to take time though… and the StackIT PaaS offerings aren’t yet quite as easy to use as their US competitors
- eastbound 10mo agoYes, funnily, mutual tariffs on IT services between the EU and USA would incentivize competition, which is a good thing. Unless the EU is try incapable of doing IT right, in which case it would slow the the EU economy, but let’s assume we’ll improve on that.
- piva00 10mo agoMostly an artefact of the non-application of antitrust laws, the US selectively decided to not apply those anymore for the past 30-40 years, corporate consolidation takes hold, companies providing a service grow enormously and are allowed to swallow prominent competitors to stamp them out. The EU has many competitive companies, I think HN is too focused on "tech" as in digital/web stuff and quite blind to other technological industries...
- jack_tripper 10mo ago[dead]
- nephihaha 10mo agoIt seems to be. As in most of the world, nearly everyone is divvied up between Apple and Microsoft, and use Google Search, with Wikipedia being the default place normies go for information. I know there are people who use Linux and prefer to use other search engines, but they are few and far between.
- concinds 10mo agoThe EU has an extremely fragmented digital internal market, laws that suck for startups in most places, worse capital markets and funding mechanisms (and related laws), and doesn't have a Silicon Valley. It also underinvests in R&D and doesn't have a DARPA. So yes, just tariffing or restricting US tech wouldn't help much. Europe "lost" that race fair and square. It needs to focus on fixing all those things.
- wkat4242 10mo agoOn the other hand a lot of these startups and tech companies are a net negative for the world. Externalise problems and pollution, internalise profits. We don't want society to be only decided by those who make the most money. That's why we have those laws. I personally don't want the EU to become the US. And Investors gambling with other people's money is what gave us the world financial crisis of 2007. No lessons were learned as usual.
- Tarq0n 10mo agoYou say that like scale is an inevitability. If Microsoft's offerings were unbundled into lots of smaller interoperable solutions we'd all be better off.
- 1718627440 10mo agoThe opposite seems to be the case. The EU fosters really competitive markets, so large companies are really hard to emerge. There are tons of small software shops in my city alone, you can walk through the city and see ads for them in front of their houses.
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoThose exist in the USA as well. We have large, medium, and small software shops. You hardly ever hear about the medium or smaller ones though, you’ll find the, splattered all over the place in office parks as well as downtown (at least here in the Seattle area). It didn’t feel very different when I lived in Europe, even the large orgs were present (Google has lots of offices in Zurich and Stockholm among others, for example, and when I was in China my wife worked for a German big tech called SAP).
- csomar 10mo agoNo you would only have the European selection.
- nephihaha 10mo agoThere is currently no real European equivalent/serious competitor to the Apple/Microsoft duopoly, Google monopoly, Wikipedia monopoly etc.
- ivan_gammel 10mo agoOn Wikipedia: German chapter is the second largest (>100 FTEs) and collects donations directly, funding root org from them and keeping significant part for its own operations. It’s not exactly an American monopoly.
- nephihaha 10mo agoWikipedia is American owned. It also pushes certain ideas very subtly. Or not subtly in the hagiographies of certain "philanthropists".
- ivan_gammel 10mo agoIt does not matter anything in this case. It’s open source, it’s community-driven, and governance structure isn’t a moat. It can be forked in a matter of days, especially given that there exist independent European structures to support it.
- nephihaha 10mo agoWikipedia is not community driven. About as public as so called public ownership in reality. It is clearly directed by a small group of people, mostly those with enough time on their hands. Most folk can no longer edit it. They're blocked. There are clear biases in its content provision, such as its coverage of certain rich people and establishment bodies.
- matwood 10mo agoPossibly. Until recently, anyone who was in tech wanted to move to the US because there was simply more opportunity. Salaries are higher, chances of making it big are higher, failing is often seen as a positive in the US, etc... The adage that the best place to make money is the US and the best place to spend money is the EU still rings true. The US become less welcoming to immigrants is a great opportunity for the EU, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to take advantage and overcome the structural differences. https://www.challenge.org/insights/structural-differences-in-eu-vs-uk-vs-us-2/ https://www.challenge.org/insights/structural-differences-in...
- input_sh 10mo agoNone of those are products, those are companies that offers 100s of products. The question is not is there as an alternative to Google-as-a-whole, but is there an alternative to Google Search (yes), to Google Analytics (yes), to Gmail (yes), to Google Ads (yes, but not really), to YouTube (no), and to Android (yes, but not really). Having a European mega-company that offers 100s of tightly-integrated products shouldn't be the end goal, that's just swapping one monopoly with another. We need a healthly ecosystem where there are hundreds of separate companies each solving 1-5 use cases.
- jack_tripper 10mo ago[dead]
- em-bee 10mo agojust a nitpick, shouldn't youtube also be "yes, but not really", since there are plenty of alternatives to hosting video. but none have the reach that youtube has, similar to ads?
- m4rtink 10mo agoI would name PeerTube the project and the various PeerTube instances various organizations are running (like for example https://vhsky.cz/ https://vhsky.cz/) as a good Youtube alternative. Sure, you might not have all the media on one big convenient pile like on Youtube, but that is kinda the point (with no single pile owner there is no single entity that decideds what goes on the pile or not).
- skeledrew 10mo agoThis can only be a fair alternative if a single search can transparently query all instances (an implicit requirement for most users), and there's also an easy, instance-transparent, preferably free way to upload content (requirement for most creators). Once one has the question "which instance should I search/create my account on?", it will be considered a failure.
- McDyver 10mo agoYou're actually making the exact point you want to attack. That's why Europe needs that push to get their act together and start being self-sufficient, digital services-wise.
- piltdownman 10mo agoDigital Service dominance in this case isn't based on some trait of American Exceptionalism - or conversely based off some sort of lack of academic rigour or work ethic in European Entrepreneurship. Rather, the current state of SaaS in the context of the historic stock market is a severe economic aberration divorced from any sort of valuation fundamentals like securities weighting. Instead we observe predatory VC and PE entities supported by a complimentary taxation and economic regime, all ultimately facilitated by the passing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. In short, this notion of self-sufficiency is unachievable in the European context as it is predicated entirely upon wealth inequality and thumbing the scale of the free-market via lobbying, and is the doctrine denounced to the point of anathema in any Socialist Democracy. The end result here is not some sort of organically earned digital services dominance - instead you end up with scenarios like forcing the FDIC to bail out the VC bank of Choice - SVB - where uninsured deposits were estimated to represent 89 percent of total deposits at the bank, totalling $18 billion of the ultimate $20 billion cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund.
- general1465 10mo agoA lot. Have a look: https://european-alternatives.eu/ https://european-alternatives.eu/
- Europas 10mo agoJust running Infrastructure is easy enough. Everyone did it before, we still can do it. Its practical to use GCP, Azure and AWS for sure but yeah they were always market dominant. Its probably time to say good buy to an old ally who became demented and hostile to europe :(
- blibble 10mo agocreate a innovation fund by taxing them starting at 20%, increasing 1% each month until the "liberation day" tariffs are dropped the innovation fund should be structured build up local competitors to US hyperscalers
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoI am not gonna comment about others since obviously there are a lot but OVH from europe even though it has flaws still feels like it definitely competes with AWS There are also hetzner,upcloud,netcup and sooo many other small cloud providers too but OVH,Hetzner,Upcloud,netcup do seem to me competitors of AWS