It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations - even friendly ones. It seems like something you obviously cannot allow yourself to become dependent on for a vast number of reasons.
Yes, the EU and it's member nations should invest heavily in their own domestic technical companies and capabilities.
However, I suspect part of the reason there is no present-day "FAANG" in the EU is in no small part due to their relatively anti-business/startup policies, which while well-intentioned, obviously have had a tangible impact on their tech business field.
Maybe some technical founders in the EU can chime in on some of the challenges they face when building within the EU versus the US.
That was part of "end of history" politics, that we've reached a stable democratic state nothing particularly revolutionary is going to happen, just steady prosperous growth. Once upon a time it was possible to believe that, however unlikely it seems nowadays.
Draghi's report claimed a big factor was the lack of a true financial union, which made it hard to mobilize and raise capital.
In the US a launch is a launch into a market in excess of 300M potential customers, in EU you have to lather-rinse-repeat 27 times
VC markets are definitely not cross-border in practice.
Now, the US is going in a direction that makes it increasingly risky. I think we’ll see global companies diversifying outside of the US in addition to governments.
There's no reason these things cannot succeed. Apple pulled it off with MacOS (built on BSD). It's just attention span, resources, regulations and the political will.
It's much easier to just buy Microsoft and hope for the best.
If you are big in one state in the US. You have the same lang and most likely the same regulations. In Europe its so many languages and its no more likely that we choose a company from another country in the EU vs the US.
I think that is not true for the US. So its easier to get big in the US, and then you are so big its actually likely the a company in the EU would choose you. Maybe not over another company from the same country (everything else beeing equal), but over a company from another country in the EU/Europe
the answer is very simple, raising capital. It has nothing to do with regulations, filling out paperwork in Germany is annoying but doesn't stop you, not having money or a market does.
Internal barriers of trade in the EU, the heterogenity of the countries and users and the lack of a deep financial sector across the union is what does most businesses in.
Which ones, exactly? I heard this phrase tossed around but on close examination it always turns out it something related to protecting the citizen. Which I believe, is a conscious choice on this side of the ocean.
the idea that forming a tight reciprocal network of economic dependency will prevent petty politics and align everyone towards cooperation, or starving.
it seemed like a good idea but now its seeming more and more like an economic version of bismarck's pre-WW1 "balance of power" strategy.
why did that fail to prevent WW1? my guess is that its an unstable equilibrium in the short term, a prisoners dilemma where, in the short term, one party can benefit more from betrayal than from cooperation.
why do humans tend to go for the short term gain of betrayal versus the long term gain of cooperation? idk, but it seems intrinsic to us because i think the "thrown out of eden" parable is folk wisdom about this same thing
Cost and quality. Economies of scale and comparative advantage mean you can usually buy something better for cheaper from the specialists versus NBH’ing everything.
Even domestically - if you interface with a big Enterprise software vendor - you're in for a massively expensive bad time. The sweet spot seems to be smaller, not-yet enterprise tech companies that focus on doing one product very well.
«The engineer wants to build a thing cheaply enough that it functions, and then cheaply as can be while maintaining function.
The MBA wants to build a thing as cheaply as can be while extracting maximum value from the process. Maintaining function is only relevant inasmuch as is necessary for marketing. Enshittification is offensive to the engineer, and is a deliberate calculated tactic for the MBA.»
We can observe this with the old-school enterprise juggernauts such as IBM. "What does IBM actually do?" is a hell of a great question today - and the answer pretty much is "whatever you pay them to do".
We also see this with our own domestic governments - where every single problem looks like a Microsoft solution - and the sales people rejoice.
Just because your software ain't throwing exceptions, doesn't mean they don't wish death on 3 generations of the developers family.
And real users, that are actually productive in their employ, aren't the ones taking surveys
I’m all for reducing reliance on big US cloud vendors, but OVH is certainly another extreme.
I assume OVH will be building a private "EU Government" cloud of sorts, which may even include new private data centers. Even if they re-use their existing cloud - the government cloud isn't likely to be all in one region etc.
I guess I'm saying, it's better to give OVH (or another major cloud provider within the EU) a chance, even if they're not on-par with AWS et al today.
They recently discovered that Terraform exists and have a usable infra as code provider now. They're starting to take multi-AZ seriously. Sometimes their network is UP and working normally, which compares favorably with us-east-1.
It's starting to look like a real cloud.
I get maintenance notices from them often that explain what they're doing and that it shouldn't be impacting, and so far they've been right.
Is your experience different?
For example, I've had endless discussions with people about the reliability of Hetzner Dedicated Servers. At the end of the day, you have to realize: You get a physical server, with fans (we had performance degradations because a cable binder degraded and parts fell into a fan and the CPU throttled), a PSU, drives (HDDs and SDDs fail differently, but both fail. SDD failure can be much more evil). It's just a little box that can run for years, or it can choose to go kapeister whenever it wants. Maybe it will take it's friends along the way too. There have been outages of servers catching on fire and frying the systems on top of them as well. Then the fire suppression goes off and shatters some drives plates on top of that. Naturally only in the archiving servers, who'd be using spinning rust in other systems this day and age?
And that's the operational technique and experience that has been hoovered up by very large PaaS offerings and hosters. You need to plan for, deal with and mitigate the situation that every server and VM hosted on a server (read: all of them) are a somewhat useful crew of saboteurs that are trying to figure out when the right failure of 3-4 systems are going to cause you a lot of overtime, stress, and maybe impact and cripple the business as well.
If you plan for this, Hetzner Cloud + Dedicated can be a great hoster, with great support and really good value for money.
If you assume that a single Hetzner Dedicated Server or Cloud VM has the same manpower behind it to give it the staggering uptime of EC2 instances, and you bet all of your company and all of your money on this VM never going down... well, you can do this on AWS. We've had a prolonged outage of an EC2 instance once in like 7 years.
But don't do this. Fix your failovers and architecture and embrace the fun of european hosters. After some grief with the early stages of the Cloud-Dedicated-VSwitch infrastructure, we're seeing great uptime with them.
People might raise the point that these native tech service providers arent as mature as the american giants. But that maturity can only be acheived through healthy local consumption. Once the EU uses them, and makes it lucrative for local competition to pop up, then they will rise to the challenge. This is great