> 74% of Europe’s publicly listed companies rely on US-based tech like Google and Microsoft.
Only 74%?
That feels wrong.
I don’t know a single company off the top of my head that wouldn’t suffer serious damage if you null-routed Google and Microsoft’s servers.
Excel rules the world, and even if it didn’t: nobody is running libreoffice on linux professionally, at least not that I am aware of- and hosting mail? Conventional wisdom is that you should outsource that: I don’t seriously believe that people would outsource mail and not go with Google/Microsoft and get a productivity suite “for free”.
victorbjorklund · 1h ago
I wondered if it could be a question of definition of "rely on", maybe they're just talking about for their product but yeah I agree probably if you count everything that the company is using, I doubt it is as low as 74% who is not relying on Windows operating system or Microsoft email or Google email and so on. I think it's probably much much higher but it might be what they define as rely on for the core service, their product, but they're not counting on the accounting staff doing their financial of projections in Excel.
kinow · 3h ago
I think Microsoft servers include GitHub? If so, that'd have a huge negative impact on research and academia in EU, as well as software development (even some web pages using JSresources from GitHub pages directly).
pbmonster · 1h ago
> I think Microsoft servers include GitHub? If so, that'd have a huge negative impact on research and academia in EU
All academic institutions I'm aware of run their own self-hosted GitLab instance.
rich_sasha · 3h ago
I worked for two companies who ran two separate stacks. One was all Windows and was a glorified email / Excel thing for talking to clients. All the business logic was on a separate network and was all Linux.
If Windows pulled the plug, it would be a major PITA but no more.
kazinator · 1h ago
FOSS may not be exactly "US tech" but from the perspective of the EU, it's perhaps even worse.
The EU doesn't control FOSS any more than it does US tech, and it can't threaten it.
pbmonster · 1h ago
I think the EU would be very happy with every major company running their own FOSS stack instead of handing their money/control to US tech firms.
Sure, this doesn't mean the EU would have control over the FOSS stack, but it would keep the data/money/soft power away from the US. And the EU would have a much easier time enforcing its security/privacy laws on those EU companies running FOSS on hardware inside the EU.
dismalaf · 3h ago
> Excel rules the world, and even if it didn’t: nobody is running libreoffice on linux professionally, at least not that I am aware of- and hosting mail?
It has remarkable stickiness but the replacement for Excel isn't another spreadsheet, it's programming + databases. SAP and other custom business software are pretty big especially in large organizations. Word is pretty replaceable, as is the rest of MS Office, especially if you have a custom solution instead of relying on Excel. Self-hosting email is definitely a thing for massive corporations. And don't forget 2/3 of the big Linux vendors are European.
74% tracks. Lots do depend on MS and Google solutions, but enough don't.
gbalduzzi · 2h ago
You can replace excel with programming and a DB only up to a certain point.
The advantage of excel is that any office worker can perform data manipulation there. It can't be replaced for una-tantum operations on data, because it isn't practical to do custom implementations every time you need something.
The alternative is to teach programming to every office worker and give them access to the db. Not sure it's a good idea
rusk · 1h ago
> alternative is to teach programming to every office worker
Programming in business environments is becoming ever more popular using languages like Python and R
It’s nowhere near as pervasive as Excel but I could see AI playing a big part here. Most Excel domain projects don’t require a high degree of technical understanding so autogenerated Python code that is “good enough” can be easily generated. Hell AI alone could take over most of the basic data crunching usecases.
dismalaf · 2h ago
I wish this site had emojis so I could spam the facepalm emoji.
You don't make every worker learn programming. You either hire programmers to make a custom financial suite so that people can input things and then the software does the relevant calculations, or you buy one. SAP is an example of that. They're not worth 300 billion for no reason. There's also custom suites for many different industries, because many have different needs.
The point is that the ability to make custom software replaces Excel... Since Excel is extremely prone to allowing users to mess up.
Edit - I guess no one's adjacent to industries where accounting software rules? Like O&G?
jader201 · 1h ago
Because Excel and Sheets exist, most businesses don’t bother with custom software for things that basic spreadsheets can handle, which is a lot.
Sure, more complex things can be handled by custom software, but there are still basic things that spreadsheets handle just fine. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Even large companies that use SAP still rely on spreadsheets for simpler needs.
mcv · 1h ago
But many companies also misuse Excel for tasks for which it's a poor fit. They also use it for data entry that has nothing to do with financial calculations, and Excel is not suitable for maintaining data. One of my big frustrations has been watching business people put literally everything in Excel and then mailing that around.
troupo · 1h ago
> You either hire programmers to make a custom financial suite so that people can input things and then the software does the relevant calculations
There's a reason Excel rules the world. And it's not because there aren't programmers capable of writing "custom financial suites".
But because Excel can handle most anything you can throw at it
> SAP is an example of that. They're not worth 300 billion for no reason
Yes. There's very little reason for SAP to be worth that much. SAP are infamous for their projects that are nearly always over time and over budget and still don't do what was intended.
edg5000 · 3h ago
I agree with the premise of the article. It really bothered me when I realised I couldn't delete my business listing Google Maps, only set it to "permanently closed". And my bank, my countries' largest, one year ago dropped NFC in favour of Google Pay. Not to mention the Google popups that seem to appear on what seems every website (how did the manage this?!).
Personally I've moved to Zoho for mail and use Ubuntu with a rsync/zfs based backup solution. I'm not logged in to Google but I do use Google Search. On my phone I use a separate Google account specially for the phone, and I use F Droid, except for my bank, which only distributes their app through Google Play.
Why do you think the EU is trying to bully (ineffectively) US tech companies? I don't think bullying US companies is the solution. More embracing of Linux would help a lot. Banks need to behave; making Google Play store a requirement for banking should not be allowed by the authorities, since banks play a special role. Then there is search and maps. Something should be done about that as well. Maybe something like an EU-based perplexity/anthropic competitor would be great.
mcv · 1h ago
> And my bank, my countries' largest, one year ago dropped NFC in favour of Google Pay.
Dutch banks used to have a great system for contactless payment through your banking app. Worked perfectly. Last year, it seems they all abandoned it in favour of Google Wallet. I don't understand this move. Why outsource this to US tech giants when we had a perfect system already in place?
I think regulation that requires banks to keep their payment infrastructure in the EU and out of the hands of advertising companies would be a really good idea.
N19PEDL2 · 1h ago
> making Google Play store a requirement for banking should not be allowed by the authorities
How would banks distribute their apps and make sure they are up to date then? F-Droid only accepts open-source software.
> Maybe something like an EU-based perplexity/anthropic competitor would be great.
Maybe it would be even better to have a EU-based app store that must be pre-installed on every Android/iOS/iPadOS device that is sold in the EU, so as to break the monopoly of Google and Apple in the app distribution.
dismalaf · 3h ago
> Maybe something like an EU-based perplexity/anthropic competitor would be great.
Mistral?
hulitu · 3h ago
> Why do you think the EU is trying to bully (ineffectively) US tech companies?
Because this increases lobby spending. Win-win.
betaby · 4h ago
Somewhere in 2005-2010 mail was declared for some reason a hard problem and outsourced to Microsoft and Google. The rest if the history.
esafak · 4h ago
All apps simply moved to the cloud. It was not just email. Let somebody else worry about it.
astrange · 31m ago
Receiving mail is a hard problem because of spam filtering. Spam filtering works better the more different email accounts you can see at once.
smnrchrds · 2h ago
My alma mater moved from self-hosting email to Microsoft after a major data breach. Keeping high-value internet-connected things secure is indeed hard.
ruszki · 2h ago
You can misconfigure your SaaS too. And it’s not that difficult to learn how to secure your system… you just need to want to learn it, which is rarely the case. The topic itself is not that difficult, you don’t need to know cryptography in details in reality to make something secure. You just need to care. But most of the people are fine with copy-pasting from StackOverflow level of caring, which is absolutely not enough with security. But once again, you have the same problem with SaaS.
The main reason to switch to SaaS is that it’s less of your responsibility anymore. The decision is made mainly not because of technical but legal or budget reasons.
tallanvor · 1h ago
Saying "you just need to want to learn it" is oversimplifying.
It's not just learning how to secure it once, it's constantly watching for announcements regarding new vulnerabilities and being able to patch at short notice or being able to pull the infrastructure offline if you can't patch right away.
The world is a different place now with what virtually amounts to criminal companies trying to find every vulnerability that allows them to get into your system and either holding your data for ransom, extracting it for their own uses, or both. Even if you really do want to employ someone solely to stay on top of patching and watching for vulnerabilities, it's safer and often cheaper to let one of the big companies host your data.
hulitu · 3h ago
> mail was declared for some reason a hard problem and outsourced to Microsoft and Google
lobby and corruption. But i repeat myself.
wolvesechoes · 30m ago
Every discussion that treats EU or Europe as a political entity equivalent to national state is a waste of time.
t43562 · 2h ago
I am not sure this is avoidable. Whatsapp (and perhaps Telegram) are the dominant messaging/chat apps for example and that is European tech but it was inevitably going to be bought by some bigger company that wanted to be dominant and that was obviously going to be American since they managed to make big money first.
Skype was at one point extremely popular and this is European but it was bought and squashed under the mountain of American poo that is MS Teams. Forgive me the rudeness but I wish to dispell the thought that American tech is automatically superior or that it wins by being good.
Then there's Linux - another European development that has rocked the world but has been bought and ruled by mostly American companies with the noticeable exception of Ubuntu (and a few others).
The World Wide Web - a blow for freedom and the spread of information coming from CERN that has again been captured and perverted into an advertisement delivery and spying system more powerful than the East German Stasi could possibly imagine.
We have Big Tech to thank for Nazi saluters, quite potentially for the attempt to break the world economy and the idea of turning all of humanity into basic income serfs which will not, of course, include the owners of big tech itself.
The EU is the only powerful entity that hasn't been completely perverted by the power of big tech and we have to hope like hell that it won't be. To all those with shares in big tech or jobs in it who want to expand and rule - go ahead and vote me down - who would expect anything else!
KoftaBob · 1h ago
> Whatsapp (and perhaps Telegram) are the dominant messaging/chat apps for example and that is European tech but it was inevitably going to be bought
Nitpick: Whatsapp was American from the start. It was founded in Mountain View, CA by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo.
t43562 · 1h ago
I should have checked :-) Sorry.
pjmlp · 59m ago
Until we get something like SuSE and Jolla being sold on the shopping malls, dependency will continue.
And even then, people need to really want to buy that stuff instead of Microsoft, Apple and Apple OSes.
Note how even with all the geo-politics, pirate copies of Windows abound in China, they aren't all running away into Linux install parties with deepin or similar.
SilentTiger · 1h ago
Because Europeans have Ursula von der Leyen
Don't expect to have any so-called independence until the Europeans have driven out all the American spies in their high positions.
StopDisinfo910 · 2h ago
I think plenty here are asking the wrong questions.
The question is not so much are EU enterprises currently depending on offering by Google and Microsoft. The real question is what are the alternatives these companies could turn to if they needed to.
And the truth is that there exists solid alternatives from Asia to nearly everything they offer.
EU companies don’t need to reinvent anything. They have a great opportunity to diversify their supply chain.
SilentTiger · 9m ago
You see, this is the problem. Europeans always think about who they rely on, and never think about relying on themselves. And they give this behavior a high-sounding name: supply chain diversification
aydyn · 1h ago
So you'd drop U.S. providers for China? Hilarious.
KoftaBob · 1h ago
> solid alternatives from Asia
That just moves the problem somewhere else, rather than giving the EU homegrown solutions to rely on.
can16358p · 1h ago
Good luck expecting this trend to change anytime soon, as long as EU doesn't relax their regulations which cripple a huge part of innovation.
Apparently you can't regulate big tech heavily and expect to compete with US big tech.
trinix912 · 1h ago
You can by regulating foreign big tech with stricter rules than domestic. But try to pass that and Trump will throw a tantrum how it’s unfair, while doing the same in the US.
notepad0x90 · 1h ago
I don't know why proton's leadership just doesn't shut up and make money while providing awesome pro-privacy services.
Is coca-cola american? most people would say so but their hq is in china!
These multi-nationals don't have 'branches' in Europe, they are incorporated there as well, that's why they're called multi-national. they pay European taxes and are subject to European laws such as GDPR and other data-residency laws, which means their data-center, and a large chunk of their support staff (Europeans are cheaper than Americans to hire/pay) are in Europe.
Should Americans avoid Proton and its products so they don't rely on Europe? Hypocrite much there friend? Should we avoid European cars? Maybe Ozempic/glp-1 medication should be manufactured by US companies in America (Denmark's GDP is seeing most of it's multi-digit growth thanks to American Ozempic usage).
Proton's leadership supported Trump and the GOP and now they want to promote nationalistic brand loyalty?
These people make it hard to be against trump's b.s. tariffs and hostility against our allies. Proton has a good product, why isn't that enough? They also have to meddle in politics and make it about "America vs Europe" or "Republicans vs Democrats"?
You know what would be great? if employee and customer owned companies replaced even the likes of proton so we can democratically vote incompetent leadership like this out. Make good products, let the products sell themselves. Why should Europeans have to put up with inferior products for the sake of nationalism? If you want to support Europe so much, tell us about how great your company's product is and how superior it is compared to American alternatives, I'd be down for that. Europeans can and do buy European goods and services of better quality, try finding a Swizz that enjoys American cheese and chocolate, or a European that drives oversized American pickup trucks.
Unless you're speaking as an individual or you are an elected politician, don't misuse whatever platform you have to meddle in politics.
bigyabai · 5h ago
Wait until they find out whose market Taiwan rules.
dingi · 2h ago
Ah yes, the EU. Always first in line to regulate the pixel spacing in cookie banners, but when it comes to actual tech sovereignty or defense, it's "please, Uncle Sam, save us!" Peak performative independence.
hvb2 · 2h ago
But they still legislate, and pass budgets ;)
iknowstuff · 4h ago
> Big Tech companies dominate, not because they’re better, but because they have the first mover’s advantage
Uuuh says who? I think they dominate because they are in fact better for business for one reason or another.
esseph · 4h ago
Being good at other things can have them generate enough money to blow trying to be good at a $NewThing that smol players only doing $OneThing can't hope to match.
unethical_ban · 4h ago
Google drive is awful, completely atrocious to navigate and reason about.
SllX · 3h ago
People aren't using Google Drive for the Drive per se or the crappy online file system UI, they're there for the apps: Docs & Sheets are the killer apps: good enough as a word processor & spreadsheet combo for any basic tasks, real-time collaboration that is still first-class and maybe unmatched (or at least the closest matches I can think of are still American vendors), and plenty of people are educated in their use, especially anybody who went to school any time after 2008. Also you know, Gmail: still a great webmail service, and part of Google Workspace too.
iknowstuff · 3h ago
Cool but GCP or AWS is overall running circles around OVHCloud.
GSuite and O365 are better for businesses than uhhh… what is the european equivalent even? Tutanota and protonmail + libreoffice?
satvikpendem · 2h ago
I store a lot of things in Google Drive, works just fine for that purpose.
vachina · 4h ago
You need talent to make tech that people want to use. Europe does not have that talent pool nor do they actively retain or attract such talents.
Also them being fully subscribed to capitalism: let other people solve my problems.
braza · 2h ago
> Europe does not have that talent pool nor do they actively retain or attract such talents.
Disagree. Not only does Europe have the demographics and educational institutions, but on top of that, it has very high social mobility [1].
I agree 100% related to the retention of talent, but I have a different perspective: I think there exist 2 kinds of retention, (I) environmental and institutional retention and (II) organizational retention.
At the (I), you have all the things that Europeans bring here when such discussions happen: accessibility to public health care, a range of public services, less inequality, access to education, and so on.
At the (II) come the big companies and their perks, mission, compensation, impact on society, organizational culture, rewarding mechanisms for ambition, and allow people work satisfaction. And a market large enough to allow some work mobility (change seats and plenty of opportunities).
Being in Central Europe, I can say we have (I) but are lacking at the (II).
I have been around for almost a decade, and my general impression is that people have some mixture of a bit of professional cope that sublimes to work contentment and, honestly, unless you have a big reason and/or financial offset to stay due to (I) personal circumstances, people that can have options will choose (II).
The EU has plenty of talent, Most startups in the EU simply do not have access to the Venture capital pool that exists in USA.
enaaem · 3h ago
Indeed. Europe lacks a unified capital market and contrary to popular belief, you actually need more EU regulations to make that happen.
js8 · 1h ago
I agree but I would say it differently - if you're an investor in EU, you have no reason NOT to invest in the U.S. There is no "stick" for defecting the country you live in. That causes capital leaking out of EU, and thus EU cannot build up its own new industry to compete globally. EU is far too liberal in this, and needs more protectionism.
astrange · 30m ago
Export promotion works better than protectionism. Korea built up their export industries by having a dictator imprison CEOs if they didn't try to do that. See "How Asia Works".
…of course, you can probably think of a more mild approach.
js8 · 12m ago
I am not sure what you mean by "export promotion" in the case of cloud services. Competing on price? Either way, that seems to require significant government spending and that's also difficult in the EU.
wkat4242 · 4h ago
We have plenty of talent. And we don't care as much about money. I chose to move to a lower income country within the EU just because I like life there better. I would never move to the US. In fact I wouldn't even consider visiting, even if my work asks me to.
The reason tech isn't so big here is that there's more regulation and less loose capital. Both aren't bad things IMO. Venture capital is pure gambling in the US. We don't subscribe to the American unrestricted capitalism here (well except for the UK and Netherlands which are heavily influenced by America)
edg5000 · 3h ago
Never heard about NL and UK having US-like venture capital situations. I always hear complaints that it's harder to raise in the EU. I've never heard NL and UK meantioned as an exception before. I understand the close US ties, but can you elaborate more on the venture capital thing?
burnerthrow008 · 3h ago
The Dutch invented modern capital markets, so it tracks that they might be more US-like in that regard.
LAC-Tech · 3h ago
I mean the British invented railways, doesn't mean they have a good train system in 2025.
abrahms · 3h ago
If you recall that "venture capital" was literally about financing ships in the 16-1700s.. it would make sense that NL & UK, both massive naval powers, would have some experience and a culture around VC.
astrange · 27m ago
If you don't visit the US how are you ever going to get Tex-Mex? Not to mention the traditional German tourist experience of getting lost in Death Valley and dying.
braza · 1h ago
> And we don't care as much about money.
I think this is a very broad statement that does not reflect the reality on the ground for a significant amout of non-etnical-europeans.
Europe is a very diverse continent culturally speaking and also has a big immigration background, and those blank statements, while they're cool as a counter-narrative to the 'Europoor' memes, lack nuance in terms of the representation of what is going on.
I come from a significantly large cohort of demographics to the EU that was searching for upward mobility from a poverty/middle-class background in South America/India, and on the contrary (maybe our fellow Asians in Central Europe can agree here also), money matters. A lot.
If you're an ethno-European and you live in Munich, Freiburg, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Zurich, Basel u.z.w not needing money would be OK because at the end of the day you can have relatives nearby, and probably you might be sitting on some real estate heritage that can make you good in the future.
But for a large part of the cohort that I mentioned, there's no family at max 3h flight, and money matters to help family abroad.
> Venture capital is pure gambling in the US. We don't subscribe to the American unrestricted capitalism here (well except for the UK and Netherlands which are heavily influenced by America)
This turns me off most of the time, but here we go...
VCs are just the capital allocators; most of the time those people represent family offices, institutional investment funds, and sovereign wealth funds that have some excess capital to allocate in several ways to have positive disproportionate positive returns, where those returns will subsidize the failed ones.
Capital for investment means that an ecosystem can start to work and you can have a flow of talent and capital, and it potentially flows to other parts of society—more explicitly, to the economy—but at the end of the day, it goes back to the public via taxes and public services.
If the alternative for the capital arriving in Central Europe is (a) founders fleeing to the USA and opening their companies there, (b) European companies using Delaware LLCs to operate at EU, (c) working at traditional old-money companies that squeeze wages, and (d) having those jobs and capital fleeing to Poland/Spain/Paris/Portugal/Amsterdam; I will take the capital at any time of the day.
Only 74%?
That feels wrong.
I don’t know a single company off the top of my head that wouldn’t suffer serious damage if you null-routed Google and Microsoft’s servers.
Excel rules the world, and even if it didn’t: nobody is running libreoffice on linux professionally, at least not that I am aware of- and hosting mail? Conventional wisdom is that you should outsource that: I don’t seriously believe that people would outsource mail and not go with Google/Microsoft and get a productivity suite “for free”.
All academic institutions I'm aware of run their own self-hosted GitLab instance.
If Windows pulled the plug, it would be a major PITA but no more.
The EU doesn't control FOSS any more than it does US tech, and it can't threaten it.
Sure, this doesn't mean the EU would have control over the FOSS stack, but it would keep the data/money/soft power away from the US. And the EU would have a much easier time enforcing its security/privacy laws on those EU companies running FOSS on hardware inside the EU.
It has remarkable stickiness but the replacement for Excel isn't another spreadsheet, it's programming + databases. SAP and other custom business software are pretty big especially in large organizations. Word is pretty replaceable, as is the rest of MS Office, especially if you have a custom solution instead of relying on Excel. Self-hosting email is definitely a thing for massive corporations. And don't forget 2/3 of the big Linux vendors are European.
74% tracks. Lots do depend on MS and Google solutions, but enough don't.
The advantage of excel is that any office worker can perform data manipulation there. It can't be replaced for una-tantum operations on data, because it isn't practical to do custom implementations every time you need something.
The alternative is to teach programming to every office worker and give them access to the db. Not sure it's a good idea
Programming in business environments is becoming ever more popular using languages like Python and R
It’s nowhere near as pervasive as Excel but I could see AI playing a big part here. Most Excel domain projects don’t require a high degree of technical understanding so autogenerated Python code that is “good enough” can be easily generated. Hell AI alone could take over most of the basic data crunching usecases.
You don't make every worker learn programming. You either hire programmers to make a custom financial suite so that people can input things and then the software does the relevant calculations, or you buy one. SAP is an example of that. They're not worth 300 billion for no reason. There's also custom suites for many different industries, because many have different needs.
The point is that the ability to make custom software replaces Excel... Since Excel is extremely prone to allowing users to mess up.
Edit - I guess no one's adjacent to industries where accounting software rules? Like O&G?
Sure, more complex things can be handled by custom software, but there are still basic things that spreadsheets handle just fine. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Even large companies that use SAP still rely on spreadsheets for simpler needs.
There's a reason Excel rules the world. And it's not because there aren't programmers capable of writing "custom financial suites".
But because Excel can handle most anything you can throw at it
> SAP is an example of that. They're not worth 300 billion for no reason
Yes. There's very little reason for SAP to be worth that much. SAP are infamous for their projects that are nearly always over time and over budget and still don't do what was intended.
Personally I've moved to Zoho for mail and use Ubuntu with a rsync/zfs based backup solution. I'm not logged in to Google but I do use Google Search. On my phone I use a separate Google account specially for the phone, and I use F Droid, except for my bank, which only distributes their app through Google Play.
Why do you think the EU is trying to bully (ineffectively) US tech companies? I don't think bullying US companies is the solution. More embracing of Linux would help a lot. Banks need to behave; making Google Play store a requirement for banking should not be allowed by the authorities, since banks play a special role. Then there is search and maps. Something should be done about that as well. Maybe something like an EU-based perplexity/anthropic competitor would be great.
Dutch banks used to have a great system for contactless payment through your banking app. Worked perfectly. Last year, it seems they all abandoned it in favour of Google Wallet. I don't understand this move. Why outsource this to US tech giants when we had a perfect system already in place?
I think regulation that requires banks to keep their payment infrastructure in the EU and out of the hands of advertising companies would be a really good idea.
How would banks distribute their apps and make sure they are up to date then? F-Droid only accepts open-source software.
> Maybe something like an EU-based perplexity/anthropic competitor would be great.
Maybe it would be even better to have a EU-based app store that must be pre-installed on every Android/iOS/iPadOS device that is sold in the EU, so as to break the monopoly of Google and Apple in the app distribution.
Mistral?
Because this increases lobby spending. Win-win.
The main reason to switch to SaaS is that it’s less of your responsibility anymore. The decision is made mainly not because of technical but legal or budget reasons.
It's not just learning how to secure it once, it's constantly watching for announcements regarding new vulnerabilities and being able to patch at short notice or being able to pull the infrastructure offline if you can't patch right away.
The world is a different place now with what virtually amounts to criminal companies trying to find every vulnerability that allows them to get into your system and either holding your data for ransom, extracting it for their own uses, or both. Even if you really do want to employ someone solely to stay on top of patching and watching for vulnerabilities, it's safer and often cheaper to let one of the big companies host your data.
lobby and corruption. But i repeat myself.
Skype was at one point extremely popular and this is European but it was bought and squashed under the mountain of American poo that is MS Teams. Forgive me the rudeness but I wish to dispell the thought that American tech is automatically superior or that it wins by being good.
Then there's Linux - another European development that has rocked the world but has been bought and ruled by mostly American companies with the noticeable exception of Ubuntu (and a few others).
The World Wide Web - a blow for freedom and the spread of information coming from CERN that has again been captured and perverted into an advertisement delivery and spying system more powerful than the East German Stasi could possibly imagine.
We have Big Tech to thank for Nazi saluters, quite potentially for the attempt to break the world economy and the idea of turning all of humanity into basic income serfs which will not, of course, include the owners of big tech itself.
The EU is the only powerful entity that hasn't been completely perverted by the power of big tech and we have to hope like hell that it won't be. To all those with shares in big tech or jobs in it who want to expand and rule - go ahead and vote me down - who would expect anything else!
Nitpick: Whatsapp was American from the start. It was founded in Mountain View, CA by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo.
And even then, people need to really want to buy that stuff instead of Microsoft, Apple and Apple OSes.
Note how even with all the geo-politics, pirate copies of Windows abound in China, they aren't all running away into Linux install parties with deepin or similar.
The question is not so much are EU enterprises currently depending on offering by Google and Microsoft. The real question is what are the alternatives these companies could turn to if they needed to.
And the truth is that there exists solid alternatives from Asia to nearly everything they offer.
EU companies don’t need to reinvent anything. They have a great opportunity to diversify their supply chain.
That just moves the problem somewhere else, rather than giving the EU homegrown solutions to rely on.
Apparently you can't regulate big tech heavily and expect to compete with US big tech.
Is coca-cola american? most people would say so but their hq is in china!
These multi-nationals don't have 'branches' in Europe, they are incorporated there as well, that's why they're called multi-national. they pay European taxes and are subject to European laws such as GDPR and other data-residency laws, which means their data-center, and a large chunk of their support staff (Europeans are cheaper than Americans to hire/pay) are in Europe.
Should Americans avoid Proton and its products so they don't rely on Europe? Hypocrite much there friend? Should we avoid European cars? Maybe Ozempic/glp-1 medication should be manufactured by US companies in America (Denmark's GDP is seeing most of it's multi-digit growth thanks to American Ozempic usage).
Proton's leadership supported Trump and the GOP and now they want to promote nationalistic brand loyalty?
These people make it hard to be against trump's b.s. tariffs and hostility against our allies. Proton has a good product, why isn't that enough? They also have to meddle in politics and make it about "America vs Europe" or "Republicans vs Democrats"?
You know what would be great? if employee and customer owned companies replaced even the likes of proton so we can democratically vote incompetent leadership like this out. Make good products, let the products sell themselves. Why should Europeans have to put up with inferior products for the sake of nationalism? If you want to support Europe so much, tell us about how great your company's product is and how superior it is compared to American alternatives, I'd be down for that. Europeans can and do buy European goods and services of better quality, try finding a Swizz that enjoys American cheese and chocolate, or a European that drives oversized American pickup trucks.
Unless you're speaking as an individual or you are an elected politician, don't misuse whatever platform you have to meddle in politics.
Uuuh says who? I think they dominate because they are in fact better for business for one reason or another.
GSuite and O365 are better for businesses than uhhh… what is the european equivalent even? Tutanota and protonmail + libreoffice?
Also them being fully subscribed to capitalism: let other people solve my problems.
Disagree. Not only does Europe have the demographics and educational institutions, but on top of that, it has very high social mobility [1].
I agree 100% related to the retention of talent, but I have a different perspective: I think there exist 2 kinds of retention, (I) environmental and institutional retention and (II) organizational retention.
At the (I), you have all the things that Europeans bring here when such discussions happen: accessibility to public health care, a range of public services, less inequality, access to education, and so on.
At the (II) come the big companies and their perks, mission, compensation, impact on society, organizational culture, rewarding mechanisms for ambition, and allow people work satisfaction. And a market large enough to allow some work mobility (change seats and plenty of opportunities).
Being in Central Europe, I can say we have (I) but are lacking at the (II).
I have been around for almost a decade, and my general impression is that people have some mixture of a bit of professional cope that sublimes to work contentment and, honestly, unless you have a big reason and/or financial offset to stay due to (I) personal circumstances, people that can have options will choose (II).
[1] - https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/residence/residence-ri...
…of course, you can probably think of a more mild approach.
The reason tech isn't so big here is that there's more regulation and less loose capital. Both aren't bad things IMO. Venture capital is pure gambling in the US. We don't subscribe to the American unrestricted capitalism here (well except for the UK and Netherlands which are heavily influenced by America)
I think this is a very broad statement that does not reflect the reality on the ground for a significant amout of non-etnical-europeans.
Europe is a very diverse continent culturally speaking and also has a big immigration background, and those blank statements, while they're cool as a counter-narrative to the 'Europoor' memes, lack nuance in terms of the representation of what is going on.
I come from a significantly large cohort of demographics to the EU that was searching for upward mobility from a poverty/middle-class background in South America/India, and on the contrary (maybe our fellow Asians in Central Europe can agree here also), money matters. A lot.
If you're an ethno-European and you live in Munich, Freiburg, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Zurich, Basel u.z.w not needing money would be OK because at the end of the day you can have relatives nearby, and probably you might be sitting on some real estate heritage that can make you good in the future.
But for a large part of the cohort that I mentioned, there's no family at max 3h flight, and money matters to help family abroad.
> Venture capital is pure gambling in the US. We don't subscribe to the American unrestricted capitalism here (well except for the UK and Netherlands which are heavily influenced by America)
This turns me off most of the time, but here we go...
VCs are just the capital allocators; most of the time those people represent family offices, institutional investment funds, and sovereign wealth funds that have some excess capital to allocate in several ways to have positive disproportionate positive returns, where those returns will subsidize the failed ones.
Capital for investment means that an ecosystem can start to work and you can have a flow of talent and capital, and it potentially flows to other parts of society—more explicitly, to the economy—but at the end of the day, it goes back to the public via taxes and public services.
If the alternative for the capital arriving in Central Europe is (a) founders fleeing to the USA and opening their companies there, (b) European companies using Delaware LLCs to operate at EU, (c) working at traditional old-money companies that squeeze wages, and (d) having those jobs and capital fleeing to Poland/Spain/Paris/Portugal/Amsterdam; I will take the capital at any time of the day.