lobby and corruption. But i repeat myself.
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.
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”.
If Windows pulled the plug, it would be a major PITA but no more.
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
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.
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.
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)
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...
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.
Mistral?
Because this increases lobby spending. Win-win.
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.
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 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!
bigyabai•3h ago