Can you point us to some examples of governments beating the private sector in software? I can’t imagine that EU governments can pull together funding greater than Google or Amazon tbh. Besides you then have to convince the private sector to move to your new unproven cloud platform
I wouldn’t read the lack of public investment into software as accidental. Just look how terrible investments like healthcare.gov are to see why: massive mountains of cash if you’re not a worker and no need to deliver anything usable. There’s money in not understanding how software works if you’re a politician or a contractor.
That said, I don’t think I have ever heard of governments releasing copyrighted, closed-source software, let alone trying to make money off it. That just doesn’t make any sense. I don’t see any reason why the lack of a profit motive would be a detriment to competition in the event governments do invest in free software
Honestly this seems like something a trade treaty would be useful for if it weren’t written by multinational corporations. Until then we’re gonna be stuck with really, really shitty decisions as individuals, like ios vs android.
Hell, have you seen any competition in software in private markets? There’s isolated pockets of competition in certain circumstances, but from my perspective the major markets all colluded to fuck us roughly the same ways.
That said, this effort will fail for lack of decent hardware investment to keep costs down.
Just recently, the DWD (German Meteorological Service) was banned from providing a free (and ad-free) general purpose weather app, after they were sued by other app developers that felt that competing with a government financed agency would be unfair.
Of course an app is a much smaller project than launching a cloud provider.
The EU could build support for this 1000 different ways. They need only shake another GDPR-shaped stick that gently encourages business to buy local and the rest would be history. But they can't really do that yet, because there is no viable local market.
Look at Huawei to see how effective government bureaucracies can be when they decide to compete with efficient business.
Interesting that Lidl only recently made news about moves into the cloud computing area.
Reading the article "German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier, speaking in Berlin, described Gaia-X as a “moonshot” that would help reassert Europe’s technological sovereignty, and invited other countries and companies to join." It's not clear if this is limited to European based countries and companies only and if not, kinda moots the statement a bit.
Be interesting how this progresses and competition is good and some standards would also work well. Though I do fear that the usual company suspects will pile into this pie just because they have a European satellite office, like Amazon, Google, Microsoft.....
I hope this is an EU wide initiative and not just another FraGer based one for many reasons.
So many questions and could just be a tool to bash the Tech giants into opening up more.
> That is already far too late, according to analysts at Gartner, who forecast that the global market for public cloud services will grow by 17% to $228 billion this year. “The leading cloud providers have already moved quickly to build up this market,” said Gartner analyst Rene Buest.
Person not poised to make exorbitant money off venture thinks venture a waste of time. Alternatively, person who might lose money if venture goes ahead thinks venture a waste of time.
>One important concept underpinning Gaia-X is “reversibility”, a principle that would allow users to easily switch providers.
Switching providers would imply some new tech or standard, no? A bit like docker is portable. Except for all parts of the cloud. So are they thinking a FAAS standard, a load balancer standard?
Well that's kinda my question. Modern cloud have like 50+ distinct "things" in them. I just don't see how they think this can even be standardized without it being a massive standard. Specific areas are low hanging fruit - like you say k8s but what they're promising is a pretty comprehensive if you can move from one provider to another for your cloud needs
My bet would be focusing on things like a common interface for Object Storage (everyone is making their products S3 and DynamoDB protocol compatible already) plus a common interface for cloud API operations (creating / managing infrastructure). Those would go a long way. Then you can think about how compatible more niche services like the various message queues etc can be made.
Kubernetes is your answer. For parts like blob storage, DNS, and identity provider, you can already use a few commercial or open source products (Minio, Keycloak, ...)
AWS/AZURE/GCP aren't exactly beloved by their customers, product quality is sporadic, domiciling things with the US is more questionable than ever before, and their margins are high. This seems like a great time for solid international (ie non-US) competition.
It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company.
Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to its old glory by an old guard convinced that somehow their country is so exceptional that it can just launch any product and that people will switch to it.
The story is more sinister when it comes to cloud platforms. A government project to free its companies from American domination over this sector will typically involve a bidding process in which established and well-connected companies with a history of costly, slow, outdated tech will win the contracts through their political connections with no consideration for their capacity to deliver or innovate. MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts. The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world leader in computing.
It's always the same thing. Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies. Always behind, always getting paid, never actually doing anything remotely useful.
Source: I am French. I know how this works, I've seen these ridiculous projects get political support and fail miserably due to corruption and ineptitude. This is more of the same.
Or Outscale; the "French AWS" owned by Dassault Systemes...they did do a great job of cloning the AWS console feature set; but the backend was supposedly all VMware & Cisco UCS. Surprisingly not Bull hw, given that the people responsible for it came from there. Coulden't be cheap to run, and I've always wondered who used it outside of 3DS.
If you want a real "French AWS", you should look at Scaleway (well, their VPS will be entering beta Q3 2020 so it's not AWS yet, but it's coming closer and closer)
There has been no better example of this mindset recently than the development of the StopCovid app. It makes no sense on a number of levels, but there are so many government officials pushing it in the name of “la souveraineté de l’État sur la santé”.
In terms of technology and innovation the German side is likely similar, though I wouldn't go as far as calling it corruption. Larger companies like Deutsche Telekom have been doing local cloud stuff for years now, leading to amusing overviews such as [1].
Having interacted with some of the folks at conferences I'm pretty sure there's a core of people in there somewhat committed to open source which was nice to see. But in terms of innovation none of the projects branded as "German X as a service" over the last decades stood out as particularly innovative or remotely well managed.
OTC is just a rebranded openstack, with a super unreliable api -- we have to use it for certain reasons at a client of mine and they're very keen to get off it.
The idea itself of supporting Europeans alternative to face American and Chinese tech giants is by itself noble (and I think necessary).
However, the usual way it is done is a disaster: top-bottom, funding some existing behemoth company that will have no capacity whatsoever to innovate, nor will to do so. But they will get the money because they have good connections.
If you think about it, it is not very different of the American military-industrial complex and the way the DoD/Army/DoE fund their programs (F-35 ?).
Creating a good environment for startups and giving grants to several ones in parallel to create an internal competitive market would be both cheaper and more effective.
But that would imply first a generation switch....
> However, the usual way it is done is a disaster: top-bottom, funding some existing behemoth company that will have no capacity whatsoever to innovate, nor will to do so. But they will get the money because they have good connections.
That's the tragedy of the government-backed tech in France. You also have a lot of very skilled tech companies there, but they are not the ones getting government support to grow further.
>That's the tragedy of the government-backed tech in France. You also have a lot of very skilled tech companies there, but they are not the ones getting government support to grow further.
That's almost an universal tragedy.
The good techies, the innovative engineers or the avant-garde researchers... Typically, the one doing the work... are generally not the one doing outreach, going around in convention, networking, making connections with politicians.... And getting Grants.
On the other side, many conference/convention/"one-man-show" dudes are generally much better to talk than to produce anything useful.
Their is a million of example of that, in both side of the Atlantic ocean.
I would say it is less tragic in America, mainly because there is a Venture Capitalism culture there that Europe do not have.
I is too easy to attribute this to some „culture“ that randomly formed and which did not happen in europe. I mean how likely is that? I believe there is a much more structural thing to it
It is also a matter of culture. For example cutthroat capitalism is not really a thing in Europe, social capitalism (or soziale Marktwirtschaft) is. Culture plays a huge role in this. Most Europeans have a lower risk appetite since it's not like Europe is swimming in successful, well funded, well advertised startups to set an example for a new generation of entrepreneurs. Most also value personal life too much to be willing to make all the sacrifices a startup would require.
But one of the biggest issues in Europe is that it's not very unified yet. A French startup will launch a French product, not a "European" product. The only way to get buy-in from enough people is to have a multinational startup and product. An initiative promoted by both Germany and France has a better chance since it may appeal to ~150 million citizens.
France has been world-leading in verification, e.g. CompCert and Coq come from INRIA, model-checking was co-invented in France. This stuff is largely language independent. Yet the big sellers of this kind of stuff (e.g. EDA software from Synopsys,
Cadence, and
Mentor) is in the US.
That doesn't invalidate my points. SAP is a market leader and comes from Germany. A lot of leading finetch also comes from Germany or UK. A lot of major antivirus vendors in the Czech Republic or Romania, etc. Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, London are all big IT tech innovation and startup hubs in Europe.
Yet the overall scene is not quite as dynamic as the one on the other side of the Atlantic. Startups never seem to be as well funded or advertised. People take fewer risks here, there's no obvious culture of risking it all to found a startup. The whole ecosystem is not designed around this. Maybe this is changing now but today the market really isn't flooded with local products but rather with products of Silicon Valley. A lot of investments in European startups still come from SV instead of being local. There are some products that are big in one European country but don't really seem to make it over the border and it's probably because Europe is not as unified a marked as it could be.
I agree with most of your points, and the huge unified, and rather homogeneous market is a core advantage of the US in certain product categories. Since you mention SAP:
clearly, SAP is successful in a space where Europe's heterogeneity should be a problem -- different legal systems, different accounting rules etc ... and yet SAP succeeded.
Maybe it was because SAP was founded in 1972, half a century ago, when European decline was not as pronounced as it is in today?
> to some „culture“ that randomly formed and which did not happen in europe
Because when WWII ended and Europe was rebuilding, in some low-key corner of the West Coast of the US, some military contractors were trying to figure out what would their next projects look like (and getting more money from the US Gov. to fight the Russians, of course)
Then these guys became the best (read, selling more) in one thing called semiconductors then the best at this other new thing that was called computers and that's how it went.
And I might add that being the junction of tech and (accidentally) some weird hippie corner of the US might have helped in some aspects.
Well, I think we have no choice in Europe even if it looks weird and too late. Keeping on depending on the US or China for vital infrastructures such as cloud would be a suicide for Europe. US and China cannot be trusted as they only think business and tech in terms of predation and domination. And their tech companies have too many bonds with their intel agencies.
This move should be seen as another evidence of the growing atlantic rift.
The Qwant story is even worse than this, the level of cronyism and ineptitude, the extreme turnover of engineers, the lies from well connected french oligarchy hustlers...
On the other hand there's already some well established hosting companies in both countries.
I would hope that this initiative will not be built from the ground up but capitalizing on that.
Qwant is poorly managed, but that doesn't mean every project is doomed to fail. If you would judge Google success based on their failed projects, it would be the same conclusion.
Well but Qwant has its core product in its infancy, if they can't even manage that, you tell me.
The problem has many layers, Europe is not really united, which makes most markets small, the governments are pretty bad at managing investiments in tech fields, and there's not enough private capital going around pouring money into this.
You're a bit harsh, it does work, so they do manage that.
I don't think there's the intent to kill google or become as big.
Competing against Google is also a huge task...
It's far from perfect, there's definitely stuff they do wrong, but it's also far from being the Quaero fiasco.
Well, maybe you're right, but I tried to give them some feedback about spanish results and the difficulty to use quotes and even when I really tried, it was impossible.
I agree completely: as a European, I find these projects pathetic. We need the humility to learn something from the US and create an environment and a framework in which private companies can thrive, instead of being constantly dragged down by bureaucracy, regulations, and a legal-judiciary system eager not to help but to assert its power.
No kidding. When I was in France I was appalled at the rates they were paying software developers. For a collection of countries that boasts better living standards for people, the comparative gap in pay for technical positions is absurd.
An entry-level tenured professor or a nurse at a hospital earn less than 2000 EUR per month. This gives them barely enough to rent a small room in a shared apartment.
Meh that's honestly not the number one problem in france. I'd even say it's a competitive advantage. Not everyone is willing to expatriate for salary, you can get really great engineers for half or even a third of what they'd be paid in SV
But then why hasn't France been invaded by US companies to hire these great engineers for half of SV money?
I know they have some small offices on campus at top universities where they employ a hand full of PhDs for ML/AI research but that's a drop in the ocean.
You could probably ask the same question of Romania, Russia or Poland. I think it's just a question of the general business friendliness of the place. And there are quite a few American companies in Paris and Sophia-Antipolis
Can't speak for France but London's tech scene is brimming with overseas offices of American companies. Out of my 5 tech jobs, 3 were with American companies, the other 2 being British.
I agree but by paying such low rates / salaries they don't get all the developers they need to do all the projects they would like to do (source: my experience in Italy, where there are more companies looking for developers than developers with spare time for them) and still those companies manage to keep going no matter if projects are delayed or cancelled. If they couldn't either they would close or find more money to spend. Of course that's great for those countries that can move faster, their advantage increases.
Definitely, I didn't mention them only because I'm more familiar with the culture of the US (although indirectly). One thing we should certainly learn from China (and I guess other Asian cultures) is to copy first, and only when good at it start innovating. It takes a lot of humbleness and pragmatism over pride. And it works.
That is literally how you innovate! What a lot of people are unaware of is that Europeans had been copying and stealing Chinese secrets for over a millenia:
Hell, even the name America for which we give to the United States today was stolen since America was originally given to "Latin America" named after Amerigo who had only set foot in Latin America.
I was also astounded when I found out how much US brands actually copy each other. So really, there is no shame in copying from others first before innovating, because that's what essentially learning is all about right? I mean we are constantly standing on the shoulder of giants, but for some reason, for certain sectors, we tend to lock out that process.
No, this approach doesn’t. Complex working systems are built on a core of simpler working systems. Picking winners works incredibly rarely. Industrial policy and the infant industry argument barely ever works. You’re far more likely to get the Argentine or Indian car industry[1] or the Irish steel industry than the Korean ship building industry.
Airbus did not arise from the government putting out a tender for an airline company to be delivered in working order. There were many smaller, working, profitable aviation companies first.
[1] They all disappeared absent subsidies/tariffs.
as for your link about OpenStack, was there anything in 2013 which would have been an alternative to OpenStack? If you wanted to build your own cloud infra back then this was the standard to do it with, no?
How do they think Google became what it is, or most American companies like Amazon? That the US government funded it and kickstarted them with VC funds?
A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts. But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies?
Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general in Europe is ridiculously low for a comparable position in the United States, or even Japan. How are they going to retain talent?
* A good, free education system
* Social security
* Good healthcare system
* Proper democracy
* Politicians who aren't clowns
* A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950
The US is close to becoming a failed state due to the increasing wealth and income gap.
Also, please do me a favour and read up a bit on the history of silicon valley and us innovation. It's hard to claim the government investment isn't a big factor. The DoD is behind a lot of stuff.
And I say this with envy - the US model of government investment is way better than the European one. OP correctly described the issues we have.
(Not saying Germany is perfect and the US is pure shit, I was being overly provocative to establish an extreme counter point)
> * A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950
None of these things (for good or bad) have anything to do with making good tech products.
But they do have all to do with low salaries. My salary is low for American standards, but I can rely on public hospitals, public schools, and public transportation systems. I do not need to save for retirement either. Or for my kids tuition.
> My salary is low for American standards but I can rely on public hospitals, public schools, and public transportation systems. I do not need to save for retirement either. Or for my kids tuition.
I think about this quite a bit, while the median middle class salary is higher in the US, the burden to fund everything out of pocket here is enormous. If salaries are 10-20% higher in the US, much of that goes out the window to fund things like health care, retirement, higher education, daycare/pre-K education, high rents, etc. Things that most Europeans take for granted. All of a sudden that 10-20% gap seems much smaller.
Also keep in mind that not everyone working in tech in the US is making SV level salaries.
Yes, the DoD is behind a lot of stuff but they seem to get it right, unlike most EU countries with gov funded programs that are an absolute disaster.
EU taxpayers consider unacceptable that govt funding goes to waste, but in the end gov funding goes to waster anyway because the amount of bureaucracy is staggering and we don't even get internal competition like the US.
So we waster money and we basically burn it without any positive outcome.
This is because most decisions in the EU are dictated by France and Germany. Germany for example is very hierarchical in how things get done and hence this is reflected in the EU too.
Not sure if if Germany is very hierarchical (not saying I'm sure it's not). I experience it as being very decentralized and as a collection of quite independent actors.
Granted, I never worked in a Volkswagen-style mega-corp, so my perception is biased.
The US DoD has a unique advantage relative to their counterparts -- I've worked with a number -- in that they culturally have a very high risk-tolerance for a government org. They will readily spend vast quantities of money on a high-risk/high-reward project knowing that it will likely fail, and they are okay with that. They've internalized the idea that maintaining an absolute tech advantage, which is an explicit objective, requires being willing to fail spectacularly. We talk a lot about those failures in the US but they also have many brilliant successes.
In my experience, many EU equivalent programs have a strong bias toward being the "second-mover" because it is seen as too risky to be the first-mover. When opportunities arise to be a legitimate first-mover in Europe with a government program, everything tends to grind to a halt due to analysis paralysis because everyone is terrified of failure. I've seen a number of cases where the US showed years late but ended up taking the lead because they can make decisions so quickly and back that with large quantities of money.
Germany is (until recently) also ethnically homogeneous, unlike the USA.
Its a lot easier to offer those services when everyone has roughly the same income, the same education, the same IQ, the same genetics, the same family experience.
If by until recently you mean the 1960s, maybe? Why do people always assume that there wasn't any immigration to Germany before 2015? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter
It's so boring that in every discussion where some other country does something better than the US, people find a million reasons why this could never work there.
The problem is not retaining talent. People doesn't just migrate in mass to the USA. The problem is how easy is to create a company, raise funds and get the needed licenses.
Pretty sure the strict and difficult process of getting a working visa has something to do with that as well, not just that not everyone on the planet is interested in migrating.
Usually you migrate to a better country to improve your life. USA is attractive in some ways, but also unattractive in some other ways that are personal to everyone.
For me the salaries in the silicon Valley are very attractive, but the social issues in the country makes me prefer Europe. Even though my salary is ridiculously low compared to USA.
> How do they think Google became what it is, or most American companies like Amazon?
Because of us government funding which created silicon valley. Silicon Valley itself is pretty much a DoD project. The foundation of the internet and many of these companies were laid by government - direct spending, subsidies, tax breaks and in amazon's case, legal protection ( they didn't have to collect state taxes ) until fairly recently.
> A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts.
> But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies?
Many of the VCs had indirect government ties. But that's besides the point. Amazon/Google doesn't exist without silicon valley which the government created, government subsidies and government protection.
And this isn't including the government's role in keeping international markets open to google/amazon/etc. Notice how there wasn't much pushback from most countries while google/amazon gobbled up entire countries? Now compare that to intense pushback china gets for any and everything.
> Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general in Europe is ridiculously low for a comparable position in the United States, or even Japan. How are they going to retain talent?
Considering american tech companies own the european market why wouldn't american developers get higher pay? If europeans protected their market and european tech companies take over the european market, tech pay would inevitably rise.
> Now compare that to intense pushback china gets for any and everything.
Its much easier to trust democratic governments than autocratic ones. If China were a democracy I highly doubt this would be the case. Sure some would push back but many would back it too. The push back that China receives is also because of their economic colonialism and I guess rightfully so. German car companies for example dont receive as much push back. Ericsson/Nokia doesn't receive as much pushback as their counterpart Huwawei.
> Its much easier to trust democratic governments than autocratic ones.
History shows otherwise. They are equally shady. After all, it was a democracy that broke every treaty with the natives and exterminated them. But I guess it all depends on your biases and agenda. Certainly, nobody can objectively say that US, Britain, France, etc as any less shadier than any autocratic countries.
> If China were a democracy I highly doubt this would be the case.
Really? Bolivia is a democracy. Venezuela is a democracy. Russia is a democracy. If china were a democracy, the chinese people would vote to fully annex hong kong and taiwan. And being a democracy, I suppose the chinese government would have to follow through, huh?
> The push back that China receives is also because of their economic colonialism and I guess rightfully so.
Now this is rather absurd. Especially considering it is us trying to force china to adopt our ways. But agenda tends to blind people.
> German car companies for example dont receive as much push back. Ericsson/Nokia doesn't receive as much pushback as their counterpart Huwawei.
But iranian, venezuelan, russian, etc companies do. And conveniently saudi arabian companies don't. They are not a democracy.
So there goes your theory about democracy. It has nothing to do with democracy. It's about geopolitics and power. The need to maintain dominance over the world as long as we can.
It was acquired quite early on by Google, but the original Google Earth/Maps project which had been developed by Keyhole had received money from In-Q-Tel, described on the wikipedia page as:
> It invests in high-tech companies for the sole purpose of keeping the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability.
I've said it before, it still puzzles me how come the Russians let the Google StreetView car do its thing on the streets of Moscow and other big Russian cities, the Chinese were smarter than that.
While it is easy to laugh at these modern "maginot lines" that the french love to build, the concept of "technological sovereignity" seems very reasonable.
When many goverment bodies more or less have to use foreign software-infrastructure, then "maginot lines" sound reasonable.
Very reasonable indeed IMO if e.g. German police has to use AWS because of lack of alternatives, or the countless local authorities running on windows.
On the other hand, it is not the US to blame for their tech-supremacy. It is Germany and France to blame.
There might be many reasons to cite why we lack behind. But the whole spirit behind a government-google, a government-aws, government-yaddayadda comes across as being more part of the problem than part of the solution.
I am personally very cynical about sovereignty as a concept - it just means "nobody is willing to try to pay the heavy price to try to stop us" dressed up as something noble. Every whinge about loss of sovereignty is a complaint that they cannot control others anymore.
While there may be some good for avoiding outside control it is a cover for their drooling about shoving others inside their domain of control.
Honestly there are very capable and smart engineers in France, and I don't blame the country ambition to develop its own solutions, but the SSII mafia (or how are they called now?) is killing innovation.
It's a very top to bottom decision process (starting from the Government/MP), with big bucks involved, and very little understanding of how to drive these tech projects, all the way to the bottom.
What I don't understand is the status-quo after years and years of failed projects. What a waste of tax payer money.
> there are very capable and smart engineers in France
I would not be so sure. I looked at the IT salaries there (both as a permanent and as a contractor) and it just doesn’t make sense to stay there when you could earn way more money elsewhere in Europe.
that's assuming money is the one important thing in your life though :p I'd personally need at least 3 times my current french salary to start thinking about compromising my other life choices
There's definitely an IT brain drain in France due to low salaries, very few people of my former school actually work for a french company anymore, they almost all went somewhere else to get a better pay.
In the post-covid world of increased remote working, the brain drain will likely increase tenfold since developers won't even have to leave the country anymore.
I don't know, I think you have to look at it with an EU scope. Within Shengen only Luxemburg and Switzerland pay significantly better than France. Germany is more or less aligned
Romanian programmer here (I still live in Romania), I would choose another European country over a well-better paid job in the US in almost all cases, the reason being that that way I'd be closer to home, we actually have decent healthcare in Europe and the social contract as a whole is more robust compared to the US (it mentally helps going out on the street and not seeing the multitude of homeless people that I've read one can find on the streets of San Francisco), public transport is decent to exceptional and for me personally there's also the gun-control issue (or lack of it, more exactly), I really don't see myself living long-term in a country as gun-loving as the US is.
Have you been to any major French city recently? There is still a crisis of homeless refugees, there is clearly different reasoning behind why they are there but in general I'd argue the effect is the same.
1) Closer to home country.
2) No visa needed.
3) Less anti-immigrant rhetoric.
4) Better work/life balance.
5) Free healthcare.
If 10 years ago there were predominantly outfits servicing larger US/UK/Scandinavia companies, now it's shifting towards building their own products/services. Basically the guys learned how to do it and not they start spreading the wings. The only thing missing in Europe is active and mature VC sector that could match that in the US.
I didn't say there's none. Every single country in Europe has varying levels of it but nowhere near to what the US have been having over the last few years.
There are "good" French companies where you can grow a career and get a good salary.
What surprises me is that these companies seem to either hide their French roots, and are often ignored by the academic world. When I was student in engineering school, the only companies we would hear from where the big French corps like Orange, Cap Gemini, Thales and co.
I'm sad to see that these French companies don't get the support and publicity they deserve. I hoped that the French tech thing would help these companies, but I only ever hear about startup with vague pitches founded by business school graduates which don't know a thing nor care about any "tech".
Perhaps that they feel a need to actively hide their french origins is a hint at being seen as an active downside to work with - or perhaps it is just a result of the style being set by the existing "leaders" akin to the name zeitgeist from multiword to acronym companies (IBM/Standard Oil) to single word as fashionable (Amazon, Apple, Google).
Personally I am of the philosophy that if they have to appeal to nationalism they suck as they lack any other qualifications or other features to cite first.
I don't think the definition of brain drain and remote work allowing people to stay in their country really fit together.
If I, a french worker, stay working in France, I pay French taxes and my lineage and social impact remain in France. I can't imagine how that is not a plus pour mon cher pays.
I know plenty of really capable and smart people in France that doesn't want to leave the country. Living somewhere is not just about salary, and quality of life as a software engineer is quite good in France.
Salaries have diminishing returns too. If you balance income and quality of life, if you can reach a certain point that's reasonable for you, it doesn't make sense at all to go through the trouble of moving.
Anyway the US is really at the bottom of the list. Most people would prefer anywhere in Europe or at worse Canada and Australia.
Thats not really specific to France. Any large government contract in any country will go to bodyshops like Accenture, Cap Gemini, IBM, TCS etc. The difference is that the French government keeps thinking that innovation is a top-down process that can be managed like you would manage an aircraft program or a nuclear power plant
That's very true. Another thing is that it is not like EU is somehow very far behind the US in terms of services hosting or "the cloud". There is French OVH provider and there is German Hetzner. While the former has an opinion of being cheap but no so great (especially in terms of support), the Hetzner really shines.
Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especially dedicated servers are first class. In many, many situations it makes much more sense (both from costs perspective and ease of migration to other provider) to use dedicated servers and hire someone who will manage them, than throwing tons of money into Amazon pockets to get "X-large instances" that have power of old Celeron laptop (exaggerating a bit, but not that much).
France also has online.net (now Scaleway?) which I haven't used recently but was very good and reliable for me 3 years ago. Been using Hetzner ever since, which has set the new bar.
OVH's support is not great but at least it's cheap and they have some transparency. Azure and AWS have shitty support too for small customers but they are expensive.
Hetzner is nice. We also have Scaleway in the same category.
> Azure and AWS have shitty support too for small customers but they are expensive
oh yeah, AWS is terrible with support!
I have to rely on their support forum for any support as 20% of our spend for crappy support is just not feasible. I.e. I get no support whatsoever. You can trick them a bit by wrapping it up in a sales inquiry though.
This is basically the same line of reasoning used by people that say you could replace your corporate slack with IRC. Of course you could, but there's a good reason that people don't. If you just want to compare one VPS to another, the only thing you're comparing is cost and availability. But really there's many more factors that people are interested in considering beyond just that. Even if the only service you're interested in using is a VPS, using an AWS EC2 would have so many benefits over a Hetzner VPS that I'd struggle to list them.
Amazon, and Google, and Microsoft... don't win cloud business because people are dumb, they win it because they offer a better product.
well, the thing is, if you literally only need one server, AWS is ridiculously expensive. the value proposition is just not there. you have to design for the cloud from the start to come out on top.
Well literally only needing one server is already a contrived use case. But if I was only in charge of one server, I'd still prefer to be in charge of one server on a platform that had AMI, CloudTrail, IAM, Amazon Inspector, GuardDuty, AWS Certificate Manager, CloudFront, AWS CLI, EBS, CloudWatch, AWS Config, ALB, Route 53, Secrets Manager, AWS WAF, and plenty of the other features that I might find perfectly useful in a one server environment. The value proposition of vanilla VPS providers is just "figure it out yourself". Deciding that a feature rich platform is worth the expense over a single product service provider is often a perfectly rational and cost effective decision.
As much as I'd love for Hetzner to step up and start offering more managed services a la AWS, I just don't see it happening, and if it were I'm not sure I'd like the side-effects of that. Hetzner is laser-focused on delivering beefy and very affordable dedicated servers, apparently the way they are able to trim costs is by running most support functions on auto-pilot and having a very narrow set of products (servers, storage box, web space) which can presumably be serviced by a small staff without a high engineering bar. If they went ahead and started building out complex and highly engineered services like S3 or even more complex ones I'd see that immediately eating into their profit margin. Plus: Hetzner is a privately held company.
Hetzner Cloud is great for what it is, I personally love it. But the pace of product development at Hetzner is such that I would anticipate something like a managed load-balancer maybe being available in 1-3 years from now, and after that another year for the next product etc. They don't seem to be in a rush to compete with AWS (or even Scaleway) by broadening their product offerings, they'd rather stick to their strength which is fast and cheap servers. I commend them for it, and their approach is very German, but it doesn't help you if you need these managed services.
To give an anecdote regarding Hetzner and them building out an S3 clone: I once asked support if there was a way for me to upgrade the 10TB max object storage solution (Hetzner StorageBox) to more than that since I had outgrown it. Simple reply: No, but you can spin up multiple storage boxes...
I wonder how much that is based on the company background. Hetzner is a traditional hosting company. Cloud companies either had large existing software development base and datacenter expertise, being way larger than a company like Hetzner, (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) or don't run the hardware themselves (Heroku, various DBaaS offerings, ...) and focus on the software offering, typically backed by VC to cover the initial investment. I assume Hetzner would like to expand there, but it's expensive, a culture shift and somewhat risky given their well-founded and established competition.
EDIT: I guess DO, Linode, ... are closer equivalents to Hetzner?
Isn't that an opportunity for another company to run managed services like S3, RDS, SQS, SES on top of Hetzner servers? I see some issues with multiple companies being involved in support requests, but nothing that can't be solved.
Or, in case their virtual servers suck (which I don't know about), running VM hosts on Hetzner servers as a service.
You can't just run a service of S3 scale on someone else's datacenter, both from a technical and a business perspective. You need fine-grained control over every aspect, from servers to cooling to network fabric to utilization by other applications etc etc. And you need to be in control of the business trajectory. If you forecast your S3 clone to grow 1000% every month, you need to start building actual datacenters and make bulk deals with hardware suppliers months ahead of time. If you tell Hetzner that they should build a new datacenter because your demand will outstrip their current ones, they're gonna shrug their shoulders. Even if you handed them the cash you got from your VCs for scaling, they might say "eh, not really the direction we want to take, thanks".
Regarding their virtual servers: They're great, don't get me wrong! But it's a tiny piece in the puzzle that is AWS, starting from things like VPC/Security Groups to managed services like load balancers, gateways, cross-DC availability, etc. And that's just the EC2 part.
You know? When you hire someone to manage some VPS or dedicated server in some DC, why not have them manage your own rack(s) connected via your own fiber on premise instead?
That is one thing i fail to understand, since it goes against the lore of decentralized, packet switching, nuke proof, and so on.
It may have been prohibitively expensive for many in the not so recent past, but it isn't anymore in more and more places. Even redundantly connected.
And to be honest, some pizzeria or hairdresser could be run from some NAS.
Just search for someFAANG is down on HN, to get a feel for the ripples it causes globally when they have a hiccup.
It really is about the affordances of getting access to space, power and the network. Nothing is hard individually, but not knowing how to navigate the landscape is much more daunting than typing some numbers into a web page.
Europe: Politicians want "something great", so there is a verdict that "something great" will be developed. A huge budget is provided, but it must be ensured that the usual suspects (public or semi-public research institutions) get most of the share. The whole project structure becomes fragmented beyond believe, nobody cares about commercial success. The project fails, but not in the eyes of the researchers, who claim that there was never the goal to create a commercial product. With the bazillion of research money they gained "valuable insight" into the whole problem and made "considerable progress".
US: Andy von Bechtolsheim meets with two bright guys, sees the huge potential of their algorithm, walks back to his Porsche, signs them a 100,000$ cheque, and a few years later we have a global tech giant called Google who the rest of the world either admires or is afraid of.
Also: this "something great" must be something they (EU politicians deciding about funding) have heard about! And what have they heard about? Something US companies have already been commercialising, hence started a big PR offensive.
That's why the EU started big funding of research on cloud computing after Amazon made money with it, started big funding of research on search engine when Google made money with it, started big funding of research on AI/ML after Google made money with it ...
I predict that the EU will go all in on supporting research on quantum computing when Google sells it in a big way.
One problem that I think is somewhat related to the top-down, bureaucratic situation is that whatever big project they try to do is a copy of something else.
They didn't want to build Google / Facebook / Whatever before those existed. Instead, they want to build a "French Google". Qwant is an example of that. Whatever they're trying to accomplish with Orange in the cloud business is just a "French AWS".
During the lockdown when everyone was using Zoom, some politician was unhappy that EU countries would depend on foreign technology. Solution? Build a European Zoom! I find this kind of ironic, seeing how Skype used to be European...
> The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world leader in computing.
Do you have arguments or is it just a blank criticism?
OVH for instance is built in part on OpenStack, what's so very wrong with it?
There was Cloudwatt also, that was supposed to be the "French AWS", and as you said got hundreds of millions from the government, was created with the help of big, old companies (Orange, Thales, Bull) and was an utter failure.
I hope they learned their mistakes and won't do them again but I fear they'll just do it the same way.
What the French government doesn't understand is that you don't create a tech giant the same way you create the TGV, the Ariane rocket or Airbus. That model worked for those giant industrial projects, but it doesn't work for tech.
I agree that these efforts have been very hit or miss but on the other hand... What should they do instead? Just give up and accept that we're going to simply be technological vassals to America? Or should Macron and Merkel learn Javascript and take the matter into their own hands?
We could've gone the Chinese way and just close the door to American companies, effectively forcing the local populace to use home-grown tools, but we're too nice for that. Instead we try to compete fairly in an open market, except that in practice most multinational corporations manage not to pay taxes in most European countries and they have a huge headstart so it's not really all that fair in the end.
It's easy to be cynical about it but again, tech is too important to just say "well, we lost, I guess we'll increase wine production instead". I want the EU to keep trying.
>Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies.
What alternative is there though? The government also tried to help small start ups and incubators with fiscal advantages. We have the brains, we have the means, the government is just trying to make it happen. The hope is that eventually it'll manage to seed the industry. We also do have significant tech companies in Europe today that actually do interesting work, so it's a bit unfair to say that we only have "ridiculous projects" that are "never actually doing anything remotely useful".
I'm French too, I know that we love to be cynical about everything, always see the glass half empty but it's not a very productive attitude. "MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts", as if France was suddenly the most corrupt country in the world. Look around, see what the rest of the world is doing. We're not doing that poorly.
Merci de le dire... Parfois cette mentalité collective qui nous caractérise me rend dingue... Le Français passe son temps à cracher sur tout et tout le monde, et surtout sur son propre pays. Donc ça fait du bien de voir des concitoyens qui restent lucides et positifs. Big up.
Listening to French entrepreneurs, the usual suspects (labor laws, taxes...) are not so much of a problem.
They all seem to rally around an kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare of interacting with anything state-related... Especially orgs collecting payroll taxes... The stories I see, where you get nailed huge fines every year, for small nitpicky details. They all talk of nightmares where some admin comes and destroy their company with a single inscrutable letter...
I hear stories like this often, I can believe there's a problem here. It is true that we like red tape over here.
That being said the problem with these testimonies is that you'll often hear people complain when something go wrong but nobody is going to tell you how great the French tax system is when it plays in their favor. It's... whatever the opposite of survivor bias is. People also like to deflect the blame away from them when their companies go under. When you don't have COVID-19 you have to find something else.
But I'm sure that there are things that can be improved regardless, I just wish we were more constructive about it instead of just throwing the whole system in the garbage and lighting another cigarette while looking pensively at empty space Camus-style.
That's where I'm at (small improvements, minding Chesterton's fence) and I hope someday someone will stop listening to big French-capitalism-style conglomerates that are always trying to bring new laws, new contract types, to reform it all to make it more American, or German, or Danish... and start listening a bit more to SMEs. Of all kinds.
And I also think part of the problem is overzealous government orgs, who I'm sure take their job very seriously, but are not encouraged to think mistakes are made with no intent to cheat, by default.
I liked the idea of a 'by default we think you made a mistake, our laws and procedures are too complex, let's settle this without penalty, with a generous paiement plan... let's wait a bit before we punish you'... I don't know...
Why not?
The prime minister of Singapore is an active C++ programmer, and has shared
source code on his Facebook page, asking for bug reports [1].
Code is at [2].
This so many times. There's no accountability for government sponsored projects in France. They believe they are discovering the wheel and so they will pour a few million in a born-dead team. And so after a while, they call it done, and everyone is happy even if product has zero usage.
Thank you for this, couldn't have put it better myself.
I'll go one step further and make conjecture that the entire Gaia-X thingie is likely from the get-go a nice little scheme to milk public money directly into the pockets of the proponents of the whole affair.
Brussels is teeming with firms whose specialty and sole purpose is fabricating bogus "projects" to squeeze EU research grant money into their and their clients pockets.
Though Bull doesn't exist anymore as independent company.
I did an internship there (before it was bought, in 2012), the river of public money had mostly dried up and I felt like the company didn't really knew what to do, even if there was some nifty tech being developed here and there.
I wonder how much they will be paying their software developers. Right now, a senior developer that really understands cloud and distributed computing can make more than $500,000/yr at Amazon, Azure, or Microsoft. If they want to attract the talent to build this, they are going to have to pay a lot more than they are used to paying for software engineers.
USA Payroll tax: 15.3% combined, first $127,000 only (3.89% effective)
France Payroll tax: 20% for salaries over €151,965.
USA Income tax: 42%, including State (CA) and Federal, excluding deductions
France Income Tax: 50%.
So the labour cost will be a lot higher due to payroll taxes, and the employee will take home less due to income taxes. High VAT (20% in France, 8.5% in SF) means consumer purchases are also more expensive. If you are in Paris, you're at a latitude 48.8N, SF 37.7N.
The same is true for moving to other Anglo countries: UK, Canada, Australia have similar lower-tax regimes.
France, Germany etc. are charging huge payroll, income and sales taxes to fund their huge welfare states and bureaucracies, but in the process ruining their competitiveness.
San Fran also has over 8k homeless in a population of 800k. The overall homeless rate in France is about 5x lower per capita.
My opinion on paying taxes changed drastically after I visited the USA 2 years ago (San Fran, LA, Vegas). I was absolutely shocked by the amount of poverty I saw and I had never realised that America had such a drastically different culture to Australia.
For the 2019-2020 fiscal year, San Francisco will spend $364 million on the homeless.
I think there are other major issues besides lack of money from lack of taxes.
For one thing, when comparing per capita, you shouldn't just look at the population of San Francisco. A lot of those 8k homeless people came from other parts of the state or even other parts of the country to San Francisco. This is in large part that San Francisco has nice weather and is relatively welcoming to the homeless compared to a lot of cities and jurisdictions. Whereas in a lot of cities, homeless residents might get a lot of harrassment from the police, in San Francisico for the most part they are left alone.
So when doing per capita homelessness in San Francisco, you probably need to look at a much larger overall population that just that of San Francisco.
That still leaves a 3.5 times higher homeless rate per capita than in France. One third is a lot but it's not the driving force behind homelessness.
>As of 2014, the city was believed to have approximately 7,000 homeless residents.[55][56] As of 2015, approximately 71% of the city's homeless had housing in the city before becoming homeless, while the remaining 29% came from outside of San Francisco. This figure is up from 61% in 2013.
The taxes in the US are just hidden away in privat services. Your gated community guard. Your doctor. Your car. Your kids educationaand school. All the things in Europe provided, you pay extra.
> France, Germany etc. are charging huge payroll, income and sales taxes to fund their huge welfare states and bureaucracies, but in the process ruining their competitiveness
That's a common bashing legend that France/Germany are taxe hell and it is mainly bullshit.
I am currently live in France with salary over 100k and my effective taxe rate is under 20%.
Both France and Germany (and almost every European country) have a gazillion way of reducing legally your taxe bill if you do it right.
Currently, some of my colleagues in Switzerland, a well known taxe heaven, pay more taxe than I do.
Off the top of my head... in France, you pay tax as a household rather than an individual. So if you are married with children you get a tax cut for each child up to 3.
Private pension contributions are also tax deductible and don't actually have to be used for retirement (you can use it to fund a first house for example)
Other things that you can take off your tax bill include alimony payments, charitable donations and investments made in certain French initiatives.
So yes, there are many ways to legally reduce your tax bill quite significantly here.
As an individual you may be OK re. tax if you are married with children because they give strong tax advantages to those households [basically they count how many people live on your income when calculating income tax], which must be your case.
But overall tax levels are high, taxes are many and complicated, red tape works against you.
France is #1 in the EU for public spending [1]. Deficit is within average and constrained by Eurozone rules (excluding the current mess). Money does not magically appear.
As I said, taxes are many, complicated, and often useless. This of course overlaps with the issue of red tape but is an issue in itself.
There is a reason why so many rich French people live in Belgium or London. There is a reason why when Peugeot merges with Fiat-Chrysler the new company is headquartered in Amsterdam.
Just another example I've recently found (this is supposed to be abrogated this year): If you're a company and your turnover is greater than EUR760k annually then there is a special, additional tax on your advertising spending. There are plenty of things like that. This is bonkers.
That's a well known overstatement that comes mainly from the fact Pension system, education system AND health care system are almost entirely state-owned in France. You can find the same pattern in some Scandinavian country btw, France is not an exception.
> There is a reason why so many rich French people live in Belgium or London.
You can say the same with British and American near the Leman-lake /Zug in Switzerland. Fiscal optimization is everywhere.
> There is a reason why when Peugeot merges with Fiat-Chrysler the new company is headquartered in Amsterdam.
That's not surprising, Holding companies always love specific countries for legislation/taxes reasons. That include Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Ireland. Almost every European major multi-national has an holding in one of these.
> If you're a company and your turnover is greater than EUR760k annually then there is a special, additional tax on your advertising spending.
That I totally agree with you. This is a good example of terrible case by case politic bullshit.
It is certainly not an overstatement, and the issue of tax goes far beyond what you may see as an individual (for example, overall labour costs [1]).
France is not an exception in its organisation, in fact its health care system is LESS state-owned than, say, the UK's. But it spends a lot, taxes a lot, and, to compound the issues, is not flexible.
You seem to actually agree that France has problems with its legislation and tax in the rest of your reply...
Edit: The graph that you posted in you reply below is obviously not the same metric. It states it is "general government" spending while I mentioned "public spending". But even so, your graph shows France ahead of Germany and the UK.
> It is certainly not an overstatement. As you say, France in not an exception in its organisation, in fact its health care system is LESS state-owned than, say, the UK's.
It is. Especially if you compare with the public spending/GDP collectively [1]. It is currently lower than USA and right in the average of OECD.
> You seem to actually agree that France has problems with its legislation and tax in the rest of your reply...
I totally agree with that. I disagree with the fact it is a taxe hell. In my experience, as a European who lived in several countries including France, it is in the average of Europe.
That said, I agree with you about the red tape / administrative burden.
Really the only way as an employee is to have a family because income tax depends on household size. And let's remember that there is a de facto second income tax (CSG/RDS) on top of the income tax.
But this is a small part of the issue with tax. Regarding employment there are the taxes paid by employers, as you rightly point out, which make the cost of labour quite high in France, but there are also all those other taxes on about everything.
Unless you are earning above 400k€ per year your income taxes will be less than 42% of your income in Germany. Lets say you are earning SF type salaries in Germany. Something like 150k€ per year. Your income tax will still only be 30% of your income. So why are only 90k€ arriving on your bank account? (60% of your salary). Because medical, unemployment, long term care insurance and pensions are mandatory but also provided by the government in Germany. The effectiveness of these insurances is much lower if only a minority is taking advantage of them.
Imagine extreme examples like everyone who signs up for unemployment insurance is freshly unemployed and once they find a job they cancel their insurance. There is no way to make it work without the government.
I would guess that the top 5% of talent in cloud architecture is in global demand. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, attract developers from all over the world, not just those local to Seattle or Silicon Valley.
Knowing you can triple your salary by moving is a pretty big incentive for a lot of people.
They will form an entity but I'm not sure if it's even going to have developers on the payroll.
My understanding (I've been involved with this on the sidelines) is that development is going to happen mostly by the member/participating companies in collaboration.
Realistically that will just yield guidelines on GDPR compliance, which was already adopted by major providers, and interoperability. Even if this non-political actor would lead to regulatory advice, we already have similar guidelines in areas like security, framing that alone as anti-competitive seems somewhat odd. I doubt a major cloud provider is "hindered" by suggestions such as "give your users something to control where their data goes" / "give your users the ability to get their data back out of your infrastructure". Startups might have problems work existing regulation that essentially says "make sure this data doesn't leave the country/union" but I don't see much difference to investing in any other compliance on the other side of the pond there.
I have sadly no faith in europe to get this right. While capitalism is under fire right now it does one thing better than anything we know right now. Innovate. I don't see a government competition with a group of smart, capable people, who would reap all the money from said effort.
This might sound terrible ... but this will come from Scandinavia/Finland or not at all. Possibly in the form of one or a few, very well thought out startups and/or standards that the rest of Europe can buy into.
This is not about size, it's about 'getting it right' - and then having the system follow along one way or another.
The corona app doesn't need to be a huge contract. But SAP and T-Systems can sure waste a huge amount of time and charge a huge amount of money for it.
Everything the federal government does is a huge contract. Of course, in a hypothetical paradise it wouldn't have to be. But in the real world, it is. That's still no reason to be surprised.
From what I know, SAP and Deutsche Telekom were chosen because:
- SAP built an app on very short notice where Germans traveling abroad could register for one of the government-organized flights back to Germany. The government was satisfied with how this played out, therefore they were the first choice for building the app part.
- Telekom is already operating several backend services for the RKI (the German counterpart of the CDC) and the local health offices, so they were the first choice for building the backend part that needs to integrate with these systems.
Disclosure: I work at SAP, but not on the Corona app. I'm not referring to any internal knowledge. What I know, I know from public media.
Quick off topic question: How is the work culture at SAP?
Is the public sentiment that it's software is impossibly hard to manage and develop for based in reality?
(Disclosure the one time I had to access SAP Data via an API it felt like running against a wall of legacy tables and badly documented interactions -> My sentiment may be biased)
It's a good place to work. As with any large enterprise, there's quite some politics going on between org units and teams, but my direct managers are committed to shielding the team from most of it so that we can stay productive.
As for whether SAP software is "impossibly hard to manage and develop for", I cannot comment on it much since I'm working in cloud infrastructure, so I'm mostly dealing with Docker, Kubernetes, Openstack, etc.
I've seen a bit of SAP software, and IMO a good way to think about it is that an SAP system is kind of like a separate operating system. It's a completely different world. And just like I (a Unix guy) would be completely lost if you asked me to manage a Windows Server system or develop for it, same with the SAP system.
Most people only ever learn to use it in the same way most people who come in contract are only users with no deep admin/dev knowledge. So the question is if you can find someone who has deep-enough knowledge of the system to implement or configure what you need.
That's hard especially for the kernel. If you're running Linux, it's not that hard to hire someone with kernel development experience. For the SAP kernel, it's next to impossible. All these guys work for SAP.
It isn't if you do it well. Think of WhatsApp that had about 55 people when it was bought for several billions. Especially if you need it done quickly, many mediocre developers are no substitute for a few good developers.
Maybe SAP and Telekon can be arsed to gather their best if it's actually important. For Toll Collect, the usual suspects failed very hard. Much effort, buggy and very late results.
The Swiss app is developed by a small independent development studio, and for what it's worth they seem to be doing a better and faster job than SAP & Telekom:
I know for a fact that there was no formal tender process, it was just a matter of having the right contacts and being at the right place. Sadly connections still matter much more than experience in Germany.
Well in the EU we still have opportunities to fight against other's monopolies and try to impose ours. Which a single small country can't and, at the end, is expected to become vassal of the US or China.
> laugh at the failures
Talking about failures, there are so many in the UK right now that the Brits, rather than laughing, should first focus on their own internal issues, which by the way, are seriously impacting the future of Europe.
>Well in the EU we still have opportunities to fight against other's monopolies and try to impose ours. Which a single small country can't...<
Except for Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc.
>Talking about failures, there are so many in the UK right now<
This is why it's good Britain got out sooner than later. Europe, especially France and Germany, can't handle the idea that their 'European way' of doing things hasn't kept pace with the times. It's easier for these people to attack those trying something new than to accept the possibility of change. At least catch up with SEA before taking cheap shots at the UK.
Korea and Japan, being great, ancient and ultra-modern civilizations are totally depending on the US ruler for their own defence while they have to face a very dangerous neighborhood with N-Korea, China and Russia. And they're not very happy about it...
And Singapore is a dicatorial city state less populated than London or Paris (an less rich). We could have expected a more ambitious model and destiny for a nation which once ruled the world.
> can't handle the idea that their 'European way' of doing things hasn't kept pace with the times.
Good luck with keeping pace with the times with Boris Johnson, Cummings and Patel...
And to get back to the initial topic : what is the plan in UK for a sovereign cloud ? Well I guess the main idea is to give all your data to US companies and abandon any ambition to control your data privacy.
> taking cheap shots at the UK
For a couple of years Britannia has been wandering in the streets with a target painted on her dress and a message: "Hey, don't you dare shoot me, EU assholes"
SAP, for all its many faults, actually has some quite successful products.
Australia's banks have been focused on replacing their legacy IBM mainframe core banking systems (stuff like CSC Hogan) with something more modern and non-mainframe. CBA went with SAP, and their project was very successful. (At least it appears that way from the media, and CBA employees who I've talked to tell me that it isn't just some good PR, it really has been a great success.) By contrast, other banks who went with other vendors had less success – https://www.itnews.com.au/news/suncorps-oracle-core-finally-...
On the other hand, Aldi Nord now successfully runs SAP HANA/Retail. The at the same time attempted (and internally highly fought against) move from decentral to central organization is probably what killed Lidl's SAP project.
[1] suggests that part of the problem is that Lidl's business processes were non-standard, and Lidl decided, rather than change their processes to match what SAP's solution supported, to instead customise SAP's solution to support their non-standard processes – and that was the point at which the project came undone, the SAP customisations couldn't scale to high turnover (but surely vanilla/uncustomised SAP Retail would not have had this problem)
Lidl's non-standard processes may well be a big part of their business success. But maybe that was a sign they shouldn't have gone with an off-the-shelf solution like SAP, and should have stuck with their legacy in-house system, or tried to build a custom next generation in-house system. And their experience isn't necessarily transferable to another business whose processes might be more standard, or who might have more flexibility to alter their processes to meet the needs of an off-the-shelf solution. And if they'd gone for some other off-the-shelf solution instead of SAP (such as Oracle or Infor), they might have had just as many problems – the more customisation heavy an ERP implementation project is, the greater the risk of failure.
This once again ignores what are probably more profound issues.
Europe has tech companies and independent cloud providers. Yet they seem to never grow large or fast enough to become leaders globally or even in Europe.
SAP is mentioned, which is a giant. But it is 50 years old. This is not the type of company that is going to challenge the status quo and come up with disrupting technology.
I think countries like France and Germany should really look at their tech and business environments, including universities, finance, tax, labour law, etc.
> Europe has tech companies and independent cloud providers. Yet they seem to never grow large or fast enough to become leaders globally or even in Europe.
Very true, but I'm unsure why that is the case. My guess it's the country/language fragmentation, ie. companies looking mostly at suppliers from their own country. But I'm not sure that is the case.
Also another guess is that European companies buy US software but US companies don't often buy European software perhaps? Again, nothing to back that up with except for a hunch.
...and the issue is that the products are too expensive due to a vast number of factors. I'm just a private hobby developer, so maybe there are markets where this is different. But when I was looking for cold storage backup and virtual hosting providers in the EU none of the offers were even remotely competitive with US offers. They're twice or even more as expensive and less reputable.
Especially concerning backup this bothers me a lot. I'm currently with Crashplan for Small Business and it works well. I would love to have all my data on EU servers, but where is the EU backup solution with decent backup software that allows me to store more than 2 TB of data for $3.06 per month?
I can't see how this French initiative would change this. If you look up "Gaia-x" it doesn't even come with a web page where you can buy the product or check out its pricing and conditions. It's nebulous vaporware - so typical.
"repository of existing services and resources that are available in the ecosystem, including the capability to search this repository"
Yeah I totally want to spend my time digging around in there for "which random company can I get a crappy version of AWS Lambda from?"
I'm no fan of monocultures and US/Chinese influence but if they want it to actually work they could say "here's a terraform provider that figures it out for you". That would be nice. So far it sounds like this is just "we'll make a list of cloud providers and some of their services"
Does anybody have any technical details to share about Gaia-X? I mean service discovery, interchangeable services/interfaces, etc. has been around since the SOAP days (~ 2003) at least. Cloud can mean many things. Does there exist anything at all or is it just talk at the political level atm? Do they intend to fund new research into bringing these things, or will they pick existing tech?
Thanks, that's exactly what I feared and would call strategical/non-technical ;) I mean it mentions "open source technologies", and contains a vague general description of the concept of identity providers, and, of course, platitudes a la "industry 4.0" but nothing concrete. I want to hear about protocols, operating systems/POSIX/Linux, integration into TelCo provisioning platforms maybe if that's on the radar and they want to have 5G on board, payment standards, containers (chroot, VMs, Docker-like/Linux-only namespace containers, or whatever), or even IP networking. Also, going by the stock photos and the use case example, I'm a bit surprised this is targetting industry applications rather than public authorities, schools, medical etc.
That's at least something. Unfortunately, this reads more like a program to keep academic research institutes busy and rehashes phantasies of dynamically matching service providers to consumers and policies, something that was a hot topic in academia, and academia only, during the SOAP times, but wasn't used at all in practice (even today you're using lots of yaml to bind stuff on clouds). Moreover, it doesn't use any established logic programming paradigm and re-invents an ad-hoc service ontology/taxonomy and query language (this after the EU spend lots of money in the last decade to fund research on SemWeb ontologies) and they're just using Neo4j (which is fine as a graph DB but not a standard by any means). On top of that, they're using OpenAPI and JSON payloads; this isn't a good fit when the majority of established protocols one would like to use (and that have been created by lots of EU money) are based on WSDL and XML (payment protocols) or even EDIFACT (logistics). OpenAPI/SmartBear has certainly sold their primitive JSON Schema thing well I guess (that just exists on paper or in the form of broken Swagger Java apps). Didn't they want to push European tech? Then why are they promoting gitlab and k8s? I could go on and on, but this doesn't look promising. Tbh, making an undergrad project out of this is embarrassing for French academia who has produced some of the best work in the field.
The "technical" architecture reads like an extensively annotated UML diagram about... generics. There are a lot of guiding principles, a lot of references to data sovereignty, but after reading it I have zero clue of what they are going on about.
Most of old Europe saw China succeed in its "Copy a successful American thing" manner and decided to try the same. Except they don't have the competence overall as orgs.
They are not shielding their market, putting everything behind a firewall, requiring joint ventures. Instead they actually respect human rights and the power of law. They don’t even use a non-latin language.
I think the residents of Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and the entirety of central and eastern Europe (except Romania) would be surprised to hear that they don't speak a Latin language.
German might not be a Latin language, but has very obvious roots there. Which are btw. more apparent than in English, because the grammar has not been simplified yet. I suspect the way to learn both languages is not that different. It also has to be way easier if you already know a similiar language, which was my point.
I speak five European languages including German. What you say is the opposite of the truth - English has far more Latin influence than German. By one estimate around a third of English words are derived from Latin (via Norman French, thanks to the Norman conquest of Britain in the 11th century.) German doesn't have nearly as many Latin words.
It's true that German and Latin both have case systems (accusative, nominative, etc.), but German didn't get this from Latin - they both inherited it independently from proto-Indo-European, their common ancestor. English used to have a case system too but it's been lost.
With that being said, my original post had a stupid mistake: I meant to imply that the listed countries don't speak a Latin language, not that they do.
> With that being said, my original post had a stupid mistake: I meant to imply that the listed countries don't speak a Latin language, not that they do.
I got that.
You are right, German is per definition not a latin language. You win 5 internet points, even though you still did not get the context of my original post, which is why you were downvoted.
> I speak five European languages including German. What you say is the opposite of the truth - English has far more Latin influence than German.
Nobody is interested in how many European languages I speak and it does not matter here, but I do speak German and English and have studied Latin. English might have more Latin words, but German feels way more like Latin than English does, because it is more structured and rule-based, has less exceptions (funnily enough because it has had less influence from French aka Latin).
It is not only about a case system, it's also gender of words, conjugation of verbs and the whole structure of sentences. English feels more linearly "one word comes after the other"-style, while German and Latin both rely more on rules and sentences can (or sometimes have to) be taken apart piece by piece. One thing they have in common is the ability to form long sentences with the predicate all the way at the end, making the listener remember the whole thing before finally getting the actual meaning.
Another important point is: You can mostly just read both Latin and German, because words are pronounced the same way they are written. We might pronounce some Latin words differently than they were originally prounounced, but since Italian behaves the same, we should be reasonably close.
Competence at designing and building large systems on schedule. At Nokia there was a saying around 2010 that in the time the Chinese produce a new phone model we can produce a new powerpoint slide.
That's just it. There are individual luminaries where individuals can act. But as a full system, you just don't get good tech products out of Europe.
You misunderstand. It isn't that Europeans are dumb. They're just people so of course there are smart ones and dumb ones same as anywhere else. I'm not claiming some racist thing that Europeans aren't competent just like I'm not claiming Americans can't build subway.
Europe itself though isn't set up to make pioneering software products. Just like America can't efficiently build subway.
If they want Competition to "HyperScalers" then why not just use OVH?
Generally speaking, I dont think any of the Europeans have technical problems, I think they have a Product Placement, Marketing and Sales problem. And I think it is more or a cultural issue. ( Not saying it is a bad thing )
IMHO the broader issue is that there isn’t a european culture or market. Instead you have a fragmented set of markets, each with their own expectations and regulations. That makes it incredibly hard to create a product that serves Europe as a whole instead of just Germany, or France, or something else.
Even just the basics are way harder than they should be, for example the lack of a common language is already a pain to deal with.
The goal is not to built yet-another-hyperscaler. The existing hyperscalers will integrate in GAIA-X.
Rather we want to give users the power to see where their data is stored and to control the use of their data if they choose to share it in an "ecosystem".
Many EU countries are scared to put their data from public administration / hospitals / ... into a cloud where lawful interception could be enforced via the US Cloud Act or similar.
American internet companies can address a large, relatively homogeneous market of 300 million people that all speak the same language. This alone is a big competitive advantage over any European company.
For these B2B applications, it is important to have your potential customers in your network. One can argue that achieving such a network is easier in the US, where most of the potential customers presumably are.
Indeed. And not only common language, but ease of doing business with companies across the continent in general. Here in Europe, due to legal/language/cultural differences, and due to laziness, the default mode of operation for small companies in services is to avoid or neglect doing business with strangers from other parts of Europe. It is safe and comfortable, but does not create big multinational juggernauts.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadHow about just getting your hands dirty and start building great stuff?
(Former european here)
That said, I don’t think I have ever heard of governments releasing copyrighted, closed-source software, let alone trying to make money off it. That just doesn’t make any sense. I don’t see any reason why the lack of a profit motive would be a detriment to competition in the event governments do invest in free software
Honestly this seems like something a trade treaty would be useful for if it weren’t written by multinational corporations. Until then we’re gonna be stuck with really, really shitty decisions as individuals, like ios vs android.
Hell, have you seen any competition in software in private markets? There’s isolated pockets of competition in certain circumstances, but from my perspective the major markets all colluded to fuck us roughly the same ways.
That said, this effort will fail for lack of decent hardware investment to keep costs down.
Of course an app is a much smaller project than launching a cloud provider.
Look at Huawei to see how effective government bureaucracies can be when they decide to compete with efficient business.
Azure and AWS are both state funded ;)
Reading the article "German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier, speaking in Berlin, described Gaia-X as a “moonshot” that would help reassert Europe’s technological sovereignty, and invited other countries and companies to join." It's not clear if this is limited to European based countries and companies only and if not, kinda moots the statement a bit.
Be interesting how this progresses and competition is good and some standards would also work well. Though I do fear that the usual company suspects will pile into this pie just because they have a European satellite office, like Amazon, Google, Microsoft.....
I hope this is an EU wide initiative and not just another FraGer based one for many reasons.
So many questions and could just be a tool to bash the Tech giants into opening up more.
Further reading upon this: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/legal-entity-gaia...
https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt...
Person not poised to make exorbitant money off venture thinks venture a waste of time. Alternatively, person who might lose money if venture goes ahead thinks venture a waste of time.
Switching providers would imply some new tech or standard, no? A bit like docker is portable. Except for all parts of the cloud. So are they thinking a FAAS standard, a load balancer standard?
Bit confused about where they're going with this
On the other hand, 2012 called.
Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to its old glory by an old guard convinced that somehow their country is so exceptional that it can just launch any product and that people will switch to it.
The story is more sinister when it comes to cloud platforms. A government project to free its companies from American domination over this sector will typically involve a bidding process in which established and well-connected companies with a history of costly, slow, outdated tech will win the contracts through their political connections with no consideration for their capacity to deliver or innovate. MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts. The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world leader in computing.
It's always the same thing. Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies. Always behind, always getting paid, never actually doing anything remotely useful.
Source: I am French. I know how this works, I've seen these ridiculous projects get political support and fail miserably due to corruption and ineptitude. This is more of the same.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant [2] https://gigaom.com/2013/11/18/a-guide-to-the-french-national...
Having interacted with some of the folks at conferences I'm pretty sure there's a core of people in there somewhat committed to open source which was nice to see. But in terms of innovation none of the projects branded as "German X as a service" over the last decades stood out as particularly innovative or remotely well managed.
[1] https://cloud.telekom.de/resource/blob/data/90924/6196063473...
The idea itself of supporting Europeans alternative to face American and Chinese tech giants is by itself noble (and I think necessary).
However, the usual way it is done is a disaster: top-bottom, funding some existing behemoth company that will have no capacity whatsoever to innovate, nor will to do so. But they will get the money because they have good connections.
If you think about it, it is not very different of the American military-industrial complex and the way the DoD/Army/DoE fund their programs (F-35 ?).
Creating a good environment for startups and giving grants to several ones in parallel to create an internal competitive market would be both cheaper and more effective.
But that would imply first a generation switch....
That's the tragedy of the government-backed tech in France. You also have a lot of very skilled tech companies there, but they are not the ones getting government support to grow further.
That's almost an universal tragedy.
The good techies, the innovative engineers or the avant-garde researchers... Typically, the one doing the work... are generally not the one doing outreach, going around in convention, networking, making connections with politicians.... And getting Grants.
On the other side, many conference/convention/"one-man-show" dudes are generally much better to talk than to produce anything useful.
Their is a million of example of that, in both side of the Atlantic ocean.
I would say it is less tragic in America, mainly because there is a Venture Capitalism culture there that Europe do not have.
But one of the biggest issues in Europe is that it's not very unified yet. A French startup will launch a French product, not a "European" product. The only way to get buy-in from enough people is to have a multinational startup and product. An initiative promoted by both Germany and France has a better chance since it may appeal to ~150 million citizens.
Yet the overall scene is not quite as dynamic as the one on the other side of the Atlantic. Startups never seem to be as well funded or advertised. People take fewer risks here, there's no obvious culture of risking it all to found a startup. The whole ecosystem is not designed around this. Maybe this is changing now but today the market really isn't flooded with local products but rather with products of Silicon Valley. A lot of investments in European startups still come from SV instead of being local. There are some products that are big in one European country but don't really seem to make it over the border and it's probably because Europe is not as unified a marked as it could be.
Because when WWII ended and Europe was rebuilding, in some low-key corner of the West Coast of the US, some military contractors were trying to figure out what would their next projects look like (and getting more money from the US Gov. to fight the Russians, of course)
Then these guys became the best (read, selling more) in one thing called semiconductors then the best at this other new thing that was called computers and that's how it went.
And I might add that being the junction of tech and (accidentally) some weird hippie corner of the US might have helped in some aspects.
You must understand that in Europe, using such language in good company is considered rather rude, or at the very least, irresponsible.
Europe is the place where there are still strongly held belief that proper centralized planning will beat market forces every time.
The fact that this mental model doesn't fit reality is considered a minor detail, it's just that the plan needs a little bit of refinement.
https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108986-six-ans-apres-son-lan...
https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108320-qwant-mail-fail-linag...
turnover and employee discontent: https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108123-le-cahier-doleances-s...
Deepl (https://www.deepl.com/en/translator) will do a great job at translating those articles.
Qwant is poorly managed, but that doesn't mean every project is doomed to fail. If you would judge Google success based on their failed projects, it would be the same conclusion.
The problem has many layers, Europe is not really united, which makes most markets small, the governments are pretty bad at managing investiments in tech fields, and there's not enough private capital going around pouring money into this.
It's far from perfect, there's definitely stuff they do wrong, but it's also far from being the Quaero fiasco.
And yes results are bad in spanish.
My understanding is that it’s the opposite. Software is significantly underpaid but you can do quite well with a typical paper-pushing bullshit job.
To be fair, that's the same in London or SF :)
I know they have some small offices on campus at top universities where they employ a hand full of PhDs for ML/AI research but that's a drop in the ocean.
Sophia-Antipolis is mostly semiconductor and hardware and has the weather and property prices of SoCal without the pay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_int...
https://www.chinese-antique-porcelain.com/european-porcelain...
The US have a history of stealing tech secrets from the British:
https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-na...
Hell, even the name America for which we give to the United States today was stolen since America was originally given to "Latin America" named after Amerigo who had only set foot in Latin America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci
I was also astounded when I found out how much US brands actually copy each other. So really, there is no shame in copying from others first before innovating, because that's what essentially learning is all about right? I mean we are constantly standing on the shoulder of giants, but for some reason, for certain sectors, we tend to lock out that process.
Airbus did not arise from the government putting out a tender for an airline company to be delivered in working order. There were many smaller, working, profitable aviation companies first.
[1] They all disappeared absent subsidies/tariffs.
A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts. But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies?
Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general in Europe is ridiculously low for a comparable position in the United States, or even Japan. How are they going to retain talent?
* A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950
The US is close to becoming a failed state due to the increasing wealth and income gap.
Also, please do me a favour and read up a bit on the history of silicon valley and us innovation. It's hard to claim the government investment isn't a big factor. The DoD is behind a lot of stuff.
And I say this with envy - the US model of government investment is way better than the European one. OP correctly described the issues we have.
(Not saying Germany is perfect and the US is pure shit, I was being overly provocative to establish an extreme counter point)
None of these things (for good or bad) have anything to do with making good tech products.
Completely delusional in the face of the past thirty years or so, but it remains a worryingly common talking point in WE “tech adjacent” circles.
I think about this quite a bit, while the median middle class salary is higher in the US, the burden to fund everything out of pocket here is enormous. If salaries are 10-20% higher in the US, much of that goes out the window to fund things like health care, retirement, higher education, daycare/pre-K education, high rents, etc. Things that most Europeans take for granted. All of a sudden that 10-20% gap seems much smaller.
Also keep in mind that not everyone working in tech in the US is making SV level salaries.
A medium/median salaried person would be much better off in Western Europe for sure.
EU taxpayers consider unacceptable that govt funding goes to waste, but in the end gov funding goes to waster anyway because the amount of bureaucracy is staggering and we don't even get internal competition like the US.
So we waster money and we basically burn it without any positive outcome.
Granted, I never worked in a Volkswagen-style mega-corp, so my perception is biased.
In my experience, many EU equivalent programs have a strong bias toward being the "second-mover" because it is seen as too risky to be the first-mover. When opportunities arise to be a legitimate first-mover in Europe with a government program, everything tends to grind to a halt due to analysis paralysis because everyone is terrified of failure. I've seen a number of cases where the US showed years late but ended up taking the lead because they can make decisions so quickly and back that with large quantities of money.
citation needed. Last I checked SP500 has multiplied by 4 in 10 years. The DAX, uhmm..
Its a lot easier to offer those services when everyone has roughly the same income, the same education, the same IQ, the same genetics, the same family experience.
It's so boring that in every discussion where some other country does something better than the US, people find a million reasons why this could never work there.
How did you get that impression? Hm K, maybe not horror clown grade, rather sad clowns.
Pretty sure the strict and difficult process of getting a working visa has something to do with that as well, not just that not everyone on the planet is interested in migrating.
For me the salaries in the silicon Valley are very attractive, but the social issues in the country makes me prefer Europe. Even though my salary is ridiculously low compared to USA.
Salaries in some of our neighbours like Germany are much higher and still only a small percent of the talented people move there.
Money is an incentive for sure. But it's not an absolute factor.
Because of us government funding which created silicon valley. Silicon Valley itself is pretty much a DoD project. The foundation of the internet and many of these companies were laid by government - direct spending, subsidies, tax breaks and in amazon's case, legal protection ( they didn't have to collect state taxes ) until fairly recently.
> A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts.
This is silicon valley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#History_(pre-19...
> But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies?
Many of the VCs had indirect government ties. But that's besides the point. Amazon/Google doesn't exist without silicon valley which the government created, government subsidies and government protection.
And this isn't including the government's role in keeping international markets open to google/amazon/etc. Notice how there wasn't much pushback from most countries while google/amazon gobbled up entire countries? Now compare that to intense pushback china gets for any and everything.
> Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general in Europe is ridiculously low for a comparable position in the United States, or even Japan. How are they going to retain talent?
Considering american tech companies own the european market why wouldn't american developers get higher pay? If europeans protected their market and european tech companies take over the european market, tech pay would inevitably rise.
Its much easier to trust democratic governments than autocratic ones. If China were a democracy I highly doubt this would be the case. Sure some would push back but many would back it too. The push back that China receives is also because of their economic colonialism and I guess rightfully so. German car companies for example dont receive as much push back. Ericsson/Nokia doesn't receive as much pushback as their counterpart Huwawei.
History shows otherwise. They are equally shady. After all, it was a democracy that broke every treaty with the natives and exterminated them. But I guess it all depends on your biases and agenda. Certainly, nobody can objectively say that US, Britain, France, etc as any less shadier than any autocratic countries.
> If China were a democracy I highly doubt this would be the case.
Really? Bolivia is a democracy. Venezuela is a democracy. Russia is a democracy. If china were a democracy, the chinese people would vote to fully annex hong kong and taiwan. And being a democracy, I suppose the chinese government would have to follow through, huh?
> The push back that China receives is also because of their economic colonialism and I guess rightfully so.
Now this is rather absurd. Especially considering it is us trying to force china to adopt our ways. But agenda tends to blind people.
> German car companies for example dont receive as much push back. Ericsson/Nokia doesn't receive as much pushback as their counterpart Huwawei.
But iranian, venezuelan, russian, etc companies do. And conveniently saudi arabian companies don't. They are not a democracy.
So there goes your theory about democracy. It has nothing to do with democracy. It's about geopolitics and power. The need to maintain dominance over the world as long as we can.
With CIA funding, amongst others. https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
> It invests in high-tech companies for the sole purpose of keeping the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability.
I've said it before, it still puzzles me how come the Russians let the Google StreetView car do its thing on the streets of Moscow and other big Russian cities, the Chinese were smarter than that.
Very reasonable indeed IMO if e.g. German police has to use AWS because of lack of alternatives, or the countless local authorities running on windows.
On the other hand, it is not the US to blame for their tech-supremacy. It is Germany and France to blame.
There might be many reasons to cite why we lack behind. But the whole spirit behind a government-google, a government-aws, government-yaddayadda comes across as being more part of the problem than part of the solution.
While there may be some good for avoiding outside control it is a cover for their drooling about shoving others inside their domain of control.
It's a very top to bottom decision process (starting from the Government/MP), with big bucks involved, and very little understanding of how to drive these tech projects, all the way to the bottom.
What I don't understand is the status-quo after years and years of failed projects. What a waste of tax payer money.
I would not be so sure. I looked at the IT salaries there (both as a permanent and as a contractor) and it just doesn’t make sense to stay there when you could earn way more money elsewhere in Europe.
In the post-covid world of increased remote working, the brain drain will likely increase tenfold since developers won't even have to leave the country anymore.
If remote works, it won't really be a brain drain anymore, because they'll be paying taxes and spending their money in France :)
Other cities in the US are much more in line with the big EU cities in that regard.
If 10 years ago there were predominantly outfits servicing larger US/UK/Scandinavia companies, now it's shifting towards building their own products/services. Basically the guys learned how to do it and not they start spreading the wings. The only thing missing in Europe is active and mature VC sector that could match that in the US.
What surprises me is that these companies seem to either hide their French roots, and are often ignored by the academic world. When I was student in engineering school, the only companies we would hear from where the big French corps like Orange, Cap Gemini, Thales and co.
I'm sad to see that these French companies don't get the support and publicity they deserve. I hoped that the French tech thing would help these companies, but I only ever hear about startup with vague pitches founded by business school graduates which don't know a thing nor care about any "tech".
Personally I am of the philosophy that if they have to appeal to nationalism they suck as they lack any other qualifications or other features to cite first.
If I, a french worker, stay working in France, I pay French taxes and my lineage and social impact remain in France. I can't imagine how that is not a plus pour mon cher pays.
Anyway the US is really at the bottom of the list. Most people would prefer anywhere in Europe or at worse Canada and Australia.
Too bad none of the immigration numbers bear this out.
Friendly reminder that what you prefer does not necessarily generalize.
They do. The only country in Europe I can think of where the US is the favored destination is Germany.
Note that by « most people » I was implicitly referring to my people, and in a larger sense Europeans. Not humanity at large.
What are your monthly expenses?
One reason EU salaries are so low is that everyone is afraid of discussing their salaries.
In the USA there is levels.fyi with widely validated salaries.
Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especially dedicated servers are first class. In many, many situations it makes much more sense (both from costs perspective and ease of migration to other provider) to use dedicated servers and hire someone who will manage them, than throwing tons of money into Amazon pockets to get "X-large instances" that have power of old Celeron laptop (exaggerating a bit, but not that much).
Hetzner is nice. We also have Scaleway in the same category.
oh yeah, AWS is terrible with support! I have to rely on their support forum for any support as 20% of our spend for crappy support is just not feasible. I.e. I get no support whatsoever. You can trick them a bit by wrapping it up in a sales inquiry though.
Amazon, and Google, and Microsoft... don't win cloud business because people are dumb, they win it because they offer a better product.
And bonus you can write of the depreciation cost of hardware in your accounts.
To give an anecdote regarding Hetzner and them building out an S3 clone: I once asked support if there was a way for me to upgrade the 10TB max object storage solution (Hetzner StorageBox) to more than that since I had outgrown it. Simple reply: No, but you can spin up multiple storage boxes...
EDIT: I guess DO, Linode, ... are closer equivalents to Hetzner?
Or, in case their virtual servers suck (which I don't know about), running VM hosts on Hetzner servers as a service.
Regarding their virtual servers: They're great, don't get me wrong! But it's a tiny piece in the puzzle that is AWS, starting from things like VPC/Security Groups to managed services like load balancers, gateways, cross-DC availability, etc. And that's just the EC2 part.
That is one thing i fail to understand, since it goes against the lore of decentralized, packet switching, nuke proof, and so on.
It may have been prohibitively expensive for many in the not so recent past, but it isn't anymore in more and more places. Even redundantly connected.
And to be honest, some pizzeria or hairdresser could be run from some NAS.
Just search for someFAANG is down on HN, to get a feel for the ripples it causes globally when they have a hiccup.
How is that different?
US: Andy von Bechtolsheim meets with two bright guys, sees the huge potential of their algorithm, walks back to his Porsche, signs them a 100,000$ cheque, and a few years later we have a global tech giant called Google who the rest of the world either admires or is afraid of.
That's why the EU started big funding of research on cloud computing after Amazon made money with it, started big funding of research on search engine when Google made money with it, started big funding of research on AI/ML after Google made money with it ...
I predict that the EU will go all in on supporting research on quantum computing when Google sells it in a big way.
OCaml is the French SML ;)
They didn't want to build Google / Facebook / Whatever before those existed. Instead, they want to build a "French Google". Qwant is an example of that. Whatever they're trying to accomplish with Orange in the cloud business is just a "French AWS".
During the lockdown when everyone was using Zoom, some politician was unhappy that EU countries would depend on foreign technology. Solution? Build a European Zoom! I find this kind of ironic, seeing how Skype used to be European...
Do you have arguments or is it just a blank criticism? OVH for instance is built in part on OpenStack, what's so very wrong with it?
I hope they learned their mistakes and won't do them again but I fear they'll just do it the same way.
What the French government doesn't understand is that you don't create a tech giant the same way you create the TGV, the Ariane rocket or Airbus. That model worked for those giant industrial projects, but it doesn't work for tech.
We could've gone the Chinese way and just close the door to American companies, effectively forcing the local populace to use home-grown tools, but we're too nice for that. Instead we try to compete fairly in an open market, except that in practice most multinational corporations manage not to pay taxes in most European countries and they have a huge headstart so it's not really all that fair in the end.
It's easy to be cynical about it but again, tech is too important to just say "well, we lost, I guess we'll increase wine production instead". I want the EU to keep trying.
>Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies.
What alternative is there though? The government also tried to help small start ups and incubators with fiscal advantages. We have the brains, we have the means, the government is just trying to make it happen. The hope is that eventually it'll manage to seed the industry. We also do have significant tech companies in Europe today that actually do interesting work, so it's a bit unfair to say that we only have "ridiculous projects" that are "never actually doing anything remotely useful".
I'm French too, I know that we love to be cynical about everything, always see the glass half empty but it's not a very productive attitude. "MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts", as if France was suddenly the most corrupt country in the world. Look around, see what the rest of the world is doing. We're not doing that poorly.
They all seem to rally around an kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare of interacting with anything state-related... Especially orgs collecting payroll taxes... The stories I see, where you get nailed huge fines every year, for small nitpicky details. They all talk of nightmares where some admin comes and destroy their company with a single inscrutable letter...
That being said the problem with these testimonies is that you'll often hear people complain when something go wrong but nobody is going to tell you how great the French tax system is when it plays in their favor. It's... whatever the opposite of survivor bias is. People also like to deflect the blame away from them when their companies go under. When you don't have COVID-19 you have to find something else.
But I'm sure that there are things that can be improved regardless, I just wish we were more constructive about it instead of just throwing the whole system in the garbage and lighting another cigarette while looking pensively at empty space Camus-style.
And I also think part of the problem is overzealous government orgs, who I'm sure take their job very seriously, but are not encouraged to think mistakes are made with no intent to cheat, by default.
I liked the idea of a 'by default we think you made a mistake, our laws and procedures are too complex, let's settle this without penalty, with a generous paiement plan... let's wait a bit before we punish you'... I don't know...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/prime...
[2] https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0B2G2LjIu7Wbdfjha...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9kJrwkfNp4&t=1320
I'll go one step further and make conjecture that the entire Gaia-X thingie is likely from the get-go a nice little scheme to milk public money directly into the pockets of the proponents of the whole affair.
Brussels is teeming with firms whose specialty and sole purpose is fabricating bogus "projects" to squeeze EU research grant money into their and their clients pockets.
I did an internship there (before it was bought, in 2012), the river of public money had mostly dried up and I felt like the company didn't really knew what to do, even if there was some nifty tech being developed here and there.
France Payroll tax: 20% for salaries over €151,965.
USA Income tax: 42%, including State (CA) and Federal, excluding deductions
France Income Tax: 50%.
So the labour cost will be a lot higher due to payroll taxes, and the employee will take home less due to income taxes. High VAT (20% in France, 8.5% in SF) means consumer purchases are also more expensive. If you are in Paris, you're at a latitude 48.8N, SF 37.7N.
The same is true for moving to other Anglo countries: UK, Canada, Australia have similar lower-tax regimes.
France, Germany etc. are charging huge payroll, income and sales taxes to fund their huge welfare states and bureaucracies, but in the process ruining their competitiveness.
My opinion on paying taxes changed drastically after I visited the USA 2 years ago (San Fran, LA, Vegas). I was absolutely shocked by the amount of poverty I saw and I had never realised that America had such a drastically different culture to Australia.
For the 2019-2020 fiscal year, San Francisco will spend $364 million on the homeless.
I think there are other major issues besides lack of money from lack of taxes.
For one thing, when comparing per capita, you shouldn't just look at the population of San Francisco. A lot of those 8k homeless people came from other parts of the state or even other parts of the country to San Francisco. This is in large part that San Francisco has nice weather and is relatively welcoming to the homeless compared to a lot of cities and jurisdictions. Whereas in a lot of cities, homeless residents might get a lot of harrassment from the police, in San Francisico for the most part they are left alone.
So when doing per capita homelessness in San Francisco, you probably need to look at a much larger overall population that just that of San Francisco.
>As of 2014, the city was believed to have approximately 7,000 homeless residents.[55][56] As of 2015, approximately 71% of the city's homeless had housing in the city before becoming homeless, while the remaining 29% came from outside of San Francisco. This figure is up from 61% in 2013.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Franci...
That's a common bashing legend that France/Germany are taxe hell and it is mainly bullshit.
I am currently live in France with salary over 100k and my effective taxe rate is under 20%.
Both France and Germany (and almost every European country) have a gazillion way of reducing legally your taxe bill if you do it right.
Currently, some of my colleagues in Switzerland, a well known taxe heaven, pay more taxe than I do.
Private pension contributions are also tax deductible and don't actually have to be used for retirement (you can use it to fund a first house for example)
Other things that you can take off your tax bill include alimony payments, charitable donations and investments made in certain French initiatives.
So yes, there are many ways to legally reduce your tax bill quite significantly here.
- Owning a flat and rent it to a thrid party. Many fees on it are deductible.
- Investing in medium/small-sized companies.
- Making property/housing more energy efficient.
- Invest in accommodations for disabled/elderly/etc.
- Fees for the studies of your kids.
- Support/Invest in art / creative related enterprise.
- And many other that need to be checked.
That is not exceptional. Many European countries have similar taxes credit schemes.
As an individual you may be OK re. tax if you are married with children because they give strong tax advantages to those households [basically they count how many people live on your income when calculating income tax], which must be your case.
But overall tax levels are high, taxes are many and complicated, red tape works against you.
- Red tape I agree. Administrations are slow and processes cumbersome.
- Taxes I do not agree, France is in the European's average.
As I said, taxes are many, complicated, and often useless. This of course overlaps with the issue of red tape but is an issue in itself. There is a reason why so many rich French people live in Belgium or London. There is a reason why when Peugeot merges with Fiat-Chrysler the new company is headquartered in Amsterdam.
Just another example I've recently found (this is supposed to be abrogated this year): If you're a company and your turnover is greater than EUR760k annually then there is a special, additional tax on your advertising spending. There are plenty of things like that. This is bonkers.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263220/public-spending-r...
That's a well known overstatement that comes mainly from the fact Pension system, education system AND health care system are almost entirely state-owned in France. You can find the same pattern in some Scandinavian country btw, France is not an exception.
> There is a reason why so many rich French people live in Belgium or London.
You can say the same with British and American near the Leman-lake /Zug in Switzerland. Fiscal optimization is everywhere.
> There is a reason why when Peugeot merges with Fiat-Chrysler the new company is headquartered in Amsterdam.
That's not surprising, Holding companies always love specific countries for legislation/taxes reasons. That include Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Ireland. Almost every European major multi-national has an holding in one of these.
> If you're a company and your turnover is greater than EUR760k annually then there is a special, additional tax on your advertising spending.
That I totally agree with you. This is a good example of terrible case by case politic bullshit.
You seem to actually agree that France has problems with its legislation and tax in the rest of your reply...
Edit: The graph that you posted in you reply below is obviously not the same metric. It states it is "general government" spending while I mentioned "public spending". But even so, your graph shows France ahead of Germany and the UK.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
It is. Especially if you compare with the public spending/GDP collectively [1]. It is currently lower than USA and right in the average of OECD.
> You seem to actually agree that France has problems with its legislation and tax in the rest of your reply...
I totally agree with that. I disagree with the fact it is a taxe hell. In my experience, as a European who lived in several countries including France, it is in the average of Europe.
That said, I agree with you about the red tape / administrative burden.
[1]: https://data.oecd.org/chart/5Zub
Because these are definitively taxes that should be included.
If yes, I am really curious to know how this is possible
But this is a small part of the issue with tax. Regarding employment there are the taxes paid by employers, as you rightly point out, which make the cost of labour quite high in France, but there are also all those other taxes on about everything.
Only income taxes. The employer taxes are mainly pension / health insurance.
The total of the employment taxes paid in Denmark is still lower than the total in France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_in_Europe#/media/Fil...
Imagine extreme examples like everyone who signs up for unemployment insurance is freshly unemployed and once they find a job they cancel their insurance. There is no way to make it work without the government.
Knowing you can triple your salary by moving is a pretty big incentive for a lot of people.
That sounds less like innovation and more like regulation to hinder foreign companies. The US should retaliate economically if that becomes the case.
This is not about size, it's about 'getting it right' - and then having the system follow along one way or another.
Now, I agree that a more diverse landscape in that industry would be preferable, but feigning surprise is not helping one bit.
- SAP built an app on very short notice where Germans traveling abroad could register for one of the government-organized flights back to Germany. The government was satisfied with how this played out, therefore they were the first choice for building the app part.
- Telekom is already operating several backend services for the RKI (the German counterpart of the CDC) and the local health offices, so they were the first choice for building the backend part that needs to integrate with these systems.
Disclosure: I work at SAP, but not on the Corona app. I'm not referring to any internal knowledge. What I know, I know from public media.
Is the public sentiment that it's software is impossibly hard to manage and develop for based in reality?
(Disclosure the one time I had to access SAP Data via an API it felt like running against a wall of legacy tables and badly documented interactions -> My sentiment may be biased)
As for whether SAP software is "impossibly hard to manage and develop for", I cannot comment on it much since I'm working in cloud infrastructure, so I'm mostly dealing with Docker, Kubernetes, Openstack, etc.
I've seen a bit of SAP software, and IMO a good way to think about it is that an SAP system is kind of like a separate operating system. It's a completely different world. And just like I (a Unix guy) would be completely lost if you asked me to manage a Windows Server system or develop for it, same with the SAP system.
Most people only ever learn to use it in the same way most people who come in contract are only users with no deep admin/dev knowledge. So the question is if you can find someone who has deep-enough knowledge of the system to implement or configure what you need.
That's hard especially for the kernel. If you're running Linux, it's not that hard to hire someone with kernel development experience. For the SAP kernel, it's next to impossible. All these guys work for SAP.
Maybe SAP and Telekon can be arsed to gather their best if it's actually important. For Toll Collect, the usual suspects failed very hard. Much effort, buggy and very late results.
The iOS app has 3 main contributors https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-app-ios/graphs/contribu...
The Android app has one with 50+% of commit https://github.com/immuni-app/immuni-app-android/graphs/cont...
Then there are several backend. All considered it's not a small project but not a large one.
https://www.ubique.ch/index.html
I know for a fact that there was no formal tender process, it was just a matter of having the right contacts and being at the right place. Sadly connections still matter much more than experience in Germany.
Yawn, laugh at the failures.
> laugh at the failures
Talking about failures, there are so many in the UK right now that the Brits, rather than laughing, should first focus on their own internal issues, which by the way, are seriously impacting the future of Europe.
Except for Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc.
>Talking about failures, there are so many in the UK right now<
This is why it's good Britain got out sooner than later. Europe, especially France and Germany, can't handle the idea that their 'European way' of doing things hasn't kept pace with the times. It's easier for these people to attack those trying something new than to accept the possibility of change. At least catch up with SEA before taking cheap shots at the UK.
Korea and Japan, being great, ancient and ultra-modern civilizations are totally depending on the US ruler for their own defence while they have to face a very dangerous neighborhood with N-Korea, China and Russia. And they're not very happy about it... And Singapore is a dicatorial city state less populated than London or Paris (an less rich). We could have expected a more ambitious model and destiny for a nation which once ruled the world.
> can't handle the idea that their 'European way' of doing things hasn't kept pace with the times.
Good luck with keeping pace with the times with Boris Johnson, Cummings and Patel... And to get back to the initial topic : what is the plan in UK for a sovereign cloud ? Well I guess the main idea is to give all your data to US companies and abandon any ambition to control your data privacy.
> taking cheap shots at the UK
For a couple of years Britannia has been wandering in the streets with a target painted on her dress and a message: "Hey, don't you dare shoot me, EU assholes"
Australia's banks have been focused on replacing their legacy IBM mainframe core banking systems (stuff like CSC Hogan) with something more modern and non-mainframe. CBA went with SAP, and their project was very successful. (At least it appears that way from the media, and CBA employees who I've talked to tell me that it isn't just some good PR, it really has been a great success.) By contrast, other banks who went with other vendors had less success – https://www.itnews.com.au/news/suncorps-oracle-core-finally-...
Lidl's non-standard processes may well be a big part of their business success. But maybe that was a sign they shouldn't have gone with an off-the-shelf solution like SAP, and should have stuck with their legacy in-house system, or tried to build a custom next generation in-house system. And their experience isn't necessarily transferable to another business whose processes might be more standard, or who might have more flexibility to alter their processes to meet the needs of an off-the-shelf solution. And if they'd gone for some other off-the-shelf solution instead of SAP (such as Oracle or Infor), they might have had just as many problems – the more customisation heavy an ERP implementation project is, the greater the risk of failure.
[1] https://www.henricodolfing.com/2020/05/case-study-lidl-sap-d...
Europe has tech companies and independent cloud providers. Yet they seem to never grow large or fast enough to become leaders globally or even in Europe.
SAP is mentioned, which is a giant. But it is 50 years old. This is not the type of company that is going to challenge the status quo and come up with disrupting technology.
I think countries like France and Germany should really look at their tech and business environments, including universities, finance, tax, labour law, etc.
Very true, but I'm unsure why that is the case. My guess it's the country/language fragmentation, ie. companies looking mostly at suppliers from their own country. But I'm not sure that is the case.
Also another guess is that European companies buy US software but US companies don't often buy European software perhaps? Again, nothing to back that up with except for a hunch.
Especially concerning backup this bothers me a lot. I'm currently with Crashplan for Small Business and it works well. I would love to have all my data on EU servers, but where is the EU backup solution with decent backup software that allows me to store more than 2 TB of data for $3.06 per month?
I can't see how this French initiative would change this. If you look up "Gaia-x" it doesn't even come with a web page where you can buy the product or check out its pricing and conditions. It's nebulous vaporware - so typical.
Pros:
- They are really really cheap! This is not just for the VMs themselves, but their VMs come with NVMe disks and comes with uncapped networking
- Their customer support has been phenomenonal, and this was when I was on their free tier support
Cons:
- They are only limited to 2 regions, Paris and Netherlands
- I've seen their VMs become out of stock quite often
Personally though, their pros far outweigh their cons, so I would very much love to see them expand their service.
Yeah I totally want to spend my time digging around in there for "which random company can I get a crappy version of AWS Lambda from?"
I'm no fan of monocultures and US/Chinese influence but if they want it to actually work they could say "here's a terraform provider that figures it out for you". That would be nice. So far it sounds like this is just "we'll make a list of cloud providers and some of their services"
Or seen another way: "where can I get a better alternative to the suckish and overpriced AWS lambda, which also respects my data?".
Perspective. AWS is not the best everywhere.
https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Publikationen/Digitale-Welt...
Apparently more posts are coming.
More on the project: https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Dossier/gaia-x.html
More concrete specs and technologies are being built, but not ready to show.
One of the authors of the "technical architecture document" here. AMA, but I cannot share in-progress work.
And use EU competition rules to mandate the the most popular apps must be in there.
It's true that German and Latin both have case systems (accusative, nominative, etc.), but German didn't get this from Latin - they both inherited it independently from proto-Indo-European, their common ancestor. English used to have a case system too but it's been lost.
With that being said, my original post had a stupid mistake: I meant to imply that the listed countries don't speak a Latin language, not that they do.
I got that.
You are right, German is per definition not a latin language. You win 5 internet points, even though you still did not get the context of my original post, which is why you were downvoted.
> I speak five European languages including German. What you say is the opposite of the truth - English has far more Latin influence than German.
Nobody is interested in how many European languages I speak and it does not matter here, but I do speak German and English and have studied Latin. English might have more Latin words, but German feels way more like Latin than English does, because it is more structured and rule-based, has less exceptions (funnily enough because it has had less influence from French aka Latin).
It is not only about a case system, it's also gender of words, conjugation of verbs and the whole structure of sentences. English feels more linearly "one word comes after the other"-style, while German and Latin both rely more on rules and sentences can (or sometimes have to) be taken apart piece by piece. One thing they have in common is the ability to form long sentences with the predicate all the way at the end, making the listener remember the whole thing before finally getting the actual meaning.
Another important point is: You can mostly just read both Latin and German, because words are pronounced the same way they are written. We might pronounce some Latin words differently than they were originally prounounced, but since Italian behaves the same, we should be reasonably close.
There are exceptions (I'm partial to Jetbrains) but it's true overall.
You misunderstand. It isn't that Europeans are dumb. They're just people so of course there are smart ones and dumb ones same as anywhere else. I'm not claiming some racist thing that Europeans aren't competent just like I'm not claiming Americans can't build subway.
Europe itself though isn't set up to make pioneering software products. Just like America can't efficiently build subway.
Generally speaking, I dont think any of the Europeans have technical problems, I think they have a Product Placement, Marketing and Sales problem. And I think it is more or a cultural issue. ( Not saying it is a bad thing )
Even just the basics are way harder than they should be, for example the lack of a common language is already a pain to deal with.
They do. OVH is one of the biggest actors in Gaia-X.
Rather we want to give users the power to see where their data is stored and to control the use of their data if they choose to share it in an "ecosystem".
Many EU countries are scared to put their data from public administration / hospitals / ... into a cloud where lawful interception could be enforced via the US Cloud Act or similar.