One of the interesting things about real colonialism is that the Europeans had wildly better legal infrastructure, that supported wildly better economic infrastructure, which supported wildly better military technology, which supported colonies.
The proof in the pudding is that Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that, they are either going to have to do without or use foreign software.
The topic (for better or for worse) was not ethics. The question was why some countries manage to maintain colonies, some don't, and some do but then lose it over time.
Having superior infrastructure and economy is definitely a huge part of the answer, I believe the majority of it. This holds true all the way back to Roman and Byzantine empires.
Things seem to change in France though. It's relatively easy to open a startup and get tax discounts for research and innovative work. Then you fly-in employees (I'm one of them) on passeport talent which is very easy to get and lasts 4 years. Average IT salaries in Europe are much lower than in US, which is unpleasant but allows to run an IT startup with less funding and healthier economics.
However the gap to close is huge and France alone is not big enough to compete with US, it has to be the whole EU. Will see where it goes.
So you say the best thing about France is that we can hire someone else than French people. And you are kind of right: We have a thing against companies with large high-low salary difference (something like a rest of revenge against the rich), and make them simply not possible, hindering the ability to build megacorporations. Apple wouldn’t have been possible here. We simply halt growth at median size and earn a good second spot on the market. That was true at the time of Dailymotion (second of Youtube), that is true in the times of AI.
Silicon valley was largely built by immigrants too. I believe in this concept, people who have enough determination to move are already above some potential energy threshold. And this threshold despite being relatively low still cuts off a huge part of local population who didn't have to pass it. I've seen it at work both for internal and international moves.
It's very possible to be very rich in France. It's not the result of random luck that both the richest man and the richest woman in the world were french not that long ago (Bernard Arnaud and Liliane Bettencourt).
You should not buy the right wing discourse that in France rich people are too taxed and they flee blabla. This is just a way to push their right wing agenda. I'm myself quite rich and I'm doing well, so don't worry.
I agree with you, and French people have nothing against riches as long as they don’t try to evade taxation. We have plenty of rich people who just contribute to the social system and live their life.
What French people don’t like is when elites try to steal our social system.
However your example isn’t really fair to be honest : Arnault and Bettencourt are really not self-made families, they are both from historical bourgeoisie. But we do have our fair share of new millionaires from the startup ecosystem.
Yes, but that’s also the only one self made billionaire I can think of so that make him more an exception than an example.
Granted I limit myself to people who created successful businesses with real added value and mostly satisfied customers : businesses that are positive for the society.
Yes, I was just illustrating that we don't eat the riches, it's indeed not good examples of becoming rich in France (though the truth is our traditional "social elevator" is being broken more and more as free public schools are left in a worse and worse state by politicians who send all their kids to fancy private schools, which makes it harder and harder to move to the upper class)
I met the head of one of the largest French corporations once, and was pretty shocked at the degree of elitism, hierarchy, and concern about prestigious schools... SV is bottom up - you hire smart people and let them collaborate freely. The typical French approach is too silo the people from prestigious schools from the rest of the organization, so the 'smart' ones can work on ideas that the rest will implement.
It's a great way to limit the understanding of the designers (no hands in the mud) and limit the total utility of design. You end up solving the problems of the elites, only, since no one else is in the room.
It is true in some fields and in large corporations and especially in former public and semi public corporations. However in computer engineering startups for example, solving technical tests and/or a nice GitHub can open you the same doors as an engineering degree.
There are very elite engineering schools (mostly l'école polytechnique and the ENS which in kind of another beast) which are so selective that people from there are IMO in a different league from other engineers (not necessarily in a good way btw)
I’m saying the opposite of “migrants are bad”. I’m saying the French culture is not pro-business (it’s generally about bullying the locally-richer, as a proxy for the real elites, which is misguided), and the best thing about French culture is that you can create a company here and hire none of them, which is what the top comment said.
That’s a myth. Ultra-rich and rich people are as powerful in France than anywhere else.
The myth "French people eat the rich" probably comes from the fact that our system discourages social upheaval.
It’s not the French people but the elites in power who don’t like people being rich if they are not from the same cast (prestigious schools).
French people only eat the richest when they want to steal our social benefits, and even that is becoming more and more rare since most media are now owned by billionaires and are spreading neoliberal narrative.
The issue is not that Apple is not possible here, but more that it is possible there and we allow them to operate normally in Europe (though things are starting to change on this front, as more laws are targeting them). Corporations that are so large have financial power that can threaten democracies, and have an overall negative impact on economy and innovation by destroying/preventing fair competition, and we should treat them as such threat/problem.
Immigrants do not care about the presence of rich people. French people do (a lot), and they’re systematic in getting rid of them. So French people are kind of undesirable when you build a company in France and the best thing about France is, indeed, that you can hire people from somewhere else.
As a European, I don't think it's just the law that matters here, though that's certainly a problem. There are two other issues, namely immigration and market size.
The underappreciated thing about the US immigration system is the fact that you usually don't even need it. If you're a Silicon Valley startup, you have a pool of 330 million people to hire from, and they all live in your country, speak your language and are part of the same culture. Yes, the EU has free movement, but moving from Warsaw to Berlin, two European cities that are pretty close to each other, is going to be far bigger of an ordeal than moving from New York, Massachusetts, or even Texas or Alabama to San Francisco. Maybe not from a legal perspective, but definitely from a language / cultural / "how do I go to a doctor here" perspective. If you need very specific talent, like people with expertise in building distributed databases or self-driving cars, you're far more likely to find them amongst 330 million Americans than amongst, let's say, 2 million Latvians. This causes network effects to kick in, making America even more of a "magnet" for talented people.
The other issue is basically the same problem, except going the other way. In the US, releasing a product means releasing it to 330 million prospective customers at once. In most industries, if you release your product in English and can accept credit cards, most people that you'd want as your early customers can already buy it. This is not true in Europe, every country has its own language and its own take on online payments. If your startup touches the physical world or legal system in any way (think easier invoicing for small businesses, 21st-century software for hotel management, an easy website builder for private medical practices etc), this is even more of an issue. The problem you're solving might not even exist in some countries (maybe their government already provides a good app for invoicing), and where it does exist, it's hard to figure out its nuances without speaking the right language. This basically means those kinds of startups usually work on a local level, not a European level.
>Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft
Nah, what hinders software development at that scale is literally just... scale and network effects. Europe has a significantly better legal infrastructure than Russia or China (which routinely kills entire sectors for random reasons) but Europe is not a homogenous isolated market of hundreds of millions people speaking the same language. That's literally it.
Looking at it another way, what's the American competition for Microsoft? You're just one company ahead of Europe in most cases, and most of them ironically sit in a state that looks like Europe in regulatory terms. If the vast majority of American states can't produce much competition, most of them extremely lax in terms of the legal environment, that's an indicator that this isn't what actually matters.
> Looking at it another way, what's the American competition for Microsoft?
Yeah this is another point that people seem to forget
We're talking about 2 or 3 cities in the US that punch way above their level. But we don't hear too often how there isn't a competitive cloud made in Boston or where's the FB competitor from Minnesota etc
"Gee, these industrial clusters are super rare and delicate! We have to make the conditions as favourable for them as possible"..
"This company is making lots of money but I disagree how they are doing it! We should force them to behave in a way that is more in line with how everyone else does things. All these big companies are the same and the wealth isn't going to go anywhere".
Europe puts a barriers in place that will kill off an entrepreneur's dream here or there. They only have to kill one or two key companies to do trillions of dollars of self-harm (which is what they appear to have done). In fact, everyone does this just to a greater or lesser degree; for example we can see how much prosperity China's manufacturing created with less blockers than in the USA leading to a few key industrial clusters.
Also; there might exist a phenomenon such that MS products allow "consolidation" of influence/power in big/old organisations. For example, Slack would need to be a bottom-up initiative in most organisations, whereas MS Teams is a top-down initiative.
MS Teams is lower risk from the perspective of management as it creates less of an alternative "center-of-gravity" for power.
Maybe it's more common in Europe for prestigious positions/roles (as opposed to compensation) to be used as reward/incentive (as opposed to a tool for change). Not sure.
> Looking at it another way, what's the American competition for Microsoft?
Computers: Apple and Google (Chromebooks are big in education). Server operating systems: various flavors of Linux, but I guess basically IBM since they bought Red Hat. Cloud services: Amazon. Office software: Google. Databases: Oracle. Name some slice or segment of all of these companies and there’s usually (though not always) a direct American competitor worth naming in the same breath even though each has their own specialty and none compete in their totality with each other.
Are Russia and China actually worse on legal infrastructure when it comes to building software? Because I seem to use more Chinese software than European ones.
I think you need to look into what favoured the creation of MS or Apple in the first place
MS is from Seattle but it didn't start there
Culture and investment/market conditions (sure, with the help of laws) play a much stronger part on that
You couldn't get them without available hardware and without a market willing to experiment.
And you couldn't have that without strong CS/EE departments that had strong investment in the decades prior that had spun a whole semiconductor industry
And you wouldn't have had that without some welcoming immigration laws (at the decades prior) and some worldwide conflicts neither and a specific country that touches both main oceans and has decided that farther away areas might be safer for some developments.
If you want to understand why laws in France are the way they are you need to take a look at what happened in the past 250 yrs more or less.
Everyone wants to get a tech sector like California but insist on having non competition agreements being either valid or conditionally valid meaning there is a gray area that stifles innovation.
Innovation by theft is how Hollywood got its start. too far from New Jersey for the patent protections of Thomas Edison to be enforced, independent filmmakers were able to make movies without paying royalties
The complaint that because Europe doesn’t support monopolies as well as America that makes them “behind” is likely the silliest argument I will read today.
Yet, here it is the top comment.
It reflects strongly on the American audience here.
Well, it gives the USA tremendous power, no? Imagine Microsoft would prevent Europe to access Azure and M365 tomorrow...
It creates jobs in the USA, which is also good.
So of course people will defend that.
In my opinion, what they fail to understand is that this power doesn't have any significant impact on their personal lives. It favours only those who are already in power.
It reflects the importance of software. It's not like Europe foregoes using this software. No, we just use the American/Chinese software instead and become dependent on it.
Not every European country is the same, the rules and regulations vastly differ.
It is true that the EU is "well regulated", but other countries with other legal frameworks and business culture do exist.
Even within the EU, doing work and business can be very different.
My personal favorites to work in are the Netherlands and Switzerland.
Easy going people, flat hierarchies, cooperative and forgiving of mistakes, though YMMV as always.
The Elephant in the room: all the different languages in Europe and it is only recently (past 10-20 years) that English proficiency has become high enough. This made communication difficult and still makes it very difficult to get people to move to another country. (edit: you need to know the local language to get any kind of social life).
Compare getting someone to move from Chicago to San Francisco (same language, same culture) versus getting someone to move from Norway to Italy (completely different language, very different culture).
So USA had a much larger effective work force when a company wanted to hire developers and much easier marketing of the products.
Europe had a lot of computer hardware companies in the 1980's but they were never able to capture the full European market. So they died out due to lack of scale.
There is also the problem of every single country wanting to be a king, so there was no political will to say "we need to join forces and create one single SV" (or one single unix company).
Still today EU can't create an European Silicon Valley as you don't get a SV by saying "we want a SV here", you get it by saying "everywhere else is NOT going to be a SV".
If you don't think any other country (not just in Europe) wouldn't kill for the next big American big tech company to have been founded within its borders instead, I don't know what to tell you.
so terrible product, that the whole world use them and apple is the largest tax payer in the world. These are some of the most innovative companies out there.
I am mesmerized at how much the comments analyze Europe under the perspective of the United States, eg we need a Silicon Valley otherwise we don't exist from a technological standpoint, we should become an homogeneous market etc.
We are not the USA and I feel fine with it, we are still able to figure the most advanced technologies on our own
The challenge with Microsoft in Europe is that it is so convenient, it doesn’t make business sense to consider alternatives. See how easily MS won market share over Slack (MS Teams) and PowerBI (Tableau / Qlik). They have such a big bundle of services that any single player has to be either amazingly good, or specialized, to win maybe 1-2% of market share. The only way I see Europe doing something about it is antitrust laws that break the bundles.
The problem is that when data is stored in the cloud, I don't have full control over it. My data hold as hostage against me. We need to break up data storage from data processing. Imagine if all your data was stored in a secure, independent location, like a large vault. You could then choose which services could access your data, allowing you to use multiple services simultaneously. Better, if this will be on browser side, where I have full control.
IMHO, small independent providers should unite and develop something like File API, but for web (for a NAS with web interface).
That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF.
Most of Words featured aren't used anyway because most people don't know them.
The rest is some Excel tools somebody once created which heavily rely on VBA but nobody can support them because they guy who made them already has left the company.
> That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF.
PDF embedding attacks have been a thing for years.
Personally I think that the culture of sending everything as a Word or Excel attachment has a lot to do with the dominance of MS office but if you can't avoid Office-like applications the other options are even worse.
Yes. Data can and will be used against people wether it's petty scamming or political/war operations. If there is uncontrolled prolifiration of personal data it makes this much easier to exploit
Hi, I work for Microsoft (just a dev), all (most?) our apps are actually designed to work with third party compliant hosting with an open protocol called WOPI.
So for example you can use Excel online with Sharepoint/OneDrive (two different hosts btw) but you can also use many maany third party hosts.
Additionally third party tools can programmatically access the first party hosts (like sharepoint).
I don't like Microsoft-esque APIs and the company sure has issues here and there but I doubt you'd get the same level of data privacy with a startup (e.g. everything goes through privacy review, security review, devs can't access customer data, data is separated by region etc)
That doesn't seem to be accurate. [0] [1] Microsoft consistently does mistakes that put its customers at risk, like being unable to secure their development environment so that when encryption keys leak in a badly sanitized dump into the dev environment they are almost immediately misused by other state actors against the US federal agencies. [2] How can you trust anything that comes out of the development if you cannot be reasonably sure about the security of it? And we cant really trust Microsoft reports either because of "Inaccurate public statements" (euphemism for lying). [0]
And if you argue with Andres Freund and the XZ discovery recently, he is really a Citus guy. Yes, that is now part of Microsoft but I guess you get my point of him not being directly hired by Microsoft AFAIK.
Microsoft as an organization could and should really do a lot more for security and privacy than they do. But first the culture would need to be that there actually is a lot of low hanging fruit instead of searching for excuses. [3] For instance, Windows Updates could be more reliable, predictable in how long they run and much faster overall. Windows could detect and stop ransomware much better. Microsoft could make Windows Server Core cheaper and have a separate more expensive license for the "full fat" Windows Server with desktop services. That would put some pressure on organizations to do the right thing and reduce the attack surface area.
It's not about data, it's about being pre-installed in the OS, being first to market, being the default at school, bundled as an office pack with other tools, networks effects as people already know it it's easier to continue to use it etc. Where the data is stored is secondary.
Most companies have a solution for network storage or cloud storage and most software will function with it. For personal use most people use their local hard disk and others use a cloud provider as a network drive. Or whatever proprietary storage solution the software supports.
ONLYOFFICE supports this. The webservice they host supports different "storage backends", which can be something they offer, or Dropbox, or your own Nextcloud instance, etc.
"Storage backend" is not a "storage frontend" I'm talking about.
Example scenario:
As an office user Alice, I want to open documented XXX stored on NAS Foo at Foo.net in application Bar at bar.com.
To do that, in application Bar user clicks on "Open File" button, then in dialog she selects "NAS" tab, then selects Foo, then selects file XXX.
When the file is selected, NAS Foo forms a one-time URL for the file, like davs://foo.net/u/alice/d/xxx.docx?otp=1234567890abcdef. This URL is invisible to user, unless she explicitly asks for it.
Application Bar receives this URL from the user browser and tries to open it.
NAS Foo shows popup to user about "Application Bar at Bar.com [LOGO] tries to open document xxx.docx. Allow? [O]nce, [A]llways, [C]ancel".
When Alice presses Once, a temporary password is generated and securely shared between Foo.net and Bar.com for the next 12h.
Now, application Bar.com can read and write document xxx.docx freely. At each read, NAS stores a record in a log about access to the document. At each write, NAS creates a new revision of the document and backups it.
Application Bar.com has no access to other files except for those selected by Alice. NAS Foo automatically revokes access of Bar.com to all files after a period of inactivity (month?).
In this case, service Bar.com cannot force Alice to pay for service just because their app contains some important documents in storage. Bar.com cannot pass those document to third party actor, like government, police, etc.
The convenience and business sense argument could make sense if the value of a communication platform was small and close to its cost. But it's not. Similarly as it doesn't make business sense to rent the cheapest or easiest to lease office exactly because a good office to your company is more valuable than its cost.
People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality, effecting a large drag on communication. It's also incompatible with effective organizational culture (eg calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions, information is siloed to only meeting participants, cooperative doc editing corrupts and loses data, sharepoint is a psychological horror game etc). Its usage is a useful signal about an organisation though.
And of course it's a giant red target from security POV, as is obvious the headlines on the MS phishing epidemics and regular news on the gaping slapstick level security holes ([0] [1] [2] etc) in the load bearing part of company security (identity, and email password reset channel).
> People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality
People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office (but I personally hate LibreOffice).
> calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions
What? Where? Is this about the list of other calendars defaulting to showing people under the same manager?
> information is siloed to only meeting participants
You can configure it to show meeting titles to everyone (the company I work for expects everyone to do so), and the new Outlook even showed me the meeting description and participants when peeking at someone else's calendar.
I absolutely cannot stand Office. Word is basically acceptable, but I refuse to use PowerPoint unless absolutely forced to. The major problem though is that every single component is blighted by the Ribbon, which among all the bad things that Microsoft has done is the worst.
> People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office
They absolutely do. Many people hate the office suite in its entirety, lots of people hate some program in particular (I particularly despise Word). Most people are indifferent and have accepted that $Program is what they are using in $Job
This is worthy of some sources, no? People on HN, technology professionals, might hate office. But we're not majority and I've never seen researched/polled numbers about hating office...
I doubt that there are any reputable sources you could find that aren't shaped by bias (of MS or competitors). However, I have worked in a non-IT related job for years and about 90% of complaints about software we use would fit into one of two buckets
1.) Microsoft Office
2.) SAP
I know this is merely an anecdote, but it aligns with my personal experience + with the experiences of friends and family
People don't hate Teams. It is competitive enough against Zoom and Google Meet (which is the worst of the three) for people to use it for video conferencing.
As a slack competitor Teams is arguably worse, but for people who haven't used Slack the difference is hard to justify switching.
You don't hate teams. I hate teams. Because it's ultra-slow and bloated, and used to eat 1.5 CPU cores all the time until I threw it permanently on a browser window. And now it doesn't notify me when other people send me a message.
Slack is just shit, and being just shit makes it an order of magnitude better than the trainwreck that is teams.
The end of Microsoft in Europe will be its poor security.
These massive integrated bundles of fluffy convenience are
cybersecurity death-traps that leak personal data like a rusty
bucket. Firms are rightly getting very nervous about massive fines,
and blaming MS is not a get-out. With Microsoft unable to reign-in the
complexity of their own products they'll lose market share to smaller,
more specialised but more secure systems.
Ironically the path to better security for Microsoft would be to
partition/split their own products as the anti-monopolists would have
them do.
The EU has compelled companies to switch to Microsoft — yes, you read that correctly. The EU introduced the GDPR law, which significantly increased the complexity of using third-party services. To minimize this complexity, companies found it more straightforward to consolidate their services with Microsoft, as it facilitates easier compliance with EU GDPR regulations.
Once again, we can thank the EU for pressuring companies to use Microsoft products.
That seems like checkbox-compliance theater. Also doesn't seem to be supported by official findings. There are notions that actually you cannot be fully GDPR compliant with Microsoft 365. [0] Therefore state organizations sometimes do migrate to different offerings. [1]
Asia India and Africa don't care so much about licensing. Many companies have people working on their own pc. They'll work with pirated software and send files around by email. Usually there is a lot less infrastructure
Come on, let's not go down this rabbit hole. We have real problems in this world: WW3, Climate Crisis. The West has to be comfortable trusting each other.
Microsoft is by the way more trust worthy than European governments!
Yes, I don't trust the state's either. But we have to keep things in proportion. Europe can't throw its efforts and forces now at trying to become independent from the US.
We first have to defeat Russia, China, etc. Become independent of them and even defeat them before we start trying to peel off dependency on the US.
US is an ally, and in the near future we have to rely on them. That's it.
On the contrary, that's cold hard truth. The US repeatedly forces foreign companies into obedience for US companies' profit. For instance, the US forced Alstom to sell its power branch to GE by actually taking hostage one of Alstom directors into high security prison. They repeatedly menaced an punished foreign companies to force them to comply to US policy.
We are all looking pretty nervously at the possibility of Trump's return. He'd be definitely willing to throw us under the Putin bus for a couple million USD laundered through his golf club or hotel bookings.
And you wouldn't actually revolt and do anything about that. So, on a whole, not really allies. Just other people who individually may or may not be our friends.
I don't support Trump, I don't like Trump; however, although Trump says a lot of shit, he's no where near the level of Putin or Xi in terms of what he actually does. Even under Trump, America would still definitely definitely be an ally.
Trump does not understand or accept democracy. Yes, on that Jan 6th democracy won, but there is no guarantee it will end the same way next time. Roughly 50% of the voters don't seem to have a problem with abandoning democratic traditions.
Trump has thankfully not been able to do much, however the Bush family has. They were worse than Xi or even Putin (if you take a non-European point of view).
(Arguably, Trump, Xi and even Putin still have "potential" left.)
What viable European alternatives to Microsoft Office are there? Google Docs is also a US-based cloud service. LibreOffice is ugly, its UX is sometimes worse than Office 2003 (especially Calc, where pivot tables have to be blindly configured in a modal dialog, and there is no equivalent to the Table feature from Excel), and they still haven't implemented automatically downloading updates.
LibreOffice isn't going to win any beauty pageants, but it does everything you need in an office setting.
Some specialists can't live without MS Excel and all of its extensions (banking), but that's not the common case. Common case is word processing, slide presentations, and task management (in spreadsheets).
> Some multi-billion-dollar businesses are run from Excel
And that's a problem because it isn't even particularly great software
[0,1,2]. Of course all complex calculation tools have bugs, but
compare the code quality of Excel with something like Matlab or R and
it looks amateurish.
My point is really that it could easily be the norm though.
There's nothing hard about writing plain text files. You just need to write good English and have some feel for text as a medium.
In some way there's less to learn there than in word, where you can bold things, insert images, etc.
People outside this niche have even less need for complicated functionality. A sales team that writes in word could have written in plaintext, and have had an organised picture of all their doings, with little details, that will eventually be machine-digestable. The only problem is if you want to write mathematics, but then you have LaTeX.
An in-between solution, if you want things a little bit conventional, is markdown.
>My point is really that it could easily be the norm though.
It couldn't and the proof is in the pudding. If it were that easy as you make it seem, we would have done it a long time ago.
Non-tech people hate switching away form office since that's the only thing they know how to use comfortably, especially to janky stuff like latex that's not WYSIWYG and needs to be compiled. Nobody is gonna use that shit.
And non-tech people are the ones who sign the checks that make the purchasing decisions, and those people hate any kind of friction, hence why companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc are so successful.
Your view on things rings like that infamous HN comment form 2007 saying why Dropbox is a useless invention doomed to fail since we can host files locally on git and easily spin up a FTP server to share them if we want to.
Arguably, most people I have encountered don't actually know how to use Microsoft Office in any kind of depth but it is a familiar environment for them. It is like most people don't actually drive a car well as supported by car accident statistics.
Most work probably shouldn't be done in the Office suite but rather some information system copying the formalized process. Most text processing should probably decouple content from form a lot more and there certainly are people that do just that but it is not the norm.
I tested the free version, their Excel equivalent seems fine, although with some strange limitations in the free version (you can edit Tables in Excel documents, but not create new ones, as creating is a paid feature).
I tested this with LibreOffice 24.2.1.2, and it’s far, far from what Excel tables do. The most basic features of an Excel table (Insert -> Table) are (a) the ability to reference cells in the same row by the name of the column, (b) displaying table headers in the chrome when scrolling, (c) auto-completing formulae until the end of the table, (d) pretty formatting, (e) auto-filtering configured by default. I can’t see any of those with the ranges in LO.
ONLYOFFICE comes to mind, although the "Europeanness" of it can be up for debate. Promises pretty good compatibility with MS formats! AGPL licensed too, which I think is a plus.
> Based in Latvia, OnlyOffice owner Ascensio System SIA was a subsidiary of Russian-based New Communication Technologies.[2] Due to EU economic sanctions targeting Russia, European organizations that used the commercial version of OnlyOffice were prohibited from doing so.[3]
Linux on the desktop is utopian. Even in 2024, it is plagued with millions of bugs. I can't use Linux for an hour on a desktop PC without encountering some issue. On the other hand, MacBooks and Windows PCs just work seamlessly, without any problems whatsoever. This is solely the fault of Linux developers, who, instead of developing one system well, create dozens of half-baked package managers, desktop environments, and other components. Unfortunately, none of these work well.
"Since the cocky, self absorbed, nerds at Canonical have decided to rotate their logo 90 degrees clockwise in the 'about' menu of Nautilus we have decided enough is enough and will fork the entire distro. We are pleased to announce <abc...xyz>buntu fork #87126378215!"
As someone that learned UNIX when Microsoft still sold Xenix, and used multiple flavours of it, was a Linux Journal subscriber since its early days, I occasionanly go down into one of those Desktop Linux rabbit holes only to repent myself afterwards.
Latest adventure an UEFI only motherboard (no BIOS backwards compatibility available), that no matter what, refuses to reckognise SSD NVMe that hold Linux instead of Windows.
Yes, one can complain the pesky OEMs still not being Linux Desktop friendly after 30 years, which in pratice doesn't matter to the regular consumer.
Windows on the desktop is dystopian. It works seamlessly when it's not installing candy crush pretending it's a security update, or when it decides to search the web for that word document you wrote yesterday, or when it decides your browser is bad because it's not edge.
So yeah, it works flawlessly, but only for Microsoft.
Linux on the desktop is a reality. I'm on one, it's my main OS, I even play my games on it.
It having bugs is nothing special. Other systems have them as well.
Windows is not seamless at all. And if you'd like to debug, you're SOL, because often it's not helpful at all.
The state of things is not up to developers. Developers are part of a project, and the projects are part of a culture. Companies have projects and culture too, producing the same effects, for example take a look at how many UI styles Windows has, or how Microsoft's one project supports and contributes to open source, while another part of them actively destroys it.
It's nice, but there's probably nothing new there for your typical HN reader (unless if they're young I guess ?)
It's also dangerously focused on Microsoft and complacent with "cloud" software. Google has already been winning their wrestling match over desktop computing for some time now, they shouldn't be helped. And with shittier software as a result.
Also while using "Microsoft sounds" in the music is cute, I can't help but think that it's a bit like using Nazi music (Wagner ??) in a documentary critical of Nazis...
It is focused on Microsoft because it is about the relationship between states and the European Commission with Microsoft. They show that Microsoft does not follow the same procedures like 'normal' tenders. Also MS employees have .gov email addresses and the states are not allowed to show how much money they pay M$.
It is not biased against Microsoft. It is about Microsoft based on journalism and decent research.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadThe proof in the pudding is that Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that, they are either going to have to do without or use foreign software.
Most wealth is not a metric for how ethical a place is. At a certain point it is negative inference.
Having superior infrastructure and economy is definitely a huge part of the answer, I believe the majority of it. This holds true all the way back to Roman and Byzantine empires.
They all lose them over time, or are themselves dissolved and absorbed.
However the gap to close is huge and France alone is not big enough to compete with US, it has to be the whole EU. Will see where it goes.
You should not buy the right wing discourse that in France rich people are too taxed and they flee blabla. This is just a way to push their right wing agenda. I'm myself quite rich and I'm doing well, so don't worry.
What French people don’t like is when elites try to steal our social system.
However your example isn’t really fair to be honest : Arnault and Bettencourt are really not self-made families, they are both from historical bourgeoisie. But we do have our fair share of new millionaires from the startup ecosystem.
Granted I limit myself to people who created successful businesses with real added value and mostly satisfied customers : businesses that are positive for the society.
It's a great way to limit the understanding of the designers (no hands in the mud) and limit the total utility of design. You end up solving the problems of the elites, only, since no one else is in the room.
There are very elite engineering schools (mostly l'école polytechnique and the ENS which in kind of another beast) which are so selective that people from there are IMO in a different league from other engineers (not necessarily in a good way btw)
That’s a myth. Ultra-rich and rich people are as powerful in France than anywhere else.
The myth "French people eat the rich" probably comes from the fact that our system discourages social upheaval.
It’s not the French people but the elites in power who don’t like people being rich if they are not from the same cast (prestigious schools).
French people only eat the richest when they want to steal our social benefits, and even that is becoming more and more rare since most media are now owned by billionaires and are spreading neoliberal narrative.
Airbus and Dassault are doing fine because they have well defined stable markets and (probably) government funding.
Yeah why would anyone dislike the idea of a run of the mill techbro making 50x more money than the janitor.
I also don't see what this observation has to do with hiring immigrants or not.
The underappreciated thing about the US immigration system is the fact that you usually don't even need it. If you're a Silicon Valley startup, you have a pool of 330 million people to hire from, and they all live in your country, speak your language and are part of the same culture. Yes, the EU has free movement, but moving from Warsaw to Berlin, two European cities that are pretty close to each other, is going to be far bigger of an ordeal than moving from New York, Massachusetts, or even Texas or Alabama to San Francisco. Maybe not from a legal perspective, but definitely from a language / cultural / "how do I go to a doctor here" perspective. If you need very specific talent, like people with expertise in building distributed databases or self-driving cars, you're far more likely to find them amongst 330 million Americans than amongst, let's say, 2 million Latvians. This causes network effects to kick in, making America even more of a "magnet" for talented people.
The other issue is basically the same problem, except going the other way. In the US, releasing a product means releasing it to 330 million prospective customers at once. In most industries, if you release your product in English and can accept credit cards, most people that you'd want as your early customers can already buy it. This is not true in Europe, every country has its own language and its own take on online payments. If your startup touches the physical world or legal system in any way (think easier invoicing for small businesses, 21st-century software for hotel management, an easy website builder for private medical practices etc), this is even more of an issue. The problem you're solving might not even exist in some countries (maybe their government already provides a good app for invoicing), and where it does exist, it's hard to figure out its nuances without speaking the right language. This basically means those kinds of startups usually work on a local level, not a European level.
Nah, what hinders software development at that scale is literally just... scale and network effects. Europe has a significantly better legal infrastructure than Russia or China (which routinely kills entire sectors for random reasons) but Europe is not a homogenous isolated market of hundreds of millions people speaking the same language. That's literally it.
Looking at it another way, what's the American competition for Microsoft? You're just one company ahead of Europe in most cases, and most of them ironically sit in a state that looks like Europe in regulatory terms. If the vast majority of American states can't produce much competition, most of them extremely lax in terms of the legal environment, that's an indicator that this isn't what actually matters.
Yeah this is another point that people seem to forget
We're talking about 2 or 3 cities in the US that punch way above their level. But we don't hear too often how there isn't a competitive cloud made in Boston or where's the FB competitor from Minnesota etc
"Gee, these industrial clusters are super rare and delicate! We have to make the conditions as favourable for them as possible"..
"This company is making lots of money but I disagree how they are doing it! We should force them to behave in a way that is more in line with how everyone else does things. All these big companies are the same and the wealth isn't going to go anywhere".
Europe puts a barriers in place that will kill off an entrepreneur's dream here or there. They only have to kill one or two key companies to do trillions of dollars of self-harm (which is what they appear to have done). In fact, everyone does this just to a greater or lesser degree; for example we can see how much prosperity China's manufacturing created with less blockers than in the USA leading to a few key industrial clusters.
MS Teams is lower risk from the perspective of management as it creates less of an alternative "center-of-gravity" for power.
Maybe it's more common in Europe for prestigious positions/roles (as opposed to compensation) to be used as reward/incentive (as opposed to a tool for change). Not sure.
Computers: Apple and Google (Chromebooks are big in education). Server operating systems: various flavors of Linux, but I guess basically IBM since they bought Red Hat. Cloud services: Amazon. Office software: Google. Databases: Oracle. Name some slice or segment of all of these companies and there’s usually (though not always) a direct American competitor worth naming in the same breath even though each has their own specialty and none compete in their totality with each other.
MS is from Seattle but it didn't start there
Culture and investment/market conditions (sure, with the help of laws) play a much stronger part on that
You couldn't get them without available hardware and without a market willing to experiment.
And you couldn't have that without strong CS/EE departments that had strong investment in the decades prior that had spun a whole semiconductor industry
And you wouldn't have had that without some welcoming immigration laws (at the decades prior) and some worldwide conflicts neither and a specific country that touches both main oceans and has decided that farther away areas might be safer for some developments.
If you want to understand why laws in France are the way they are you need to take a look at what happened in the past 250 yrs more or less.
Everyone wants to get a tech sector like California but insist on having non competition agreements being either valid or conditionally valid meaning there is a gray area that stifles innovation.
Innovation by theft? Well, California is a very special outlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause
Non competes are good for the big incubent companies, but bad for the economy and the workers.
You're phrasing it in a way that makes this scale seem like a good thing. Is it?
I'm not convinced that the scale of supranational grow-at-all-costs uncontrollable corporations is good
Yet, here it is the top comment.
It reflects strongly on the American audience here.
It creates jobs in the USA, which is also good.
So of course people will defend that.
In my opinion, what they fail to understand is that this power doesn't have any significant impact on their personal lives. It favours only those who are already in power.
Depends how much they pay.
Even within the EU, doing work and business can be very different.
My personal favorites to work in are the Netherlands and Switzerland. Easy going people, flat hierarchies, cooperative and forgiving of mistakes, though YMMV as always.
Compare getting someone to move from Chicago to San Francisco (same language, same culture) versus getting someone to move from Norway to Italy (completely different language, very different culture).
So USA had a much larger effective work force when a company wanted to hire developers and much easier marketing of the products.
Europe had a lot of computer hardware companies in the 1980's but they were never able to capture the full European market. So they died out due to lack of scale.
There is also the problem of every single country wanting to be a king, so there was no political will to say "we need to join forces and create one single SV" (or one single unix company).
Still today EU can't create an European Silicon Valley as you don't get a SV by saying "we want a SV here", you get it by saying "everywhere else is NOT going to be a SV".
What has Apple and Microsoft done for Americans ? They pay little to no taxes, they spy on everyone, they provide increasingly terrible products...
IMHO, small independent providers should unite and develop something like File API, but for web (for a NAS with web interface).
Are we forgetting decades of office suite incompatibility? The main reason most european companies use Office365 over alternatives is:
1. Fear of retraining
2. Fear of untrodden path
but most crucially:
3. Fear of incompatibility with other businesses
That's the reason why malware has it easy because companies still send office documents that should be a PDF.
Most of Words featured aren't used anyway because most people don't know them.
The rest is some Excel tools somebody once created which heavily rely on VBA but nobody can support them because they guy who made them already has left the company.
Have seen that more than once.
PDF embedding attacks have been a thing for years.
Personally I think that the culture of sending everything as a Word or Excel attachment has a lot to do with the dominance of MS office but if you can't avoid Office-like applications the other options are even worse.
So for example you can use Excel online with Sharepoint/OneDrive (two different hosts btw) but you can also use many maany third party hosts.
Additionally third party tools can programmatically access the first party hosts (like sharepoint).
I don't like Microsoft-esque APIs and the company sure has issues here and there but I doubt you'd get the same level of data privacy with a startup (e.g. everything goes through privacy review, security review, devs can't access customer data, data is separated by region etc)
And MS tries to force you into the cloud.
And if you argue with Andres Freund and the XZ discovery recently, he is really a Citus guy. Yes, that is now part of Microsoft but I guess you get my point of him not being directly hired by Microsoft AFAIK.
Microsoft as an organization could and should really do a lot more for security and privacy than they do. But first the culture would need to be that there actually is a lot of low hanging fruit instead of searching for excuses. [3] For instance, Windows Updates could be more reliable, predictable in how long they run and much faster overall. Windows could detect and stop ransomware much better. Microsoft could make Windows Server Core cheaper and have a separate more expensive license for the "full fat" Windows Server with desktop services. That would put some pressure on organizations to do the right thing and reduce the attack surface area.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/micro... [1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/chaosdb-how-we-hacked-thousands-of-a... [2] https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-tec... [3] https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/it-takes-a-phd-to-develop-t...
Most companies have a solution for network storage or cloud storage and most software will function with it. For personal use most people use their local hard disk and others use a cloud provider as a network drive. Or whatever proprietary storage solution the software supports.
Example scenario:
As an office user Alice, I want to open documented XXX stored on NAS Foo at Foo.net in application Bar at bar.com.
To do that, in application Bar user clicks on "Open File" button, then in dialog she selects "NAS" tab, then selects Foo, then selects file XXX.
When the file is selected, NAS Foo forms a one-time URL for the file, like davs://foo.net/u/alice/d/xxx.docx?otp=1234567890abcdef. This URL is invisible to user, unless she explicitly asks for it.
Application Bar receives this URL from the user browser and tries to open it.
NAS Foo shows popup to user about "Application Bar at Bar.com [LOGO] tries to open document xxx.docx. Allow? [O]nce, [A]llways, [C]ancel".
When Alice presses Once, a temporary password is generated and securely shared between Foo.net and Bar.com for the next 12h.
Now, application Bar.com can read and write document xxx.docx freely. At each read, NAS stores a record in a log about access to the document. At each write, NAS creates a new revision of the document and backups it.
Application Bar.com has no access to other files except for those selected by Alice. NAS Foo automatically revokes access of Bar.com to all files after a period of inactivity (month?).
In this case, service Bar.com cannot force Alice to pay for service just because their app contains some important documents in storage. Bar.com cannot pass those document to third party actor, like government, police, etc.
People hate Teams/Office because it's so low quality, effecting a large drag on communication. It's also incompatible with effective organizational culture (eg calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions, information is siloed to only meeting participants, cooperative doc editing corrupts and loses data, sharepoint is a psychological horror game etc). Its usage is a useful signal about an organisation though.
And of course it's a giant red target from security POV, as is obvious the headlines on the MS phishing epidemics and regular news on the gaping slapstick level security holes ([0] [1] [2] etc) in the load bearing part of company security (identity, and email password reset channel).
[0] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-critical-...
[1] https://www.hkcert.org/security-bulletin/microsoft-exchange-...
[2] https://digital.nhs.uk/cyber-alerts/2021/cc-3977
People hate Office? I don't think I've seen any significant hate for Microsoft Office (but I personally hate LibreOffice).
> calendar has hardcoded top-down management assumptions
What? Where? Is this about the list of other calendars defaulting to showing people under the same manager?
> information is siloed to only meeting participants
You can configure it to show meeting titles to everyone (the company I work for expects everyone to do so), and the new Outlook even showed me the meeting description and participants when peeking at someone else's calendar.
They absolutely do. Many people hate the office suite in its entirety, lots of people hate some program in particular (I particularly despise Word). Most people are indifferent and have accepted that $Program is what they are using in $Job
1.) Microsoft Office
2.) SAP
I know this is merely an anecdote, but it aligns with my personal experience + with the experiences of friends and family
The more sophisticated your documents get the more you hate Office.
As a slack competitor Teams is arguably worse, but for people who haven't used Slack the difference is hard to justify switching.
Slack is just shit, and being just shit makes it an order of magnitude better than the trainwreck that is teams.
Yes, hate is a soft word in this case. We despise it, we wish its creators burned in hell together with the management who chose it.
Teams is the opposite of engineering, is the bully boy around the corner.
To call Teams a shit, means giving it consistence, which it doesn't have.
These massive integrated bundles of fluffy convenience are cybersecurity death-traps that leak personal data like a rusty bucket. Firms are rightly getting very nervous about massive fines, and blaming MS is not a get-out. With Microsoft unable to reign-in the complexity of their own products they'll lose market share to smaller, more specialised but more secure systems.
Ironically the path to better security for Microsoft would be to partition/split their own products as the anti-monopolists would have them do.
Once again, we can thank the EU for pressuring companies to use Microsoft products.
[0] https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/pre... [1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/germanys_northernmost...
>Therefore state organizations sometimes do migrate to different offerings
And then come back to Mother Microsoft. See Munich.
(Or the US could scrap the "Patriot Act" along with shutting down NSA and other 3-letter agencies, but that's even less likely to happen.)
Microsoft is by the way more trust worthy than European governments!
We first have to defeat Russia, China, etc. Become independent of them and even defeat them before we start trying to peel off dependency on the US.
US is an ally, and in the near future we have to rely on them. That's it.
The US is a merciless imperial power.
We are all looking pretty nervously at the possibility of Trump's return. He'd be definitely willing to throw us under the Putin bus for a couple million USD laundered through his golf club or hotel bookings.
And you wouldn't actually revolt and do anything about that. So, on a whole, not really allies. Just other people who individually may or may not be our friends.
But in the role of US president he would be able to do equal harm, just by acting like a 5 year old.
(Arguably, Trump, Xi and even Putin still have "potential" left.)
Not true, ridiculous statement.
Some specialists can't live without MS Excel and all of its extensions (banking), but that's not the common case. Common case is word processing, slide presentations, and task management (in spreadsheets).
And that's a problem because it isn't even particularly great software [0,1,2]. Of course all complex calculation tools have bugs, but compare the code quality of Excel with something like Matlab or R and it looks amateurish.
[0] https://www.microassist.com/software-tips/real-world-risks-o...
[1] https://www.solving-finance.com/post/the-wall-of-shame-for-t...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
All other systems have a way steeper learning curve.
For typesetting and presentations that have be 'nice' I use TeX and beamer. For the kind of stuff MS users use Excel for I use R.
For presentations that don't have to be nice I use nano, plaintext and then just scale up the text.
He probably meant an alternative to Office for companies and average people not tech enthusiasts. Nobody is gonna switch to raw text files and TeX.
That is, actual presentations made from scaled-up nano, mini-manuals for the team written in plaintext, etc.
Stop extrapolating that your niche experience somehow is the norm.
There's a reason why companies prefer to pay for office instead of using raw text and latex files for free.
There's nothing hard about writing plain text files. You just need to write good English and have some feel for text as a medium.
In some way there's less to learn there than in word, where you can bold things, insert images, etc.
People outside this niche have even less need for complicated functionality. A sales team that writes in word could have written in plaintext, and have had an organised picture of all their doings, with little details, that will eventually be machine-digestable. The only problem is if you want to write mathematics, but then you have LaTeX.
An in-between solution, if you want things a little bit conventional, is markdown.
It couldn't and the proof is in the pudding. If it were that easy as you make it seem, we would have done it a long time ago.
Non-tech people hate switching away form office since that's the only thing they know how to use comfortably, especially to janky stuff like latex that's not WYSIWYG and needs to be compiled. Nobody is gonna use that shit.
And non-tech people are the ones who sign the checks that make the purchasing decisions, and those people hate any kind of friction, hence why companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc are so successful.
Your view on things rings like that infamous HN comment form 2007 saying why Dropbox is a useless invention doomed to fail since we can host files locally on git and easily spin up a FTP server to share them if we want to.
Being familiar with something way bette than needing to learn from scratch. That's the end of the sales pitch.
https://www.softmaker.com/en
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftMaker_Office
FWIW this is no longer true, the feature is called 'Database Ranges'. However i (sadly) don't disagree LO is still miles behind Excel.
Free personal tier, which they host themselves, similar to Google Docs / Sheet: https://personal.onlyoffice.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice
Thanks, but no thanks.
Latest adventure an UEFI only motherboard (no BIOS backwards compatibility available), that no matter what, refuses to reckognise SSD NVMe that hold Linux instead of Windows.
Yes, one can complain the pesky OEMs still not being Linux Desktop friendly after 30 years, which in pratice doesn't matter to the regular consumer.
So yeah, it works flawlessly, but only for Microsoft.
Linux on the desktop is a reality. I'm on one, it's my main OS, I even play my games on it.
It having bugs is nothing special. Other systems have them as well.
Windows is not seamless at all. And if you'd like to debug, you're SOL, because often it's not helpful at all.
The state of things is not up to developers. Developers are part of a project, and the projects are part of a culture. Companies have projects and culture too, producing the same effects, for example take a look at how many UI styles Windows has, or how Microsoft's one project supports and contributes to open source, while another part of them actively destroys it.
It's also dangerously focused on Microsoft and complacent with "cloud" software. Google has already been winning their wrestling match over desktop computing for some time now, they shouldn't be helped. And with shittier software as a result.
Also while using "Microsoft sounds" in the music is cute, I can't help but think that it's a bit like using Nazi music (Wagner ??) in a documentary critical of Nazis...
It is not biased against Microsoft. It is about Microsoft based on journalism and decent research.