One thing that became extremely clear after anti-Russian sanctions were imposed is that multinational corporations absolutely belong to specific country or set of countries.
Putting government websites and services on AWS or Azure pretty much precludes independent foreign or domestic policy. It's ok now (UK and US are pretty tight) but things/alliances change and in 20 or 30 years it could become huge problem.
> One thing that became extremely clear after anti-Russian sanctions were imposed is that multinational corporations absolutely belong to specific country or set of countries.
"Set of countries", aka economy yes, "single country" no. If every nation except the US allied with Russia over Ukraine, I'm not so sure McDonald's would have pulled out of Russia.
US can force Microsoft or Google to pull out of UK in the same way Russian government can force Gazprom to stop selling gas to Germany. Again it's unlikely in current geopolitical situation but imagine that fascists or communists come to power in US (both are non zero probability). If there is one thing that history teaches us is that alliances are unstable.
Also US can easily force McDonalds to pull out of Russia - CEO and leadership live in US and have to comply with US sanctions unless they want to pull Lavabit or spend time in jail.
Scalingo https://scalingo.com is basically a french Heroku-compatible PaaS based on a reliable french IaaS (Outscale, cloud subsidiary of Dassault Systemes, the famous maker of Catia, Solidworkds, etc)
I understand the intent of the question, but in this case a UK-based alternative would be preferable, not just a European alternative. The UK is more likely to find itself at odds with France than the U.S.
That thought reminds me of a conversation in an episode of Yes Prime Minister:
> Hacker: I sometimes wonder why we need the [nuclear] weapons.
> Sir Humphrey: Minister! You're not a unilateralist?
> Hacker: I sometimes wonder, you know.
> Sir Humphrey: Well, then, you must resign from the government!
> Hacker: Ah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not that unilateralist! Anyway, the Americans will always protect us from the Russians, won't they?
> Sir Humphrey: Russians? Who's talking about the Russians?
> Hacker: Well, the independent deterrent.
> Sir Humphrey: It's to protect us against the French!
> but in this case a UK-based alternative would be preferable
For you maybe, but not for me :) I just took advantage of the threat to ask a slightly unrelated question (although parent mentioned Ireland as well, so maybe slightly on topic at least)
Platform.sh is another (employee here). We're a French PaaS and DevOps platform. So we provide hosting, but also every bit of operations needed to provision infrastructure and true staging environments for every pull request/branch with just a `git branch`. We work with Azure, GCP, AWS for 9+ regions across the globe, many of those in Europe. This has allowed us to also provide the backend for OVHCloud's WebPaaS (https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/web-paas/) behind-the-scenes.
"If I sign up to your service and deploy stuff to one of your Europe-based data centers, will my data ever land on a US-based company's servers?" [______]
Edit: Apparently not! Didn't even have to sign up to the service (just loaded the landing page) and my data ended up on some US-based (Google) entity's servers (fonts.googleapis.com).
Looks like a nice platform, unfortunately doesn't seem too privacy-aware so gonna have to find something else.
It will. As long as the company does business in the us then american governmenet can force access to data hosted somewhere else. They did it in the past theyll do it again
If you count Russia to be European, which is debatable from both a cultural and a geographical perspective. Yandex only has one data center outside of Russia/definitely in Europe, and last I heard, they needed 600,000€ worth of diesel per day to keep it running.
Don't feel bad. Europeans have a much better work-life balance. Plenty of parental leave. A culture that prioritizes life outside the office. Six weeks of guaranteed vacation that people actually take. Etc.
Those things have a price. Namely, when people work less, less innovation happens, which means less productivity growth happens, which means less innovation happens, and so on. I lived in Germany for two years. I absolutely loved it. However, despite its reputation, it's not a place that I would say prioritizes work (compared to the U.S.)
> Namely, when people work less, less innovation happens, which means less productivity growth happens, which means less innovation happens, and so on.
That's quite a stretch. Ask any engineer about having that a-ha moment in the shower, or when out for a walk. Downtime is incredibly important for mentally intense work. Work smarter, not harder and all that. Productivity isn't tied to time spent in office - my experience with american offices is that they encourage people to hang around, spend time there with meals, etc. That's not productive time, that's time spent in the office. Similarly, innovation doesn't come from time in the office, it comes from collaboration, experience, thinking outside the box.
> However, despite its reputation, it's not a place that I would say prioritizes work (compared to the U.S.)
I don't think this is a fair statement. The US prioritizes butts-in-seats, workplaces where you're competing against your peers, system where the power imbalance between an employee and employer is heavily stacked in favour of the employer. That doesn't mean that the US prioritizes work., and it definitely doesn't mean that Germany doesn't prioritize work.
> That's quite a stretch. Ask any engineer about having that a-ha moment in the shower, or when out for a walk. Downtime is incredibly important for mentally intense work.
I agree but I think you’ll find that working usually contributes economic value. Not working usually doesn’t. The key word being usually. if you’re in doubt, just try to record the economic value delivered by your downtime. How many hours are idled for every a-ha moment? Not that there is anything wrong with idling…
> That doesn't mean that the US prioritizes work., and it definitely doesn't mean that Germany doesn't prioritize work.
I’m using productivity as a measurement. Ideally, productivity accounts for inefficient work by comparing inputs (labor) to economic outputs. The U.S. is more productive in this sense, so it’s more than just butts in seats.
During WW1, the British "Health of Munition Workers' Committee" collected some fascinating data on production and working hours from armament factories. These were fairly motivated workers, doing semi-skilled manual tasks where you'd expect productivity to scale linearly with time on the job.
Moving from 25 hours/week to 30, 40, or 45 hours did lead to a proportional increase in output, but it then begins to plateau. Teams working 7x 10 hour shifts produced about as much as those working 8x6.
Check out the first few figures of
Pencavel, J. (2014). The Productivity of Working Hours. The Economic Journal, 125(589), 2052–2076. Portico. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12166
Data collected from American workers during WW2 showed a similar pattern. I'd expect that "creative" work has an even smaller linear range, but I'm not aware of any studies.
> I’m using productivity as a measurement. Ideally, productivity accounts for inefficient work by comparing inputs (labor) to economic outputs. The U.S. is more productive in this sense, so it’s more than just butts in seats.
> I agree but I think you’ll find that working usually contributes economic value.
_Some_ people have to be "not working" in order to make use of all the other areas of the economy - shops, transport, leisure centres, clubs, nightlife, the arts, self-care (beauty, massage, counselling etc). That's a fairly large slice of the economic activity in many countries.
Sure, but they can’t spend more than they make, and they can’t make more than they produce. Obviously this might not hold true for every individual, but it holds true in aggregate.
By that logic economic value is only created by active work, and not by any of the thought process that goes into it. That's an asinine thought process.
Yes, value is created by work. The asinine thought process is to somehow suggest that a meaningful amount of economic output is intangibly created by not working. Economic output isn’t the end-all-be-all metric to use for life. But it’s a little crazy to suggest that you can move this particular metric by doing nothing in aggregate.
Economic value has no strong meaning. When you mow your lawn yourself, does this action have economic value? If so, why is it not measured? If not, why does it have if you hire someone to do the work for you? Likewise for some jobs that are quite country specific: do old people who need a job to survive have more economic value than old annuitant people who can take care of their grand-children? What about reading a book? What about then discussing about said book with others? What if that discussion makes some students better? What if you are a teacher? What if you are a benevolent? What about writing a novel that would have had tremendous economic value if published but keeping it to yourself? What if that novel is then published after your death?
Productivity has no strong meaning either. How do you measure it? GDP PPP / worker / hour? What if it actually depends on externalities like the amount of carbon released in the atmosphere? What is actually a worker (back at the what is "work" and "economic value" point)? What if it counts destroying then rebuilding things (as-is)? What if it counts absurdly high health expenses? What if it counts absurdly high health expenses coming in part because some people illegal pushed for addictive drugs to be way over-prescribed by corrupting physicians?
Yet Germany is the 4th largest economy in the entire world with a GDP of near 4 trillion US dollars, despite being a country of only 83 million people (only the 19th largest country in world). Perhaps the Germans have figured out how to work smarter, not harder...
U.S. productivity is higher than Germany (outputs / inputs), so it appears Germany hasn’t quite figured out how to worker smarter than people in the U.S.
Yeah, but how much of the value that this is based on is artificially inflated, either by outright bullshit such as HFT and other forms of "wealth" that are solely created out of numbers or to account for indirect bullshit such as absurd healthcare and rent costs that drive up wages and, indirectly, product prices?
Yup. My back-of-envelope from past looks at this is that 5-10% of US GDP is purely drag from excess healthcare costs, i.e. we'd collectively be better off and our economy (entrepreneurship, especially) healthier if that amount of our GDP simply vanished, even though it would mean lower GDP per capita.
There's a quote from Obama in an article from The Nation years ago, that basically says we can't fix our healthcare system properly because it would put too many (white-collar make-work jobs program participants, essentially, under our current system) people out of work.
This may cut both ways with regards to innovation. For example, Europe as come way longer than the US when it comes to automation in various sectors (see f.x. the recent Economist article about inefficiencies in the US retail sector).
The main US advantage wrt to the last generation of tech giants (i.e. Google, Facebook and Amazon) is language. You will reach scale far faster in the US than in Europe because you do not have to translate your product to new languages and markets. Thus the US giants reached scale before similar European products could compete.
You’re conflating innovation with office work, while in reality it’s often - or mostly - the inverse: the work patterns typical for software industry hurt innovation, replacing it mindless repetition - see the vast majority of software startups.
>Europeans have [...] Six weeks of guaranteed vacation that people actually take.
That is false. EU mandates minimum 4 weeks of PTO across all members but varies wildly according to country, sector and company.
In most EU countries I've seen the average tends to hover around 5 weeks while 6 weeks or more is usually for very generous employers trying to attract top applicants in employee friendly countries.
I get you're attempting a jab at Americans by flashing large number of PTO, but let's be realistic that 6 weeks is not the norm in for all jobs in the whole of Europe.
You're not including bank holidays. The UK, for instance, has 20 days + 8-10 bank holidays. Italy has 20 + 10. Germany has 20 + 10. Denmark 25 + 11. France 25 + 11. Spain 22 + 14. Finland 25 + 11. I could go on...
Surely you understand my overall point. The concept of PTO doesn’t apply because PTO in the US includes sick leave. Most European countries carve out that separately. The word is not used in Europe and exclusively an US import. Not only is the term not reflective of the situation, it’s ambiguous and an acronym that’s US specific. So better to use a word that isn’t. Europe has vacation and sick leave. That’s how it works. US citizens can adapt to local terms which are better for a specific context. It’s just that easy and better.
> So we should all be learning Chinese by your logic?
I fail to see how admitting that certain countries have particular qualities that make them less competitive in a given industry and thus make it more economically feasible to use the solutions of other nations, means that they would become dependent on another culture/language.
I mean, exploring new languages and knowing a few polite phrases is generally a good idea, even if you don't find the idea of learning a new language fun/useful personally. That said, it's not like it's required either: people who shop on AliExpress don't need to know Chinese by any means.
Globalization (and thus getting out-competed in certain respects) is kind of inevitable nowadays, though admittedly it would be really cool to see European alternatives to AWS - I mean, Alibaba Cloud and Yandex Cloud seem to prove that it's at least somewhat feasible to explore something like that and companies like Hetzner and Scaleway seem to also prove that the infrastructure aspects are basically covered.
All that's missing is the platform around it, as well as all of the complexity and development that would come with setting out to make something like that.
We're not abandoning the idea, just the current project architecture.
Reading more carefully, it's saying the architecture PaaS is currently
built on is reaching the end of its days. It's natural to revise this
after 7 years. Outcomes of the next round may be a new PaaS for
government (and hopefully civil) deployments, with more flexibility
around the cloud targets to allow hybrid on-prem, colo, and mixed
cloud substrate. If anything that strengthens hybrid resilience
against mono-cultures or foreign influence.
> To be fair, Europe as a whole is 20-30 years behind on most fronts from the state of the art of information technology.
This is a gross, unjustified generalization. Sure, there's a lot of old crap around, but that's no different from other parts of the world; but there's also lots of new, modern stuff, with a huge diversity across the continent.
Just to give a common counterexample, the SEPA system allows me to trivially transmit money to anyone in the eurozone, for a considerable portion of them (including everyone in my country) in seconds, completely free of charge and involvement of any third party except my and their bank. Cash App, Venmo and comparable services basically don't exist in the EU, because the governments stimulated and mandated large scale interoperable digital infrastructure.
Agreed, there are so many areas where the US trails the rest of the world as far as technology is concerned. The Australian taxation system tech would probably be enough to make most US citizens cry for what they have to endure, and I'm not even sure it's the best one out there.
Paying on credit card in the US was painful compared to the experience in Australia a few years ago. Australia had tap-to-pay everywhere and so many places in the US were still requiring swipe and signature (I mean WTF).
I have found SEPA to be quite good. Australia has PayID as well which works well.
To cherry-pick, Estonia is leading the world when it comes to digital government. It has been an absolute pleasure to use their e-resident system to run a company. They're fostering a startup ecosystem that is punching well above it's weight[0]. From autonomous delivery robots[1] to Wise.
Government technology can often lag behind private sector technology, both from an inately conservative approach, but also because they have to care about things that often get ignored with private sector tech, like supporting everyone (e.g. robust accessibility).
But to say that Europe is 20-30 years behind is just not a realistic view of the world.
Technology isn't the reason the US appears to lag in some cases - business and governmental policy decisions are behind everything you list, and plenty of people don't like it.
The truth is that 20-30 years ago Europe was lagging behind the US in some respects - credit card acceptance, computer usage in some businesses, etc. But obviously they're on par with the US today, and where they're ahead or behind the US the reason isn't access to technology, rather it's usually government policy.
It's quite nuanced, which of course the GP comment wasn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Government policy and societal attitude are two parts of the reason. It's not really fair to compare US and Estonia really, One is managing 350(?) million people and the other 1.3 million. Even comparing Australia to Estonia though, the differences in behaviour from the government entities are remarkable.
Australia has a real "we're going to catch you" vibe to it's taxation and social services, where as, Estonia seems to really have an attitude of trying to build awesome things to make their citizens better off and to streamline things.
Governments and their relationship to technology, both as a provider and also as a regulator is a complex beast. As you say, so many of the problems are manifestations in the imperfections of our democracies. Regardless of which AU, EU, GB, US all have flaws that we have to live with and work to improve.
It’s not generalization, it’s mistaking what layman think of technology (websites and apps, 90% of which are useful only for extracting investors cash) with what actually is technology.
SEPA is good but not that good. It normally takes two days for my money to arrive, longer over weekends and holidays. The UK Faster Payments system actually does work within seconds most of the time, but only within the UK.
I can transfer funds from my Finnish bank account to my German bank account and I get a push notification from the German one within seconds of submitting it. If your SEPA transfers aren't instant, it just means that one or both of the banks involved haven't just adapted it yet.
Banks might also have only implemented receiver or sending, but not both. My mom can receive my instant SEPA transfers, but she can't send me one back since her bank has only implemented the receiving part.
The SEPA Instant Credit Transfer scheme introduced in 2017 introduced 10-second transfers. Not all banks are participating yet, particularly in (south-)eastern Europe, but it's a fast growing share, and in my home country (the Netherlands) just about everyone does.
All of my SEPA transfers after 2017 took days and none of them involved banks in (south-)eastern Europe. But it's good to hear that things are improving.
In Hungary, you can digitally sign documents using your ID card or your online account at the local equivalent of gov.uk. Certificates are signed and managed by the government. Quite handy for everyday contracts like an apartment renovation.
Yes, although at least in Washington State you can only renew online every other time since they want you to come in and get a new picture taken every 12-16 years. Which isn't really unreasonable when you consider that's your main photo id.
Given that the US still appears to think that cheques are the height of technology and part of a trivially researchable SSN is proof of identity, I’m not convinced that any sector besides surveillance capitalism is behind.
I realise I’m just replying to a troll’s cherry picked list at this point, but come on you’re not even trying.
All of those chips and fabs all rely on ASML? Those manufacturers you list literally couldn’t make the chips they make without an EU company being the backbone of their work.
You can’t think of global scale European applications. SAP, the worlds third largest software company by revenue? Representative of the EU’s tech sector, probably not, but it goes to show your either ignorant of the wider industry in the EU or being deceiving.
> Open banking and SEPA. Are these technologies? I think they were just regulations.
Turns out regulations can be a good thing? Our banking infrastructure ‘just works’, instantly, EU wide, with low fees and technology first.
> Wake up.
People get real holiday, great purchasing power (sure, not as high as a US tech worker, but pretty darn good), healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt them, proper mental health treatment so walking down a street isn’t a gamble, great affordable education, and the pleasure of not having a mass shooting multiple times a week. But yeah, the US has some big companies. Good for you bud.
Speaking of cherry-picking. Which European fab is ASML selling to? Being able to manufacture one machine for one stage of the process doesn't make an industry. Europe has some great niche companies, but has a real problem fostering an actual ecosystem.
Europe has sleep-walked into technological irrelevance since at least the early 2000s. In 10 years or so, all there's left in European tech that's competitive is going to be aviation, and agriculture and fashion if you count them as tech.
> People get real holiday, great purchasing power (sure, not as high as a US tech worker, but pretty darn good), healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt them, proper mental health treatment so walking down a street isn’t a gamble, great affordable education, and the pleasure of not having a mass shooting multiple times a week. But yeah, the US has some big companies. Good for you bud.
US tech workers have PTO, and Europe has mass shootings as well, and war and migrant crisis on the border. FANNG's profit is not just big, they are so massive, they dwarf many European countries' GDP.
The truth is hard to swallow, but if Europe doesn't recognize just how far behind you are, you are never going to catch up, or even better, produce some industrial leaders once in a while.
So, what you are trying to say is: "Please stop sending us your well educated and skilled people - we need to spend more money on our country and citizens, not absurd wages for tech"?
That's super kind of you, I think Europe could get back on its feet with that kind of leg up.
What I'm saying is, at this point, Europe has lost the competition on so many waves of technological disruptions, there's simply no hope. The only thing Europe can do to gain back some international negotiating power is to invest in the next wave. Unfortunately, we can pretty much declare Europe has lost on AI, and good luck with hydrogen-based energy.
The European brain drain to America simply will not stop until there's a complete ecosystem.
