While I like what he says, I wonder how serious I should take him. Is he part of an always ignored fringe group, or can he push his ideas forward? He sounds progressive, and all over Europe the politics shift to conservatism. Also, I've never heard about him on the news, only here on HN.
Politics is unfortunately more about who is talking than what is said.
Economic development is too complex to be micromanaged from the top down. It also suffers from the kind of trade barriers this plan advocates.
Most importantly, all economic development initiatives face an uphill challenge if the underlying macro conditions aren't right. The solution for the UK, the EU and Canada is simple but politically anathema: cut taxes
A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines.
The study is quite rigorous too:
https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/tax-cuts-and...
No. There is no relevant strategy which does not answer "who is going to build it". The 11 Points are irrelevant unless you can actually create a real product and create real corporations providing these services.
Point 6 "following the Airbus model", would mean a decade(s) long funding run to create a company to compete directly with US tech supremacy. This is what was (for very unclear reasons) rejected in the section before.
There currently is zero actual competition with these US companies. EU companies each compete in very small niches (just like EU companies competed as suppliers for Boeing). Unless you create an actual competitor, there is no solution. The belief that you just need standards and many small, decentralized operators is what is making US Tech so dominant. They are dominant because you can go to these US companies and get most of what you need from a single source, this greatly reduces complexity overhead and the need for competent staff. Dealing with myriad of small service providers and their individual differences and compatibility issues is not effective, efficient or competitive.
Europe needs an actual competitor, who can actually replace US tech companies. Insisting on the fantasy of decentralization is what is making US dominance certain.
I'd focus on building a modern product that is easier to use, has more transparent pricing and better support, and makes transitioning from AWS/Azure/GCP a breeze. Start simple, and keep iterating. Start with a platform where I can easily deploy my favorite popular web framework and hook it up to a popular SQL database. Most companies just have a web application with a database. Make it super simple to get off App Engine/Elastic, Cloud SQL/RSD GCP/AWS Storage. Get small and midsize customers to switch, and then keep iterating up to big companies. They'll come if the tech and service is solid. It is not that hard to beat the big American cloud providers at this. Their services are bloated, difficult to understand, have poor service, and terrible pricing models.
The reason most EU companies don't want to switch now is because alternatives suck even more and it cost too much time and effort.
Self-hosted open hardware and open source software seems like a better option than the other people's hardware/software in a cloud.
Plain and simple, I don't want EU hosted services because the EU isn't a good proprietor. It offers less privacy or speech guarantees than alternative locations.
I am an EU citicen but believe the EU is a lobby group with its proponents often idealists in the best or fanatics in the worst case. Both don't allow any criticism and cannot hold this mostly purely executive behemoth to account. It is fundamentally unbalanced construct that needs strong restrictions. And therefore it would also not be the best place to host anything.
I really don't understand the obsession with AWS-like EU clouds.
The EU cloud may win only by shifting the paradigm.
Take Microsoft Office as an example.
For many years, Open Source and businesses tried to make a Microsoft Office competitor by mimicking Microsoft Office. Naturally, all clones were worse than the original and they either failed or stuck in their small niche... until Google changed the paradigm and rolled out Google Docs that had a unique feature of online collaboration.
Then was the turn of Microsoft to mimic collaboration features of Google Docs in Microsoft Office and be worse at it almost by definition.
Another example is S3.
For years, businesses tried to have POSIX-capable filesystems seamlessly scale in size and in availability. It took Amazon to roll out a simpler alternative that, by having a smaller set of features, enables so much sought properties of distributed file systems in an efficient and commercially viable way.
Back to EU clouds.
Scaleway tried replicating AWS, but they are and will always be a worse AWS than AWS itself. That Microsoft and Google could force their way through is more of a marketing win and just proves my point.
I think we should use the airbus model and copy 1 to 1 the AWS platform. Exact same apis, same control panels, same everything, just copy. Start with the most important functions. At least it would be clear what the end goal is and only a matter of funding and execution. It would also make it much easier for existing businesses to migrate away from real aws to euws.
The various cloud primitives like s3 and cloud functions are making good progress but don’t see anything with the breadth and integration of US clouds appearing any time soon.
Then again anyone building on that sort of integration is likely locked in on a provider level never mind country
Euro-stack.eu which is referenced in the first paragraph runs on Wordpress.com (Automattic) and is "protected" by Cloudflare.
Both are US companies.
Moreover, their Letter to EU Commission is written in Microsoft Word and converted to PDF using Adobe software.
For every step, they preferred US products.
Nothing surprising, the text author is a random young lady from UK, if we trust the document properties.
How pathetic (
In the "Coherent Strategy" I miss a point 12 that says: European Digital Service companies should be stimulated and anchored in the EU. If deemed strategic, regulation should prevent non-EU ownership participation.
As the past has shown, it's too easy for the printers of the 'world reserve currency' to just scoop up any emerging company with what is basically infinite monopoly money.
I wonder if a managed K8S approach wouldn’t be better? Most Enterprises I know will anyway need to deploy legacy software, so the need for something like K8S never really goes away. The question is if EU Enterprises really need stuff like AWS Sagemaker rather than just spinning up Jupyter Hub on K8S…