Comment by softwaredoug
1 day ago
Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy
1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans
2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology
When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.
Don't take the Canadian market for granted.
There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.
With 40M people, Canada is about half the size of Germany in terms of population and GDP. Also smaller than France. Canada is more similar in GDP to countries like Italy. The Spanish economy is a bit smaller but it has slightly more people (48M). The EU + UK is a bit over half a billion people.
The thing with Zoom, Meets, Teams, etc. is that these aren't that hard to replicate. There is not much of a technical moat. It doesn't take a very large startup to create your own version of that. And given what a basket case teams is, it's also not that hard to do much better. There have been plenty of alternatives over the years. Network effect is what drives the growth there, not technical quality.
So if the French want to use something else, all they have to do is pick something and they might get the network effect through mass adoption. That would work better if the whole of the EU does it of course. We'd still need a solution if we want to talk to people in the US. The reason why US drives the network effect traditionally is its trade relations. It's convenient for everyone to use the same tools and solutions.
We need the EU to do for software what it did for device charging and require interoperability.
There used to be several 'universal' chat clients, for example Pidgin.
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I'm not sure I agree about the lack of a technical moat. While spinning up a basic WebRTC wrapper is trivial, the real challenge is the global distributed systems engineering required for low latency and reliability at scale. You need a massive edge network to handle routing, jitter buffering, and packet loss effectively across continents. It seems like the hard part isn't the client, but ensuring it actually works reliably when you have millions of concurrent streams on flaky connections.
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Teams has the upside that is is deeply integrated in Microsoft products.
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It should also go without saying that Canada already had a vertically integrated telecoms giant in RIM/Blackberry that handled end to end smartphone comms globally in the 3G era, right down to compressing emails through their servers so they could be transmitted efficiently over 2G data networks.
Unfortunately Blackberry was heavily dependent on US telecoms and corporations buying their servers and devices to pad their profits. And since then, local engineering talent from the Kitchener-Waterloo region has been siphoned off by Silicon Valley money, mostly to craft elegant solutions to deliver more ads to your devices.
Canada's telcos are a "narrow waist" for a lot of software licensing.
A lot of business customers bundle their business/productivity software with their phone and Internet services. Did you know you can buy Google Workspace and/or Microsoft Office through your telco? I was shocked to find out how many do this when I worked for one of the telcos.
Just like how consumers bundle their streaming services with their home Internet plans.
One bill for all the things is convenient.
I would bet it's the same in EU (but can't say for sure, I only have first-hand info about Canada).
If there was a real push to move companies away from these platforms, it would probably start there, mostly because the telcos are typically very government-aligned due to regulatory and spectrum concerns, and would get in line with government efforts to promote non-US alternatives, if they decided to.
Getting the majority of consumers to ditch their US-based streaming and entertainment is another thing though, I can't see that happening ever, no matter how at-odds the US and Canada become.
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There was also Nortell
Canada is subject to the Monroe doctrine. Forge a link too close and there will be intervention of sorts.
Threats only works if the threatened entity thinks they can avoid them via compliance.
Tariffs come anyway, both Canada and Denmark are under threat of annexation, and ICC suspensions of Microsoft emails show that governments cannot rely on US tech.
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Not only software. Think back to who supplied the vaccines during COVID.
The British and the Russians also had a COVID vaccine (and much cheaper), and the French cancelled theirs because they realized it would come too late to be competitive.
So if they were restricted to some reason to use their own only, they would be fine.
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> weaponized against us
I take a more optimistic stance here. Trump can only live so long, and everybody except basically Trump and John Bolton knows that the majority of his idiotic tariffs (and nonsensical belligerence like pretending NATO control of Greenland doesn't meet all our defense needs) are wealth-destroying on net, as well as wealth-destroying for at least 10x the number of people than they help (many of them I'd say 100-1000x as many). When Trump leaves the stage, those who replace him will either be Democrats sprinting at full speed from all his policies to demonstrate how not-Trump they are, or Republicans who want to grow the economy. Either way, the stupidity in a lot of his policies is a temporary condition.
Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
The decades long level of trust in the US and its institutions was unprecedented and built off of the tremendous goodwill and momentum post WW2.
It was an unusually high degree of trust, and now it's unusually low. Even if the US reverses its policies it will take a very long time to rebuild trust, and even then the historical warning marker of the Trump admin will be studied as a reason to never return to the prior level of trust.
Without total trust software products are a natural target for any country that's thinking more about how to defend its own sovereignty. Policies and subsidies for locally built software that previously would have seemed frivolous or wasteful now seem prudent and badly needed.
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> Note that I'm not saying everyone should give the US a pass or maintain as much economic and defense dependency on the US. But I think it's hyperbolic to make all your long-term plans assuming something as stupid and self-defeating as his worst anti-ally policies are a new normal, because they harm the US at least as much as they harm everyone else, and everyone but those two knows this.
It is debatable if everyone but John Bolton and Donald Trump knows this. After all, according to the last NYT poll the current POTUS commands an approval rating of 41 % in the USA. The number of people I meet who do not understand how tariffs work, for example, is staggering.
Anyway, it is smart policy to expect the worst and plan for it instead of being surprised by another insane president voted in by the people of the USA. Call it risk management if you like. It would be negligent of the leaders of the EU and its member nations to not account for that. The EU has to reduce dependence on unrealiable trade partners, this is true whether we are talking about warmongering Russia, dictatorial China (probably the most reliable of the three!), or unpredictable USA.
So, let's hope for the best and prepare for the worst. The EU can't change it if preparation harms US economic interests in the long run. That's on Trump.
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MAGA will likely not die with Trump, and the Democrats have done their fair share to shaft Canada too. (If Jimmy Carter were still alive you could ask him about his family tree farm and what he thinks of softwood lumber tariffs.) As our PM recently said in Davos, the U.S.-led rules-based world order was a bit of a sham from the get-go. Certain countries were more equal than others. The rules were always flexible and they bent in favour of the U.S. most of all. Canada and other middle powers got an okay deal nonetheless, so we went along with it. That's over now, and "Nostalgia is not a strategy.".
Now that we're always going to be four years or less from the next potential bout of American insanity, it's time to build a new order that is less vulnerable to big powers and more equitable for everyone else. An order in which the rules are applied more consistently and have teeth. That doesn't necessarily mean breaking out the feather quills and having a big shin-dig at Versailles though. It's doing lots of little things that shift our dependence to like-minded middle powers whenever and wherever possible.
e.g. The white house has threatened other countries (including Canada) with tariffs in order to deter regulation or taxation of american software giants in non-U.S. jurisdictions. That makes dependence on these companies an exploitable (and already exploited) weakness. This is why governments, like France, want alternatives.
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Americans elected trump not just one time. They did it twice.
They all knew who he was by the end of the first mandate yet they still elected him again.
Why wouldn’t they find another « trump like » when trump goes away ? Vance or someone else, the list is long.
I see no reason for things to change and that’s if the USA doesn’t become an autocracy in the meantime. Trump already did so much in a year, that’s fascinating. He just need to boil the frog a bit longer but everything is in place.
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It seems optimistic to me at this point that he could be replaced by a Republican not largely crafted in his image. It's possible, but I certainly wouldn't take it for granted.
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I think that your outlook on US politics and future leadership is naively optimistic (though I very much hope to be wrong).
First and most importantly, I don't think it should be considered a given at this point that there will be a democraticly elected successor to Trump. It's clear from past attempts and current declarations and actions that the Trump regime will try to maintain power instead of ceding it at future elections - whether they will succeed or not will depend a lot on American institutions and the power of the people.
Secondly, your assertion that only Trump and Jon Bolton agree with the current policies seems deeply wrong. First of all, the VP (with a real chance to be President, given Trump's age and apparent health), seems very much on board. Secondly, much of Trump's policies are based on the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 document, including at least some of the foreign policy decisions. Thirdly, a desire to re-orient US foreign policy away from Europe (and thus NATO) and towards China exists in a large part of the traditional foreign policy establishment. Fourth, the leaders of the Democratic Party seem to have learned entirely the wrong lessons from the last election, looking more at which of Trump's policies they should adopt rather than what alternative solutions they can promise to the American people.
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I think every American needs to understand this quote:
> "We will never fucking trust you again."[0]
It doesn't matter that Trump will eventually no longer be President, and it doesn't matter that there are still members of the American political establishment that support the old way of doing things. Trump does not act alone, and there is rapid attrition of those older bureaucrats who valued the USA's allies. Trump's allies in the GOP will continue to be in power, and perhaps worse, the partisan appointees that have inundated the public service will remain.
The USA has burned its bridges. There is no more trust to be found.
0: https://www.readtheline.ca/p/matt-gurney-we-will-never-fucki...
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Trump has done/is doing generational harm to the perception of the US worldwide, to say nothing of US soft-power influence. It's going to take decades to rebuild that trust after he's gone, and we still have a couple of years of his term to run yet.
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trump disappearing isnt going to restore trust now the world has seen how broken american politics is.
Trump already left the stage once. This is something deeply wrong with the US that can't be explained away as a phase.
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The damage Trump has done to international relations will last much longer than the three years that he has left in office.
It was an open secret that the USA was a transactional unreliable ally, now it's just common knowledge.
Even the most ardent "look West" politicians have stopped talking about avoiding China.
[dead]
The real thing that's changed here is that the US gets no benefit from defending Ukraine or Europe
European politicians need to wake up NATO was really an exercise in helping the US with its proxy wars their support will not be reciprocated
Not with trump and not with his successor
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But they EU doesn't make any software... So unless Canada is willing to go with Chinese software which would kinda invalidate any "moral" ground they have and well frankly the USA wouldn't allow it seems like the USA can take it for granted.
Europe makes lots of quality software, it just doesn't scale economically. And that's an issue with access to capital and to a lesser extent legal fragmentation, not talent or willingness. That's why there's a constant push for markets reforms in the EU, on top of unified corporate structures (one might even call them "federal") being in the pipeline.
Canada's software market was $73B in 2024.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/software-m...
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The EU doesn't make any software? Really now..
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Canada just announced a huge deal with China last week. You're wrong on all counts.
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At this point I am praying that one of the things pushing back on this administration will be American Companies that have gotten rich on the back of "American Globalism", learning just how much it hurts when the US doesn't do its responsibility to remain Allies with it's nominal Allies.
And the EU, Canada, and anyone else who the current US administration is slighting, should absolutely be moving cash hard and fast away from the American Economy, if they want change in US policy. TACO, is about economic policy, and it's hard to imagine this administration continuing it's more unpopular global (and even local policies), if it's discovering it's not actually backed by US Mega-Corps.
There is no unringing this bell. Maybe a sane administration would slow the migration, but the damage is done. America is a capricious partner who can flip the table at any moment.
100%
The reason there is no unringing this bell is not just that we have a capricious, vainglorious president, it's that all of checks and balances that are supposed to restrain the executive have proven worthless so far. Republicans in Congress have completely declared their impotence, having fully relinquished their duties that the Constitution specifically delegates to the legislative branch, like tariff power, war powers, etc.
Absolutely not. History has shown again and again that human memory is short and greed is unbounded. If there isn't an active fire burning under people's asses they'll choose the $0.01 cheaper option even if it ends up being much worse for them in the long run.
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Exactly. Trump is just the messenger. The underlying problem, festering for decades, is that a large enough fraction of the US population thought that Trump was even remotely qualified to lead a country to begin with.
The fact that we didn’t immediately remove him after the Greenland letter just demonstrated to our allies that that same fraction of people also don’t value our relationship with Europe.
The CCP looks thoughtful and stable by comparison. It’s too bad that the result of this will be to force more people to align with them, because they’re just as self-serving as Trump, they just have the good sense and temperament to hide their true intentions.
A terrible potential is that US products may find themselves unable to get footing internationally, due to broken trust and increased competition, so instead they'll try to rely on every-expanding protectionism and corruption to stay dominant in the US market.
Just as we've seen in the car industry we'll wind up less innovative, less productive, and less economical.
The day I heard trump wants to fire Powell and manage the fed « his own way », I emptied all my trading accounts and bought gold.
I guess I’m not alone, gold is exploding.
European pension funds are also slowly getting rid of US bonds. They don't talk about it because they don't want to attract the ire of Trump and they don't want to create panic in the markets as long as they are still invested. But e.g. the Dutch fund ABP sold 1/3rd of their US bonds in 6 months (10 out of 30 billion in US bonds that they have). They reinvested the money in Dutch and German bonds.
The wheels for the great decoupling have been set though. The companies (which are also persons apparently thanks to the perversions of American law) have made their bed and will have to sleep in it themselves.
Of course, there are huge unrealized opportunities to be had in economic powerhouses such as Belarus, Argentina, Russia, and whichever other member exists in the Board of Peace.
I think it's totally great that competing products get produced in the EU. Not a bad thing from anyone's perspective except the owners of those US companies that will now need to compete.
It’s great yes, but if we in the US weren’t proving so untrustworthy, EU startups and tech giants could focus on building things that actually might out innovate us and everyone else. Which would be a win-win.
Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.
I don’t blame them. There is value in trusting your tools and not risk having them weaponized. It’s just sad all around.
Duplicating things is underrated. It's good for there to be multiple operators doing basically the same thing. Innovation can happen at the margins. It will be easier, not harder, for EU companies to innovate in meaningful ways after they've built their own systems and are no longer just following in the wake of big US companies. (Not to mention that half of what passes for innovation these days is actually bad.)
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> It’s great yes, but if we in the US weren’t proving so untrustworthy, EU startups and tech giants could focus on building things that actually might out innovate us and everyone else. Which would be a win-win. Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much.
You could apply this to Slack vs Teams as well. Slack was already good, Microsoft just duplicated their work, came out with an inferior product and won. So, was it worth it?
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Sometimes rebuilding a tool makes it better. You hopefully learn from the past.
In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created. We want a strong Europe who can build and innovate instead of regulating and fining. In contrast, we certainly don't want see the disastrous joke like Northvolt. We certainly don't want to see the joke that BASF shut down its domestic factories and invested north of 10B in China for state-of-the-art factories. Oh, and we certainly don't want to see a Europe that couldn't defeat Russia and couldn't even out-manufacture Russia, even though Russia's GDP is merely of Guangzhou's.
The current US administration wants a captive Europe. One that buys its defense, energy and technology products from them. One that sells its territory, regulations and know-how to them.
Ask the Department of State if they'd like a European-sized French attitude and strategic autonomy.
Current admin has been on record for years saying the same thing. Warning EU about russia, warning EU about China, warning them about not innovating.
I don't know if this was planned internally but it seems the way they figured out how to get EU to actually do something is to make it seem like big bad trump is going to hurt them.
Current admin has gotten more out of EU than 20years of asking nicely.
Before: US: "please increase military spending" EU: "no"
US: "please do not support our advesaries" EU: "builds nordstream"
US: "stop killing innovation" EU: " more regulation"
Now:
US: "We will invade greenland" EU: "omg we need to invest in greenland and increase its military support, we will send more troops immediately!"
US: "we will pull out of nato" EU: "omg we hate US we need to massively increase military spending and industry"
US: "our tech companies will not listen to you" EU: "omg big bad america, we should try to make out own"
I don't like it but at the same time, it works? Let EU rally against US who cares as long as they actually do something.
Simply put absolute best thing for US is a strong EU. China is an advesary that will take the entire US system to challenge if EU can handle the rest then it's a win.
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> isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want?
no, I certainly do not read that at all. This is not what the U.S. wants -- a genuinely free EU that has its own economy and source of tech entirely independent of the U.S. That is quite the opposite of what the U.S. wants but it inevitable that it is what the U.S. will get.
> even though Russia's GDP is merely of Guangzhou's
Am I missing something? [1] lists Guangzhou’s GDP as 435,746 M USD, while [2] lists Russia’s GDP as 2,173,836 M USD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_Chinese_cities_by_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
My bad. I meant Guangdong Province
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Seen from Europe, the current US administration doesn't want a Europe, end of story.
Trump 1.0 already tried to convince EU countries to exit the EU.
Trump 2.0 keeps insulting the EU, threatening the EU economically and threatening it militarily. To the point where even most of the far right EU candidates who were betting on being the ${EU COUNTRY} Trump are now doing their best to display how they're very much not Trump.
Good thing we're not in the US to terrorize us with the ICE.
Europe will then redirect the 300B euros it was investing in US treasuries annually to Eurobonds, while redirecting the $300M in purchasing from US companies to EU companies. This is biting the hand that feeds the US.
Europe will buy LNG from Canada instead of the US, and continue to purchase imports from China. I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure). CATL is currently building the largest battery factory in Europe in Spain.
>"I agree though that a strong EU is needed, in part to defend against the US, as well as Russia (until the Russian economy reaches failure)."
So after Russia fails "a strong EU" is no longer needed? Also waiting for Russian economy to fail may prove to be forever and not even desirable. Changing the system of government to one that treats people like it should is much better goal
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lol hahaha Europe will "say" and maybe in a few decades they might get around to starting some of that. Europe still buys gas from Russia; can't even ween itself off it during a war.
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I think they should (in practice there could be something in the middle). Yes, they may have more bickering with the US, but that's just part of the messy diplomatic process. At the end of the day, we want to see strong allies that share a compatible value system with us. I'm actually more optimistic too: a stronger Europe will earn more respect because of their strength. And that respect will lead to more negotiation instead of more bickering.
> even the current administration want
Sure, the US admin wants a strong US military, for example, ideally with 100% US weapons. Etc.
What a joke of a comment. Trump and Musk and Vance explicitly support every anti-EU party in a half-dozen EU countries. Cuz they wanna make EU stronger, durrr.
oh man, I agree with what you are saying but EU is a joke.!
Is it really though? We have strong labour laws, consumer laws, antitrust laws, personal information laws and so on because the majority of us want it. We understand that this do not maximize growth, and consider that worth it. In fact, the most of us sees the current US administration as a very big joke.
> In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created.
This is a pretty ridiculous statement.
It is clear that the US under current administration is absolutely hostile to EU, and that the US in general is untrustworthy when a good portion of its people see the actions of the current administration as desirable.
> When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US
well, you can finally hardcode the date in mm/dd/yy format without worrying for a menu to change it.
EU market is by no mean easy, it's heavily fragmented requiring very often intense localization effort.
For sure. But a major goal of US foreign policy was to create an EU so it would be easier for trade. Backsliding on support, wanting to sabotage it, doesn’t help US companies as it just adds burden.
Seems easier to comply to the single market rules though than 50 odd different states.
I'm American and sell my software to all 50 states (plus the rest of the world). I don't have a single special market rule for any state, not even my own. My payment providers take care of tax collection for me and my accountant tells me how much to pay the government each tax season.
US perspective: EU looks like a great place to expand into once I've reached some critical size threshold. But I can't imagine starting a business there. In the US we have effectively limitless capital, tons of tech talent, and many fewer regulations.
Just about everything I'd want to do in a startup appears illegal or otherwise infeasible in the EU because of the morass of data and AI and energy regulations.
On the other hand, I could never imagine moving to the US. It seems like such a third world country in so many ways. The amount of households that cant afford a sudden $400 expense without borrowing. The childhood poverty rates. The maternal mortality rate. The traffic deaths (en even worse, the pedestrian traffic deaths going in the wrong direction fast), people dying at work, the fact that you managed to get hookworm BACK, the power grid (I love in a small society in Sweden and I have averages 6 minutes of power outages per year), people being functionally illiterate.
I am pretty sure that would not affect me if I moved there, but I am completely dumbfounded that nobody seems to want to change things. One party wants the status quo and one party seems to want to make things worse.
I am not sure I would be able to stand that.
As a European I'm glad for all of these pesky regulations. https://noyb.eu/en
> Just about everything I'd want to do in a startup appears illegal or otherwise infeasible in the EU because of the morass of data and AI and energy regulations.
Sounds like you're doing some shady, disgusting bullshit or you're exaggerating the regulations. I hope it's the latter.
> When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada
I don't think Canada's pretty entertained about US either. US is completely alone in this regards.
From what I can feel, US wanted to isolate itself from Global economy/Globalization and its succeeding at it.
Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA and Trump, in one of his tantrums, threatened to destroy that this week, with 100% tariffs.
Canada is very much in the same boat as the EU.
> Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA
It is "is" and it will continue to be is probably for the rest of Canada existence. You can't trump geography here and frankly Canada's decades of under investment in shipping infrastructure means they need to use USA ports for foreign trade anyway.
Why did he threaten 100% tariffs?
He did not like the Canadian prime minister's speech about "great powers" weaponizing economic integration, so he decided to prove him right.
Because Canada has been in trade talks with China and may potentially lower its tariffs on China which gives them a back door into the US. There are some specifics and it's all conditional. It depends on the kinds of deals it settles on.
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I do feel as why demands reason and I am not sure if you can reason with the unreasonable which is what the Canadian speech was about in Davos and then POTUS threatened 100% tariffs again.
Kind of proved the point of America being an un-reliable partner which is what I inferred from Canadian PM's speech & his call for middle economies to connect with each other and strengthen together to have more leverage overall.
Probably bummed because nearly everyone (rightfully) praised Mark Carney's speech in Davos (in contrast to Trumps incoherent ramblings). I am pretty sure he can be that petty.
Because after the US threatened to destroy our economy and/or annex us by force and/or cancel nu-NAFTA and/or impose tariffs on us regardless, we realized that Americans don't actually want us as friends so we started diversifying our trade partnerships and negotiated a mutual tariff relaxation deal with China.
The previous Canada-US relationship is gone. Months ago I wrote on HN that purely by virtue of having to weather this storm, the nature of Canada-US relations will be irrevocably and fundamentally altered. Even if Trump and his cronies were jailed tomorrow, it's too late. The rest of the world understands that Trump is just a symptom of the disease affecting America and it's going to get worse, not better.
Delusion? Dementia? Being surrounded by yes-men?
Some Americans. Others of us are very aware of this.
> there’s not an easy 3rd economy
There isn't right now but India very much wants to be that in about a decade
> 2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
What about China? India?
To add to what has already been said:
- Business law is in its infancy and local courts excessively favour the Indian side. In the event of a dispute, enforcing the terms of the contract can be very complicated or even illusory.
- Banking and insurance services are complicated, slow and expensive.
- There is not one but many different sets of legislation per province. There are gaps in the legislation and it is necessary to go through a long compliance process based on the manufacturer's or supplier's legislation, involving translation, negotiation, etc.
- Each time there is a change in decision-makers, at least part of the process must be repeated.
I work for an energy company and we have a team that has been working on an Indian project for almost ten years, without the project really seeming to have progressed.
The Indian market is a bottomless pit if you don't have a very high-ranking political sponsor in the Indian government.
india is a great market, but:
1. extremely price sensitive; zoho is regarded as expensive
2. 121 major languages in active/business use, with 22 formally recognised by government. These people may understand limited english.
3. 28 unique states plus 8 unique territories.
so in many ways its like expanding across the US, except there are 22 languages as well as 36 state law regimes, plus federal law, and then indian city law, transfer pricing regimes, currency settlement issues... etc.
China is also possible, but still price sensitive and strongly culturally prefers local solutions
edit: fixed formatting.
From a world domination point of view fragmentation is bad. On the other hand heterogeneity is good for choice and freedom as at least on paper if one platform kicks you off due to whatever curbs on freedom, you have alternative choices.
Heterogeneity/fragmentation also makes it harder for companies and countries to impose their mores on others. From that PoV Africa also should develop its own tools so as not to be subject to either North American or European values but their own values.
It's not clear that anything will be kneecapped. You need more than a desire to not use these products, you also need a viable alternative. Using products from China or Russia probably isn't deemed viable if the concern is politics, which leads to a need for Europe or Canada to build alternatives. They have not been good at this for a long time, maybe that will change, but it's not clear that it will.
There are plenty of viable alternatives. Perhaps not all are as polished as some of the mainstay US companies, but the funtionality is there. It's no surprise that people in the US are ignorant of the existence of the many excellent EU software companies and services.
Then why aren't Europeans using them?
India.
Today India invited President of EU commission on its republic day & I feel like there are discussions on signing free trade agreement.
I was in my car watching it live when I recognized the President of EU commissioner and I was like hey!!
I feel like friendly relations of EU and India are definitely on the rise & I have said this previously as well and talked to my other cousins/family who works in Coding and most agree that a deeper India-EU ties are possible.
One thing we were discussing is if EU could directly invest funds in Indian companies instead of going through 10 layers of councils/commissioning companies but to people who want to either build private solutions (Preferably open source?)
I do feel like that's inevitable too. EU's financing is something which I have heard is tricky within EU itself but there are some recent initiatives to stream line it and perhaps India can even integrate into it if its actually net positive for India.
Overall I feel like I am pretty optimistic about India EU relations (though I feel like I have bias but what do people from EU think respectfully?,I'd be more than happy to answer as I talked to my developer cousin about it for almost 2 days on how EU India integration especially in tech feels so good and inevitable haha :>)
India's position on Russia means it's a non-starter as a serious trade partner.
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Good call out, India is likely the most viable option.
I can't wait to see how many indians we are going to be forced to import due to that "free trade deal". They must have looked at how well it went in canada and said among themselves "now that's how you destroy a country we gotta get some of that". [EDIT] Hopefully national politicians get balls, more balls, and tell their MEPs to vote against it like the mercosur deal.
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Not sure why you're being downvoted, Europe has been mostly bad at software and services for a long time now. There's a reason Linus lives in Oregon.
There's always this occasional chatter about being more competitive, and certainly some good ideas -- for example, the Draghi Report -- but then nothing happens, or you get a few half measures at most.
I guess the one upside of Trump being such an aggressive jackass is that it might finally provide enough impetus for European countries to take further integration more seriously.
Europe has good software companies. It's just that the US has bigger VC funding which makes European companies unable to compete when US/EU companies are "fighting".
There's a reason Linus lives in Oregon.
What is the reason Linus lives in Oregon? By his own admission, 90% of his workday is reading and answering email. We have email in Europe, so that can’t be it.
There is also australian and british markets I assume?
100M people isn't nothing, but it is highly likely that EU products would compete strongly in those markets.
Britain is trying to get tighter with UE and back into the common market.
It’s not trying to get back into the common market.
China, India. There are little EU-wide network effects similar to American ones.
Outside companies don't do well in China
India doesn't have nearly the purchasing power of EU or US
China: Everything that puts western buyers off Chinese stuff, same happens in reverse. E.g. translation is really really hard. Every previous time I have illustrated how bad Google Translate is at this by quoting the Chinese output, someone has missed the point and replied to tell me the output is so bad as to be almost incomprehensible.
India: Lots of people, sure, even after accounting for how they've only recently fully electrified and don't all have office jobs where software is even slightly relevant… but the entire economy even in aggregate let alone per capita (and therefore TAM) is smaller, and the linguistic situation is (according to what I was told by Indian coworkers at a previous job) an exciting mix where everyone speaks 3+ languages and intermixes them in basically every sentence.
We’re also pissing off Canada. This administration is actively destroying America to reduce the influence of American liberal values on the world. Destroying America is part of the plan.
> s in a somewhat unified market
It's really not when it comes to the internet. First of all I'm in a very big minority here in Romania because I can read French (I can also speak somehow), but the majority of the people around me cannot. And let's not mention German. So, when the majority of EU citizens cannot speak the languages of EU's two biggest countries by population then it means that the market is not unified.
And, no, using English as a lingua franca across the continent going forward is not going to cut it, that will mean cultural erasure. Maybe in the future some EU bureaucrats will advocate for that, i.e. to replace French, German, Spanish, Italian etc as people's main language, but I think we're pretty far away from that. Also, making everyone around these parts bilingual is also not going to work, it's either English as a first language (or French, or German) or nothing.
The typical mature technology company in the US earns half their revenue from outside the US. Makes it harder to understand even tacitly supporting white supremacy and ignorant isolationism.
A core tenet of the "dark enlightenment" mind-virus that has taken hold of the valley is the idea that civilizational decline/collapse is not only inevitable but imminent, so they don't really mind getting a bigger slice of a smaller cake, as long as they are in charge[1].
However, they also are getting citizenships from other countries or buying pacific island bunkers: just in case.
1. The collapse inevitabilitism absolves them of any guilt when their actions make the world worse, since "it was going to happen anyway"
It's also pervasive. The weirdest thing in the world is watching someone I know who works for a big tech company and moved to the States suddenly wanting to get a New Zealand citizenship "just in case".
They supported it because they saw an opportunity to remove limitations on them, both domestically (see FCC, restrictions on state level AI laws, etc) as well as internationally (regulations, digital taxes, etc in the EU and Canada, for example).
... and Canada doesn't seem very keen on going on like this.
Yeah, assuming Canada is just going to keep going along buying American software and services seems pretty naive. There's less capacity to build alternatives in Canada than there is in Europe, but as Europe builds out alternative ecosystems, Canadians will likely be just as eager customers as Europeans (if not more eager).
The beauty of so many of these solutions being open source solutions also means that it creates avenues for cooperation between organizations that have no official cooperation agreement.
E.g. The Austrian federal Military, the state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the city of Leon have no direct forum for cooperating on software projects, yet all three are contributing to the development and rapid adoption of Nextcloud. Canada can easily get in on this too.
Canada has roughly the population of California, and Aus/NZ combined have populations less than California. For these types of market analyses, these countries are closer to US states in market potential.
What's is your argument? That tech companies don't need them? Sounds like such a brutally myopic american take.
Sure.
Canada has a GDP of:
Kansas, Arkansas, Nebraska, Mississippi, New Mexico, Idaho, New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont
put together.
That's the equivalent of 18 states.
Throw in Aus and NZ too and you add another 7 states -- Louisiana, Alabama, Utah, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nevada and Iowa.
Ontario alone has a larger GDP than 45 of the 50 US states, and a bigger GDP than New Hampshire, Hawaii, West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, Rhode Island, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont put together.
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> When we piss everyone off in the EU
Companies are supposed to compete anyway, without having to get pissed off first.
Canada is in the same boat as the EU -- desperately looking for alternative vendors at the moment.
Canada's government is not looking for MS or AWS alternatives.
i wouldnt be surprised if theyre talking about it internally, and avoiding saying it out loud until they've secured alternative options
I think they are a decade or two late to migrate away. They will end up developing their own in a time where these are loss leaders. It’s likely they will pay for it in a bundle while just not using it.
Not to mention in my experience EU companies don’t know how to migrate away from anything as their tech companies operate at the efficiency of a US government agency.
Let's not go over the top.
The announcement is about a tool developed internally by the French government to use internally, too. This is a very wasteful approach that does not create real competitors to US giants, and it is liable to be cancelled at the next round of cost reduction...
An insider view: there is a major push in a lot of state related team & department at the moment to go “sovereign tooling”. With alternatives for a lot of stuff.
This is not just a corner of the universe, most of us are switching tools at the moment, the trend is definitively big.
My point is that you don't achieve that by having the state start developing internal tools (unless it's highly sensitive stuff like for the intelligence services or military) for standard office applications. The French state is already massively oversized...
It’s not just this, it’s the arrogant attitude of the administration on tarriffs, Ukraine, and a broad range of topics
And that will change in 3 years or even at the end of this year... A lot is blown out of proportion by the EU itself because it serves its own agenda to expand reach and power.
Realistically there is zero alternative to US tech/online dominance in sight in Europe and the credible competitors are more likely to be Chinese (tiktok, temu, shein, etc.) What is happening is EU politics.
>2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market
I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product.
The regulations were insane.
I imagine software is significantly easier, but there is a mountain of difference when it comes to electrical and plumbing.
Regulations are le bad.
- signed someone from a country where ~10m people still drink water from lead pipes (the USA)
And in France alone 7.5 million home have lead pipes [1].
[1] https://www.zerowaterfilter.com/blogs/zerowater-knowledge-ce...
Regulations are neutral. They can be positive, or negative. And should be pruned occasionally probably.
And yea, we have lots of old lead pipes here in certain places. But let's not pretend we can't find fault with the immigrant ghettos in Europe or myriad other issues y'all have over there.
There's problems everywhere there's sufficient numbers and complexity.
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Lead pipes in Chicago were due to union regulatory capture and not lack of regulations
We are still making hardware and feel the same way about the US market. The litigation is insane. Meanwhile the Chinese don't give a damn about any of those.
> I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product.
If you are unwilling to follow regulations to sell your hardware here, then it tells me the regulations are already doing its job properly.
The issue was the sheer number of various regulations/standards/(taxes?) changing by country.
It was good enough for the US.
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India, but many companies aren't willing to price for the market nor respect corporate norms there.
Weird, because software has probably the lowest marginal cost of goods sold of any product or service. You can make money selling at almost any price.
Yes, there is some cost to provisioning and running a cloud account. It's pretty small though. Some disk space and electricity.
By "corporate norms" I presume you mean bribes paid to the person making the purchasing decision?
I guess the point here is to keep high prices. If you lower the prices, you can try to enter even Africa, but it's simply easier to keep more or less uniform pricing, unless you're Steam-size and are able to spend resources on doing this properly.
What corporate norms are notably different in this context?
> nor respect corporate norms there.
What do you mean?
No, thank you. I would rather run Chinese spyware.
EU is a colony of USA. If it would be necessary, US can simply force EU to buy US technology.
If you check the EU politics, they never do or say anything that can be interpreted negatively by US or damage US interests.
In 2025, EU and US signed an agreement that obliges EU to buy energy resources from US at ridiculously high prices, despite that EU is already struggling with the high price of energy.
In the tech sector, EU has been a colony of pretty much every other country which it used to colonize. IMO, the fines that the EU used to collect regularly from US big tech companies were bribes to keep suppressing the EU tech sector.
There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.
No. No one really gives a shit about AI other than the tech industry and vocal CEO culture which is just using it to bury recession and regular lay offs. Otherwise it's novelty value and frustration but no one is going to use it or pay enough for it to be viable as an economic backbone.
There are many more important things to consider. Like literally everything else society sits on top of.
AI is great at translating, doing a task in seconds which would take days. For almost no cost.
That is quite significant on a continent like Europe, with dozens of different languages.
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> They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
What failed with Mistral?
Which anti-AI regulations are we talking about, and don't these apply to any solution distributed in the European Union, hence also to American ones?
> build a better model with lower latency.
That's mighty impossible for the european mindset - people here are not so risk-eager as to through hundreds of billions on infrastructure for something that might return a profit.
The US capital markets are truly a wonder to behold. There's no way to replace that. For good and ill, you'd only get weird looks in Europe if you asked for €10 billion for an unproven business model in what's somehow also a competitive market.
To be fair this example does look a lot like insanity.
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This is part of the answer.
I have a theory about the second part; European consumers have an even more suspicious view of "corporate overlords" if they are domestic/European than if they are American. Not because Americans are more trustworthy, but because they see Europeans as "anonymous masses" and are therefore more "neutral" to the internal struggles in Europe.
Signing up to a service owned by a European "dynastic" family, possibly in a neighbouring country, feels like more of a surrender of autonomy.
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You don't have to love risk to build something you need.
> There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT
Before or after the bubble pops?
What does chatgpt has over competitors again? Besides a deranged ceo of course
Uhhh... 800m active users?
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>There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.
I think the idea of a Eurostack is more compelling: standard office productivity tools that aren't beholden to Microsoft, Apple, or Google. That means email, calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, slide decks, video conferencing.
Imagine if every government and corporation in the eurozone stopped paying for Windows licenses and O365 subscriptions.
LibreOffice exists, of course, but it lacks an alternative to Outlook and Teams/Zoom. It would benefit from a benevolent corporate sponsor with deeper pockets than TDF which AFAIK is purely volunteer-driven.
1. ChatGPT is shit
2. We prefer anti-AI regulations and not having a stupid Musk indoctrinating half the country
What was the last successful French software project in the Telecom or Conferencing space?
This project has been forced into the hands of 40k users, but likely due to a plethora of bugs and user experience issues they are picking a date far in the future for broad deployment.
Belledonne Communications has been actively breaking Linphone, conference calling broke back in August 2023 for example and remains broken to this day.
If we look to Québécoise in Canada, SFLPhone would crash after 2 dozen calls, and Jami (formerly GNU Ring) is still a beta quality product with some neat DHT concepts that I'd love to see work.
The French sphere has a software delivery and quality problem. The user rejection factor will remain high until they choose to fix the bugs that cause users to run away.
Ffmpeg.
Basically all videoconferencing (except teams) is built on the back of French open source software.
Idk, VLC is kinda everywhere and while not the super cutting edge of video playing anymore, is still pretty OK. If they'd just attach a chat and SIP client to VLC they'd be set.
I don't know what's the ETA on VLC 4 but it's been entirely usable for me for the past year, and it's pretty cutting edge (internally). Hopefully it's not too long before we'll see beta releases.
Impossible n'est pas français !
And you seriously are saying Teams is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Ok I concede the videoconferencing works, but it's quite a feat to make a text chat window so slow and buggy. Sometimes when I type, it is spelling stuff backwards! Message texting is a solved problem since IRC or ICQ
CYCLADES (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYCLADES) was influential in the design of important Internet concepts like the OSI model and TCP.
That'd be the same osi model which only is used by academics and nobody in the real world.