Comment by dlcarrier
8 days ago
What I get out of that pitch is "use us because we're local to you, and possibly because you're required to, not because we're and good, or that we'll even try".
I mostly interact with smaller contributors to their field, and they tend to be unique and bold, because that's what is needed to be competitive. When they get their uniqueness and boldness out of just being who they are, it doesn't tend to foster the type of uniqueness and boldness needed to make a good product.
The way we are now, it is a liability to rely on foreign technology for anything critical, we should be back to the cold war days, were plenty of countries had their own computers, operating systems, programming languages.
It is going to be pleasant? No, and it is going to take a few decades, however we cannot afford to have kill switches in the hands of foreign nations, even if their software is the best in the planet.
In the current climate, using MS Office is a business risk for European companies. Who knows what idea will pop into ol' minihands' head next time he has a bad day at the golf course? Like, it would _not_ be particularly shocking if at some point in the next 2.5 years he attempts to interfere with the ability of US companies to sell services to Europe. You can no longer depend on "but that would be an obviously terrible idea, so they won't do it" as an operating principle; see the tariffs.
Frankly, right now, there is a lot of money to be made in just providing safer alternatives to American cloud stuff. They don't need to be _better_, they just need to be based in a stable jurisdiction.