This is a model that worked extremely well in Japan in the latter half of the 20ths century, and was mostly responsible for its economic miracle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu
In the cloud sector this would mean small companies that did everything from running electrical transformers in Berlin to data center management to running blob storage (on S3 protocol) to running machine learning SAASes or elastic compute services. All companies would work together to form a cohesive whole. Each company would own shares in related companies to insulate each other from stock market fluctuations and takeover attempts.
The hard part is building something resembling a cohesive service out of all of this where smaller companies can plug in to the network easily and end customers can use every service they want and still have one bill to pay.
If they can use the 10 billion euros for that - to minimize fragmentation - then the market will take care of the rest.
Of course, it could just be handed over to SAP to build "SAP cloud" as a direct competitor to Amazon. In which case, yeah, we'll get a pile of shit.
It requires a set of small, interlocking companies, (many of which own pieces of each other and have very tight knit relationships) that form part of a greater supply chain. It requires trust and human relationships.
The set of companies in Shenzhen responsible for the "pearl river delta electronics manufacturing miracle" might be the closest analog we have today.
It is perhaps easier in manufacturing because standardization on interlocking components is easier, but it's by no means impossible in software, and with cloud computing we do have an emerging set of interaction standards (e.g. the S3 protocol).
I don't think that the EU actually will follow this path, because it requires pretty deep technical and economic understanding to follow through and policymakers who are resistant to lobbying from, e.g. SAP, but they certainly could, and the EU has surprised me before with smart policymaking where they clearly listened to experts (e.g. with GDPR).
A bigger issue IMO, is that the EU can't grow business that grow a cloud business and instead thinks it can just will this into being.
I think I know what they want to do, define the economic relationships between companies and standardise them in RDF and other semantic web standards. Dunno maybe even set internal prices for memory, processing and network utilisation sort of like LIBOR does for intra-bank lending.
Oh, wait. That already happens over here!
So in the end, objective comparison would have to go much deeper, than median household income.
On the other hand, my spending on Apple Stands in the last years was very similar to your personal spending on Russian nuclear fuel as used in US nuclear plants. That being $0. Turnips leads this one :).
A second hand thinkpad could do the job if money is tight.
But that is something different that taking all the funds by incumbents.
The US didn’t shoot for “building a cloud” with the DARPA investments. The goal of those investments were for very specific projects that assisted the military (short and long term) and the Internet and SV were a side effect.
Trying to build a “Rival Cloud” immediately sets off red flags for me because of how vague it is. What are the concrete goals? To replicate AWS? How much would you want to replicate? Which services? Which features in the services? Why would customers choose this over AWS? How could this organization be run (somewhat) profitably while being useful?
They already have Hetzner. Seems like the EU government could work with them to fund the new services they think are important. Maybe open source the components that they build so other EU companies could build similar services if Hetzner went bust.
The point of EU programs is not to build anything, that's just an excuse. The objective is to funnel tax payer's money to politically well-connected.
It's the opposite in the EU, big companies get funding to develop something. Startups have no chance, unless someone knows someone.
I watched a talk by David Graeber, author of On Bullsh*t Jobs. He observes that actual service sector jobs, where someone does something for someone else, have made up a pretty constant 20% of the economy. According to wikipedia, 74.7% of Europe's economy is services [0]. It's going to be a rude awakening when the curtains are pulled back on a 55% bullshit economy.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union#...
However, my argument to parent was, that DARPA was also top-down, and it was a success.
You can apply even as a single person, just need to know your ways through the bureaucracy, how to formulate your application, business plan, etc. Not easy, but doable.
Or use one of the many services which support you in doing that. There seems to be a service industry around that nowadays, which wasn't the case when I did a few years ago, or been to scroogy and stubborn because I can speak and write fucking AMTSDEUTSCH if I have to :)
I have a British friend who would work with me on this idea of an appliance reuse/recycling factory in NRW (because it's the closest state to the best suppliers from FR/DE/BE/NL). We've done the research, there's little competition and we could be profitable within a year.
To summarize the idea: take broken/used/returned electronics like washers, fridges, dishwashers, dryers, TVs, laptops, smartphones. Fix whatever can be fixed and sell as refurbished, break down the rest and sell for parts and scrap.
Seems simple? That's because it is, at least the basic idea. The hard parts are securing suppliers and selling everything for a profit. But we believe it can be done, because there's a huge market for refurbs, and especially spare parts.
There's a myriad of small repair shops all over EU that are starved for parts. I used to get them for cheap from my previous employer and sell them at a profit. I never had enough parts to satisfy the demand.
The UK has several big companies and a whole lot of small ones. Mainland EU is lacking, there's a few big recyclers in the Netherlands, everywhere else it's just small companies that don't seem to aim for scale.
I could publish the business plan if anyone's interested. At this point, I don't care if it's me or anyone else who does it. But it has to aim for scale, it's a must have for the environment.
Honestly speaking, it is hard for them to compete with cheap chinese white goods, their used goods are just a tad cheaper than brand new chinese goods.
Check out https://www.envie.org/
Just my own opinion, used white goods that were once high end will last longer than the cheap new stuff.
They just have more thought put into the design, there is no corner cutting like missing components and thinner metal, they're just better built. And they have features that are missing even on the newest cheap models.
Haier washers, for example, are a nightmare. They fail catastrophically very often, even the cheapest Bosch will last more. And the parts are simply not available, not new, not refurbished.
Of course common sense would say refurbishing is better for the environment, but common sense? EU?
Anyways, I wish you luck/success.
Refurbished home appliances like washers/fridges/dryers/dishwashers/ovens are a good product to sell, there are lots of small shops that buy dozens or hundreds of them for resale, and of course, lots of individuals furnishing their own place.
Energy efficiency for them is not going up anytime soon, they've been stuck in the same ratings for more than a decade. They're simply as efficient as possible already.
Liability and warranty would be handled by the resellers, and if agreed, by us. Mostly by return and replacement, but it could be feasible to create an on-site repair service. We can provide the necessary parts, too.
The thing is, a properly fixed appliance will last just as long as a new one. In fact, the failure rate on used electronics can often be lower - newer models that use a new internal design fail more than older, "proven" appliances. The saving grace for them are the warranty and return policies.
Customers will still give 4-5 stars even if their first purchase was a dud, but it was swiftly replaced with another one. That always surprises me, btw. It's like, "oh my new Indesit fridge was DOA, but they replaced it the next day. 5 stars."
Anyway, a big downside is that transportation costs are rather high. And they can only be loaded by forklifts with special attachments, or several people at the same time.
However, the more thoroughly they're checked, repaired and cleaned, the fewer returns, the less money spent on transportation.
Which I btw. got for free from the streetside, it was just standing there with other stuff, probably houshold clearing. Saw it on my way home, checked it out, was clean. Looked OK. Went home, got my foldable sack barrow and a few rubber straps from my bicycle, went back there and had a nice upgrade to my even older, but much smaller and louder fridge. Which I then rolled to the communal recycling center a block away :)
STRIKE!
With enough policy tools and barrier, EU cloud will happen.
It works well for the average citizen, but not so great for innovative and ambitious people.
In Italy a startup took over the job for 1/50 of the price and with at least as good or better job.
Is the above play a problem for Germany? No. Do you they even understand an problem? I don't think so.
This is what I noticed in Germany as well. The government keeps tooting their own horn on how in every statistic they're the best in Europe and the media parrots that while the younger generations just takes it for granted and doesn't bother questioning the poor decisions the government makes while they spend the public tax money like drunken sailors because hey, "we're Europe's no. 1, what could our government ever do wrong?"
Maybe vote the corrupt leeches out?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannesmann-Prozess
with the golden handshake/parachute, however you may call it.
Any spending that would make the pandemic become a fraction less severe is probably a net win. So if you have to chose between 60m EUR offer and a 95% chance of success of all features and in time delivery and another offer of 10m EUR and 90%, what should you choose? Why be thrifty at this point?
My question is rather why didn't they went out to spend more? So many more things that could have been added: public places check-ins (e.g. When visiting restaurants), more interfaces for laboratory to upload data, manual meeting log, collaborations with other countries...
[1] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2020-10/coronavirus-...
Meanwhile in Canada Shopify and Blackberry got together and helped the federal Canadian Digital Service in coding up an app, with the code available on GitHub:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID_Alert
* https://github.com/CovidShield
No money exchanged hands AFAICT.
So they just come across as greedy, corrupt bastard - which probably has the positive side of being very much closer to the truth.
It's great that it worked nice in Italy, but giving the contract to a random startup is more of a gamble I think.
They are a rather small company by headcount but with great success in the app consumer market and with a lot of experience in the sector.
Not everything need to be huge to be good and successfully, especially in technology.
Upd: I previously wrote, that Italian app shares the source code with German one, which was probably not correct. In fact, Italy collaborated with Germany on developing a contact tracing solution before, but the apps were developed independently with different requirements. I’m sorry.
It's a lot less than that in terms of total personnel costs ($100K is a modest salary-only for a software engineer, it's extremely low as a full cost of employment.)
Sure. But it's probably nowhere close to your salary + benefits + overhead cost to your employer.
On top of whatever your direct employer charges to the government agency hiring them to cover profit and other costs (management overhead, contracting overhead) associated with your employment, there's also contract management overhead for the government agency. For contractors, the total cost is usually a greater multiple of salary + benefits than it is for direct employees (though if the benefits suck enough, maybe still a smaller multiple of bare salary.)
1) 30 top notch engineers to build the MVP and then iterate.
2) 300 engineers - the first 100 to step all over each other trying to build an app and the remaining 200 engineers fixing the bugs from the first 100.
Can you share your source?
UK has spent 11 billion on a healthcare IT system and got nothing to show for it.
https://independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/hea...
It's the public sector commissioning the private sector in matters that it often doesn't understand. This will fail far more often than it will succeed.
If the app is useful, this is another topic, but it was not the point of this thread.
The current app is a nightmare. It shows that i had already 2 low risk encounters - but it doesn't show me when and where! I NEED this info to adapt my behavior! very bad app.
people die. the economy is suffering. millions lose jobs. still, some guys making 140k in their it engineering jobs working from home and relaxing are telling me sth about "data privacy as priority". i disagree. people disagree.
Taiwan did a FANTASTIC job leveraging data.
we are either not capable of that or just fanatic.... maybe both.
The when and where of individual encounters, especially at low levels of infected population, are pretty irrelevant. At this point you should really be aware of how you can change your behaviour to minimise risk, that really hasn't changed in the past few months.
Please, mate, this is just populism what you are doing there.
But it doesn't matter where they happened since I already know that I am carefully avoiding risky areas. I am sitting next to my window when working and people walk past that window within 2 meters. That alone could set off exposure notifications. Or maybe someone across the aisle in the supermarket?
Would I not go to the supermarket if I know it happened there? Would I not go for a walk if I knew someone 8 meters away from me on some bench was later diagnosed with COVID?
It barely serves any purpose at all outside of curiosity. The app already tells you everything you need to know.
There's a difference between what you share willingly and stuff being collected on you, especially in private matters.
So when the app tells you to quarantine, you quarantine? Or it is important enough to share everyone's location data, but not for people to more radically adjust their behaviour rather than just avoid a particular location?
Show the evidence. Wanting data privacy is far from the fringe minority sentiment you imply it to be, otherwise GDPR wouldn't be so popular.
Literally everyone who knows anything calls the German app a huge success, especially compared with similar efforts.
Half the population downloaded it in the first days and it works great. It's completely privacy-focused and the UX is great for both individuals as well as the government.
Is the German tracking solution really 400 times as complex? Based on either citizens' adoption or UX, is it anywhere near as successful?
Built by a small, Agile company, although not by a startup by any classification.
In Canada, Shopify and Blackberry donated some engineering time:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID_Alert
Can't find anything on the back-end costs.
That's irrelevant when it comes to spending. The cost of something is always proportional to how much the customer(here the German government, read the taxpayer) is willing to spend not how complex the project is. While it might not be more complicated to implement than in Finland, the German government has more money than the Finish government so it was billed(read fleeced) accordingly.
It's like asking "Are SV engineer really 400x times better coders than Europeans?". Maybe not, but they can charge 400x more because their market conditions allow them to. Simple.
Do you have any source for that?
If true that is indeed impressive, but I am sceptical, given that your claim that "Half the population downloaded it" seems to be extremely exaggerated (https://qz.com/1898960/whats-behind-finlands-contact-tracing...)
One way in which the German app was clearly superior is that it was released a full month and a half earlier.
Share of population that downloaded it - Your article only talk about the first 24 hours. See for instance this article that says 1.8 milloin a month and a half ago: https://mobiili.fi/2020/09/08/koronavilkun-lataukset-yli-18-...
That's beginning to be half of the relevant population in a country of 6 million, when you take out kids and people in old folks' homes.
Which tells me that the claim "They ended up building it for 150k, with 250k more to operate it until the end of next year." is complete bullshit as a comparison for the German numbers, because it is only for the app itself without any backend or supporting infrastructure. Especially because you made it sound as if the rest of the 6 Million budget was not even used.
In reality, on top of the app development they spend 400k on planning, specification and coordination, 3.2 Million on other software (backend and admin, I suppose), 1.4 Million for deployment(?) and communications, and further maintenance and operations is not in fact accounted for yet.
> hat's beginning to be half of the relevant population in a country of 6 million, when you take out kids and people in old folks' homes.
Ah, nice moving goalposts there.
Yes, it's a very successful project and everyone involved deserves praise. Yes, Finland spent less than Germany for very similar results.
But they didn't spend 400k (let alone 150k) compared to 60 Million. They spent 4 Million compared to 20 Million, which is the overall development costs in Germany, with most of the rest going to the operation of a support call center (and that scales with population size, so legitimately more than 10 times higher in Germany than in Finland).
So why the 5 times higher development costs in Germany? Because they didn't do a public bid like Finland did. They threw money at some big companies they assumed could do it. And for that they got an app 6 weeks earlier than Finland. It turns out that those 6 weeks happened to be a time of low case numbers so that they didn't really matter. But that couldn't be known at the time the whole thing was planned, and if the pandemic had developed differently, those 16 million could have saved thousands of lives.
The only problem is that investors like the idea of cornering markets, which, due to regulation, is harder in the EU.
What leads you to believe that europe's problem is the investor climate?
I mean, this policy is clearly devoted to ensure that europe is able to control and manage critical cloud infrastructure, instead of handing everything in a silver platter to the US or, even worse, China. What leads you cto believe that a change in europe's investor climate would have an impact on this?
That question is particularly pertinent if you consider that GAFA-sized can mean "big enough to influence legislation".
First of all, none of the GAFA were actually started as Cloud infrastructure providers. So the question is not why isn't Europe creating big Cloud Infrastructure companies, one could argue that the biggest "pure-player" in Cloud is OVH which is European.
If anything it's the (insanely lax and pro-monopoly) American regulatory environment that has the biggest impact on the creation of big Cloud providers outside of the U.S. The only country that manage tyo do that are China & Russia to a lesser extent because they have active protection against AWS/GCP/MS.
As to why Europe doesn't create big GAFA-like companies in other sectors, one reason is that the E.U is not a single market from the perspective of these companies. Yes the regulatory environment is stable & simple enough for companies to operate in all E.U countries, but that's not all that makes a market.
The fact that europeans speak 27 different languages for instance makes building a european sized company much harder than a U.S sized one, for roughly the same market in terms of $$$.
EDIT: I don't think creating GAFA-style companies is a goal any state should pursue. The U.S needs to get their head out of their ass and split AMZN & Google ASAP, & fix Facebook.
edited: reworded to "close to impossible"
I know plenty who did. You should rather say something like it's hard for the average European worker to move to the US.
The one who went the furthest worked remotely for a very well known company from France for 2 years. Even with the company sponsoring the visa, he had to wait more than 1 year to have a shot, the lottery only happening once a year. He didn't get selected and eventually the company gave up on having any hope to ever bring him.
> why is that? Is it the regulatory environment?
fcantournet:
> If anything it's the (insanely lax and pro-monopoly) American regulatory environment that has the biggest impact on the creation of big Cloud providers outside of the U.S.
I don't think you can say the problem there is America's lack of regulation preventing European cloud providers (which was what the question was about) from starting.
It seems like the problem there is one of the European regulations being too strict.
Stifling regulation is not a force of nature, it is a lever that can be adjusted.
Whereas China and Russia have stricter rules about what foreign corporations can do, so there that allows for the creation of homegrown solutions like Baidu - would Baidu exist today if Google was able to run their services without interference in China since the start?
You will never get a Ronaldo/Jordan caliber player without exposing them to the best players from an early stage.
Protectionism works well until they face a real challenger and then wonder why their usual tactics and products all seem to fall short.
Also, this egalitarianism and promoting of mediocracy you speak of makes no sense in regards to people who want to attain personal growth. Not to mention having a system like the US comes at a massive cost in regards to the wellbeing and welfare of the general population.
Innovating isn't just about money. Not to mention a ton of innovators exists in the EU, they are just not the same scale as amazon/google etc.
The task of a business is to make profit. So yes, in that sense, the money is the ultimate goal and profit is the one and only kpi to look at.
The EU is populist in trying to blame tech companies for all of society's ills.
What I don't like as an EU citizen is that our network infra is ridden with Huawei equipment. I'd much rather have US equipment and services if domestic companies aren't capable delivering it rather than One Belt, One Road. Just take a look at Kyrgyzstan and how it's going to become a Chinese colony.
Who wants to invest in what will be scapegoat for law makers to cry at?
You can kill ~300 people and noone goes to jail. You can launder money for druglords and just get a fine.
What does a corporation have to do to actually suffer serious consequences, like jailtime or breaking up a company? Something that's not just 'cost of doing business'?
Throw more money at the current system, which has gotten bloated and complacent and clearly doesn't really work. The taxpayers pay for it.
ICT/IT is a very broad term, and usually used for anything technological in my experience.
If I hear you work in IT, it makes it sound like you work in corporate IT, e.g. the help desk, corporate networking, etc.
"We have never done this in the past, we are not doing this now, we won't do it."
I just send a pitch to a European VC fund with a new, totally disruptive technology. Their answer: "This is a crowded, very competitive market, hence we are not interested." I mean, really? First, this shows that the market is there. Second, such a device does not exists in the market and would disrupt the market. I don't get it.
I am a dual citizen so if we don't find money in the EU we just go to the US.
Does anyone know much are European businesses paying for US and Chinese cloud services per year? If we can pay 10B€ in order to move 20B€ of spending back into the EU then I'm all for it, no matter if we innovate or just subsidize existing providers.
They always have a way around and have enough influence to make sure there is anway around it.
EU investments like these always go to the same pockets. It is a broken system but it makes the insiders lots of money.
Lots of companies exist for the sole reason to get EU money and have absolutely zero interest in making any real products.
And not the least, startups are shots to the Moon with the expectation that most will fail; you cannot do that in this case, if you guarantee the money there will be no motivation, if you don't guarantee any money there will be no funding. Investing is different in Europe, that's why there is no SV here.
I've never raised capital or founded a startup in Europe, but from what I've been told by Europeans there are several challenges that the continent should try tackling
- Talent and Pay gap with the US
- Risk averse investors
- Over-regulated markets
I don't see how this plan will solve any of the above.
it’s a very hard to solve this problem, considering the current climate when there are a lot of multi billion (and trillion) dollars companies.
The world, at least the western world, desperately needs viable mature competition not based in the US.
I would go so far as to say not having it is a real problem for democracy and maybe even go as far as it being an issue of national security.
With the close ties between intelligence services and social media in the US, it is a problem for the US, but certaily more outside. However it is a challenge to avoid 5 eyes.
Less conspiracies, two rich and powerful persons in the US can decide what information is permissible in an election and what is not.
This would not matter much, if there were at least 10 different healthy competitors with at least a few million users.
Hopefully being more distributed also internationally, it would be unlikely that each leader would make the same decisions.
Like newspapers, they can suppress a story, but another newspaper might go with it.
Sadly in the US, the mass death of newspapers often means that a region / city /state might only have one newspaper in a monopoly situation.
I do not know if the state injecting billions can get to where we need to be.
I think it’s a simple confluence of the US having many English speaking people with lots of money, plus English is spoken worldwide, plus labor is readily available in the US.
There exists buyers, labor supply, and the inherent ability for software to scale with very low marginal costs means targeting the US market results in a higher probability of success.
Once you can grab the rich US market, you now have the momentum to grab other markets, and being first is more important than being better where network effects are in play.
My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings.
EDIT : and i should add, helping politicians look good. All in all it will only help everybody pretend they're doing something, while letting the ship sink even more.