I agree with you that Office 365, AWS and Github are great products. Hard, if not impossible, to catch up as a competitior, especially when you have trillion dollar companies backing them.

However, if you cannot trust those products then you cannot use them.

Remember, this thread is about Github blocking an entire company due to one employee due to American politics. If a non-US company risks to lose it project management/code management (Github), its infrastructure (AWS) or its documents (Office 365) on a whim due to American policies then they cannot use those products.

If a big enough chunk of the world can't use the American offerings, then there is a market for alternatives.

I think it's important to frame it correctly: US companies have been persistently acting illegally in Europe. Avoiding taxes (e.g. Amazon's Project Goldcrest) to undercut competitors, mishandling data for profit, and then abusing market dominant positions to prevent European competitors from rising up; forcing those potential competitors to sell to US firms.

You're right that it's probably too late to reverse all of this economic damage that the US has intentionally caused. It's a difficult problem for the world.

Ah yes, poor innocent Europe that is so distraught over the economic damage US companies did that checks notes Ireland sued the EU on behalf of Apple to prevent it from having to pay taxes.

You're right. You should frame it correctly and take ownership over the complete and utter regulatory failures of European countries to support and nurture local businesses.

> We have no private investors that would pony up enough money to go against US tech titans and fat chance the EU would ever fund such initiatives

Did you miss this a couple of weeks back?

https://www.eetimes.eu/eu-signs-e145bn-declaration-to-develo...

That's for semiconductor technology, not a full software stack, search engine, social network, or server hosting farm that could compete with Apple, Google, Facebook, or Amazon. Designing ICs is already a niche market, and designing process nodes for IC manufacturing is even more niche. Furthermore, the EU already had technical superiority here: ASML is the company that supplies TSMC with the machinery that powers their 5nm node.

Sure, I get what you're saying, but I hope you see my point here. Pursuing 2nm lithography (which is something like 1-2 nodes from bleeding edge?) with 135 billion euro surely tells you something about their commitment.

I would also point out that many of these companies you mention are immensely scattered. Take anyone and you'll find their resources spread across an evergrowing domain/portfolio. I'm not saying it's bad that Apple is developing cars and Facebook VR headsets - I'm just saying it spreads them thinner. If the EU found it valuable enough to pursue e.g search within the next five years it's not at all unfeasible or unreasonable to do so. It might even be better for the greater good of the internet frankly.

I generally agree with your post (we both made the mistake of posting during EU peak times and not US peak times, so downvotes incoming), but it's worth noting that Airbus is a success story bolstered by the now-EU to combat American aerospace dominance.

I love Airbus, but they're not a software company and since we live in the age of cloud-everything, software has eaten the world and all our mobile tech is controlled by two US walled gardens (apple and google) that is a lot more potentially impactful on our daily lives on multiple levels of our society than what Airbus could do.

The Silicon Valley wasn’t built overnight. The software industry is just taking off in the EU. Mind you, nobody would have thought that the US would loose their leading role in the Middle East, look at them now. I can see the same happening in tech.

Problem is that EU is not comparable in any manner to the US. For one, where do you suggest the Silicon Valley of EU is? London would've been a decent bet except that they just bailed.

As someone else mentioned, capital is way harder to raise (meaning slower to market) - and then an underrated factor which is equally important is how easy or difficult is it to sell as a nascent startup. At least in my industry (cybersecurity) it has been very hard in the EU vs US in the earlier stages of product maturity.

Much like the parent comment, I don't see this changing anytime soon and I'm fully betting on the fact US will keep their dominance in tech.

Well, we shouldn’t just assume that Silicon Valley has to be a place. The lockdown showed that numerous companies can operate 100% remotely. And I got the impression that there’s always more money than startups.

Silicon Valley absolutely has to be a place and people will return to face-to-face social contact the minute that is possible. It is impossible to build long-term meaningful relationships on a 100% remote basis.

Wages are also strangely way, way worse in the EU. When you combine that with cost of living (and taxes) being far higher there, it's not a great recipe for growth.

It depends. For example, office software is already far into the flat region of its innovation curve. IMHO it would suffice to throw away MS and adopt e.g. LibreOffice in all educational and government institutions throughout EU (and there are precedents already). GitHub shall be even easier to replace (complexity is far below office and open source alternatives do exist). Now with AWS, it is really a tough question. Hetzner is doing a very good (albeit slow) progress towards AWS functionality. Their prices are competitive and customer service is much better that what I ever got from AWS (not affiliated, just a happy customer). The level of integration in AWS however is still out of the reach of Hetzner (Cloudfront, S3, SES etc).

It would be really interesting to know your opinion on what functionality in AWS is indispensable and what you can sacrifice in case Hetzner/OVH price for the rest is the same as AWS or lower.

> Sure, please let me know how the EU plans to build Office 365, AWS, GitHub competitors of similar scale, quality and success.

There are no such plans. EU wields a lot of regulatory power. The most likely path of action would be to force MS/Amazon/etc. to spin-off their EU side of the business. And I believe that the companies have already prepared for this.