I'm not sure large multinational corporations belong to any specific country at this point.
Putting government websites and services on AWS or Azure pretty much precludes independent foreign or domestic policy. It's ok now (UK and US are pretty tight) but things/alliances change and in 20 or 30 years it could become huge problem.
"Set of countries", aka economy yes, "single country" no. If every nation except the US allied with Russia over Ukraine, I'm not so sure McDonald's would have pulled out of Russia.
Also US can easily force McDonalds to pull out of Russia - CEO and leadership live in US and have to comply with US sanctions unless they want to pull Lavabit or spend time in jail.
I'm sure specific country belongs to large multinational corporation at this point.
There, fixed it for you :)
That thought reminds me of a conversation in an episode of Yes Prime Minister:
> Hacker: I sometimes wonder why we need the [nuclear] weapons.
> Sir Humphrey: Minister! You're not a unilateralist?
> Hacker: I sometimes wonder, you know.
> Sir Humphrey: Well, then, you must resign from the government!
> Hacker: Ah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not that unilateralist! Anyway, the Americans will always protect us from the Russians, won't they?
> Sir Humphrey: Russians? Who's talking about the Russians?
> Hacker: Well, the independent deterrent.
> Sir Humphrey: It's to protect us against the French!
For you maybe, but not for me :) I just took advantage of the threat to ask a slightly unrelated question (although parent mentioned Ireland as well, so maybe slightly on topic at least)
"Currently operating": yes, steadily, for seven years now.
"Noteworthy": yes, I really hope we are, at least, we have been quite newsworthy recently
"Most companies seems to be US-based": well, we have US employees and we are running on top of US based companies infrastructure, amongst others.
o/
--
platform.sh
Edit: Apparently not! Didn't even have to sign up to the service (just loaded the landing page) and my data ended up on some US-based (Google) entity's servers (fonts.googleapis.com).
Looks like a nice platform, unfortunately doesn't seem too privacy-aware so gonna have to find something else.
You also have a variety of smaller providers hosting OpenStack, which gives you some platformy services.
Those things have a price. Namely, when people work less, less innovation happens, which means less productivity growth happens, which means less innovation happens, and so on. I lived in Germany for two years. I absolutely loved it. However, despite its reputation, it's not a place that I would say prioritizes work (compared to the U.S.)
That's quite a stretch. Ask any engineer about having that a-ha moment in the shower, or when out for a walk. Downtime is incredibly important for mentally intense work. Work smarter, not harder and all that. Productivity isn't tied to time spent in office - my experience with american offices is that they encourage people to hang around, spend time there with meals, etc. That's not productive time, that's time spent in the office. Similarly, innovation doesn't come from time in the office, it comes from collaboration, experience, thinking outside the box.
> However, despite its reputation, it's not a place that I would say prioritizes work (compared to the U.S.)
I don't think this is a fair statement. The US prioritizes butts-in-seats, workplaces where you're competing against your peers, system where the power imbalance between an employee and employer is heavily stacked in favour of the employer. That doesn't mean that the US prioritizes work., and it definitely doesn't mean that Germany doesn't prioritize work.
I agree but I think you’ll find that working usually contributes economic value. Not working usually doesn’t. The key word being usually. if you’re in doubt, just try to record the economic value delivered by your downtime. How many hours are idled for every a-ha moment? Not that there is anything wrong with idling…
> That doesn't mean that the US prioritizes work., and it definitely doesn't mean that Germany doesn't prioritize work.
I’m using productivity as a measurement. Ideally, productivity accounts for inefficient work by comparing inputs (labor) to economic outputs. The U.S. is more productive in this sense, so it’s more than just butts in seats.
During WW1, the British "Health of Munition Workers' Committee" collected some fascinating data on production and working hours from armament factories. These were fairly motivated workers, doing semi-skilled manual tasks where you'd expect productivity to scale linearly with time on the job.
Moving from 25 hours/week to 30, 40, or 45 hours did lead to a proportional increase in output, but it then begins to plateau. Teams working 7x 10 hour shifts produced about as much as those working 8x6.
Check out the first few figures of Pencavel, J. (2014). The Productivity of Working Hours. The Economic Journal, 125(589), 2052–2076. Portico. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12166
Data collected from American workers during WW2 showed a similar pattern. I'd expect that "creative" work has an even smaller linear range, but I'm not aware of any studies.
Actually, the differences are quite small and in 2017 Germany overtook the US in labour productivity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
_Some_ people have to be "not working" in order to make use of all the other areas of the economy - shops, transport, leisure centres, clubs, nightlife, the arts, self-care (beauty, massage, counselling etc). That's a fairly large slice of the economic activity in many countries.
Productivity has no strong meaning either. How do you measure it? GDP PPP / worker / hour? What if it actually depends on externalities like the amount of carbon released in the atmosphere? What is actually a worker (back at the what is "work" and "economic value" point)? What if it counts destroying then rebuilding things (as-is)? What if it counts absurdly high health expenses? What if it counts absurdly high health expenses coming in part because some people illegal pushed for addictive drugs to be way over-prescribed by corrupting physicians?
That's unimportant, though.
Arguments like this are pointless.
> artificially inflated
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184968/us-health-expendi...
There's a quote from Obama in an article from The Nation years ago, that basically says we can't fix our healthcare system properly because it would put too many (white-collar make-work jobs program participants, essentially, under our current system) people out of work.
The main US advantage wrt to the last generation of tech giants (i.e. Google, Facebook and Amazon) is language. You will reach scale far faster in the US than in Europe because you do not have to translate your product to new languages and markets. Thus the US giants reached scale before similar European products could compete.
That is false. EU mandates minimum 4 weeks of PTO across all members but varies wildly according to country, sector and company.
In most EU countries I've seen the average tends to hover around 5 weeks while 6 weeks or more is usually for very generous employers trying to attract top applicants in employee friendly countries.
I get you're attempting a jab at Americans by flashing large number of PTO, but let's be realistic that 6 weeks is not the norm in for all jobs in the whole of Europe.
There’s vacation and sick leave in most of EU. PTO is an acronym used in the US and the concept doesn’t apply in Europe.
I fail to see how admitting that certain countries have particular qualities that make them less competitive in a given industry and thus make it more economically feasible to use the solutions of other nations, means that they would become dependent on another culture/language.
I mean, exploring new languages and knowing a few polite phrases is generally a good idea, even if you don't find the idea of learning a new language fun/useful personally. That said, it's not like it's required either: people who shop on AliExpress don't need to know Chinese by any means.
Globalization (and thus getting out-competed in certain respects) is kind of inevitable nowadays, though admittedly it would be really cool to see European alternatives to AWS - I mean, Alibaba Cloud and Yandex Cloud seem to prove that it's at least somewhat feasible to explore something like that and companies like Hetzner and Scaleway seem to also prove that the infrastructure aspects are basically covered.
All that's missing is the platform around it, as well as all of the complexity and development that would come with setting out to make something like that.
The current solution is Cloudfoundry.
On AWS.
They are simply doing what every other CF customer is doing - realizing that the platform they chose to run on is dead.
Last I looked, no one was holding a gun to any Europeans head saying "You must only use evil US software comrade!"
In fact, I think it's a European who is holding a gun to other Europeans heads at the moment.
This is a gross, unjustified generalization. Sure, there's a lot of old crap around, but that's no different from other parts of the world; but there's also lots of new, modern stuff, with a huge diversity across the continent.
Just to give a common counterexample, the SEPA system allows me to trivially transmit money to anyone in the eurozone, for a considerable portion of them (including everyone in my country) in seconds, completely free of charge and involvement of any third party except my and their bank. Cash App, Venmo and comparable services basically don't exist in the EU, because the governments stimulated and mandated large scale interoperable digital infrastructure.
Paying on credit card in the US was painful compared to the experience in Australia a few years ago. Australia had tap-to-pay everywhere and so many places in the US were still requiring swipe and signature (I mean WTF).
I have found SEPA to be quite good. Australia has PayID as well which works well.
To cherry-pick, Estonia is leading the world when it comes to digital government. It has been an absolute pleasure to use their e-resident system to run a company. They're fostering a startup ecosystem that is punching well above it's weight[0]. From autonomous delivery robots[1] to Wise.
Government technology can often lag behind private sector technology, both from an inately conservative approach, but also because they have to care about things that often get ignored with private sector tech, like supporting everyone (e.g. robust accessibility).
But to say that Europe is 20-30 years behind is just not a realistic view of the world.
[0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/estonia-has-just-1-3-million-p... [1]: https://estonia.ee/delivery-robots-created-by-estonian-engin...
The truth is that 20-30 years ago Europe was lagging behind the US in some respects - credit card acceptance, computer usage in some businesses, etc. But obviously they're on par with the US today, and where they're ahead or behind the US the reason isn't access to technology, rather it's usually government policy.
Government policy and societal attitude are two parts of the reason. It's not really fair to compare US and Estonia really, One is managing 350(?) million people and the other 1.3 million. Even comparing Australia to Estonia though, the differences in behaviour from the government entities are remarkable.
Australia has a real "we're going to catch you" vibe to it's taxation and social services, where as, Estonia seems to really have an attitude of trying to build awesome things to make their citizens better off and to streamline things.
Governments and their relationship to technology, both as a provider and also as a regulator is a complex beast. As you say, so many of the problems are manifestations in the imperfections of our democracies. Regardless of which AU, EU, GB, US all have flaws that we have to live with and work to improve.
Banks might also have only implemented receiver or sending, but not both. My mom can receive my instant SEPA transfers, but she can't send me one back since her bank has only implemented the receiving part.
- Government issued MFA/SSO solution (nemid, now mitid)
- Online tax filing
- Drivers License/Health Card apps
- Secure communications platform (e-boks) for official messages
And thats just off the top of my head. The likelihood that the US catches up to this in any meaningful way is slim to none.
I do agree that the 20-30 years behind is a gross overestimation, but acting like we're a shining example of modern IT is a stretch as well.
[1] https://www.version2.dk/artikel/eksperter-saar-tvivl-om-sikk...
Happy Wise customer, Happy Xolo customer. I love Bolt (when available).
Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
All of those chips and fabs all rely on ASML? Those manufacturers you list literally couldn’t make the chips they make without an EU company being the backbone of their work.
You can’t think of global scale European applications. SAP, the worlds third largest software company by revenue? Representative of the EU’s tech sector, probably not, but it goes to show your either ignorant of the wider industry in the EU or being deceiving.
> Open banking and SEPA. Are these technologies? I think they were just regulations.
Turns out regulations can be a good thing? Our banking infrastructure ‘just works’, instantly, EU wide, with low fees and technology first.
> Wake up.
People get real holiday, great purchasing power (sure, not as high as a US tech worker, but pretty darn good), healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt them, proper mental health treatment so walking down a street isn’t a gamble, great affordable education, and the pleasure of not having a mass shooting multiple times a week. But yeah, the US has some big companies. Good for you bud.
Europe has sleep-walked into technological irrelevance since at least the early 2000s. In 10 years or so, all there's left in European tech that's competitive is going to be aviation, and agriculture and fashion if you count them as tech.
> People get real holiday, great purchasing power (sure, not as high as a US tech worker, but pretty darn good), healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt them, proper mental health treatment so walking down a street isn’t a gamble, great affordable education, and the pleasure of not having a mass shooting multiple times a week. But yeah, the US has some big companies. Good for you bud.
US tech workers have PTO, and Europe has mass shootings as well, and war and migrant crisis on the border. FANNG's profit is not just big, they are so massive, they dwarf many European countries' GDP.
The truth is hard to swallow, but if Europe doesn't recognize just how far behind you are, you are never going to catch up, or even better, produce some industrial leaders once in a while.
That's super kind of you, I think Europe could get back on its feet with that kind of leg up.
The European brain drain to America simply will not stop until there's a complete ecosystem.