If it were forced to simplify, competition would take care of many of the ills.
The trick here is that "users" and "customers" have become all but totally decoupled when it comes to the modern internet. Not enough people were willing to pay, so the market has turned to other sources of revenue.
I share your skepticism about bureaucratic government agencies creating value, and doubly so when it comes to technology. At the same time, as an individual voter I am beginning to question whether "the market" is optimizing for the same things that I value.
Perhaps there is a natural conflict between maximizing utility for the majority of people vs maximizing utility for the majority of capital.
In the EU's case, multi-party competitive bidding, with the winner taking the prime slot and others being assigned modular chunks of the product, sounds attractive.
Specifically, with the stipulation that results would be used as a criteria in future bids.
tl;dr -- Use the pyramid league system (e.g. from football) with promotion and relegation to efficiently create industry competition. Fuck up too many projects, down the pyramid you go.
From past failures the 2 things I want to be addressed are: 1) Have a proper procurement agency with actual experts at the helm, they are the "customer", they hand over the bids, they measure success, they should of course listen to end users. 2) Shield the project from petty internal politics. While I understand that political interference is inevitable, especially if you get public funding. The top priority is to have a good alternative to existing software in these 3 categories I defined. Not yet another job program/kickback to politically well connected entities.
At stake: huge amounts of money
Naturally, people will go to great lengths to try and obtain that, by influencing the key decision makers.
So you put in a layer above the decision makers.
So they influence the layer above the decision makers.
Repeat-repeat.
The only true defense against corruption, at scale, is competition. Because then everyone tries to knife each other in the back, and it generally zero-sums.
I want to see an ecosystem where small businesses and organisations can thrive in the IT space, just like they do in the offline space.
To provide an analogy for this: a lot of areas in the US have only a huge Walmart where people do ALL their shopping. In NL we don't have a "Dutch Walmart"; instead each neighbourhood has a bakery, a fish shop, a cheese shop, etc. Cities are full or small restaurants and bars. Many of all these shops are operated by their owners.
I want to see the same in the IT space.
What they want is a couple of big, reliable companies who offer services that just work. They want dev teams to be able to explore a new service by simply spinning up a POC with a new offering from a vendor they already have a relationship with; they don't want to figure out which of the 20 different EU companies who offer LLMs or managed Kafka they need to contact, sit through sales calls, and do security evaluations on before the team can start work.
As an American, I definitely don't like having to drive to a mega store and do all my shopping there. The European city model is far superior -- I love traveling there and walking to the bakery, cheese shop, and butcher to buy a meal. But as a dev and manager of many years, I definitely do not want to see that be the norm in software. I love startups who offer unique services, but from a practical perspective, I also love that it takes a day to spin up something in AWS vs months of contract negotiations, trials, sales calls, etc to get signed up with a vendor who offers something outside of AWS.
As a small company, you don't want to deal with small companies because it's too much effort. You just want to deal with one huge company which is your supplier for all your services. But you do want your clients to come to you and negotiate with your small company.
Assume your clients have the same mindset as you: why would they buy from you instead of buying from the same "one-stop-shop" where you're buying everything? They don't want to deal with small businesses such as yours, just like you don't want to.
Your "supplier of all services" might not offer what you're offering right now, but the day they do, you'll quickly be out of business. You and, gradually, all other businesses.
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As a tangential note: 50 IT service providers is a darn lot. I suspect that is 10x of what the average business needs.
The small companies I've worked at were generally quite happy to work with other small companies where procurement consists of a couple employees telling a founder they need a service, then the founder subscribes with a credit card later that week.
I don't generally work at small companies these days :)
50 might have been an over-estimate, but I thought you were advocating for a decentralized EU tech space, where I would need one vendor for each part of my tech stack... instead of using AWS for EKS + SQS + SNS + RDS, I would have one vendor for my managed kubernetes cluster, one for kafka, another for APNS notifications, and someone else to host the databases.
We need the same for software: create a company/agency/institute, fund them appropriately (the A400M had a development cost of over 20 billions to give a ballpark figure) and ask them to produce an OS, a browser and an office suite. Make sure it's done with a product mindset, that they have ownership of it. Pay market rate for the employees. And within a decade we could have a credible alternative to Apple/Microsoft, then we can mandate the different EU administrations to switch to this software stack.
The biggest road block I can foresee is the infighting about how to "fairly" distribute the jobs. My worry is that instead of having a couple of locations that can each focus on a key aspect of the project, we would end up with 27 offices, with all the siloing that it entails. Which is literally one of Ariane's greatest weaknesses...