And this is the part I hope Europe gets. They don't have nearly as much money to throw at Matrix as Microsoft can throw at Teams, but they do have massive resources, and I bet that since Matrix doesn't have many of the same shitty KPIs as Slack and Teams, those resources can go much further.

The lack of shitty KPIs is the main thing. Hiring 10 full time devs to work on Matrix would probably be more effective than 500 full time devs on Slack/Teams with most of them stuck on weird Product Manager goals and renaming things to Copilot 365 Teams with Copilot.

Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”? And surely you must mean the EU.

The money needed to improve matrix is nothing compared to what is already being spent on Microsoft products.

> Are you saying that Microsoft is more wealthy than all of “Europe”?

"In 2024, the EU spent €403 billion on research and development" [1]. In 2024, Microsoft spend $29.5bn on R&D [2]. So about 20 Microsofts makes up the entire EU's R&D expenditure.

Alphabet, meanwhile, spent $49.3bn on R&D in 2024 [3]. It earned $350bn that year. So it would be correct to say that Microsoft and Alphabet's revenues, alone, rival the total amount Europe spends on research and development. (Non-EU non-British spending is insignificant.)

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/

[3] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425...

Nah I'm just saying that Microsoft has more disposable money to throw at Teams than Europe has to throw at Matrix because Microsoft is a corporation that is choosing how to spend its money internally and Europe (or the EU, but why leave Switzerland, GB, etc. out of the fun?) would be funding an external entity in a (possibly?) new way.

I'm still learning how the EU applies grants to open source projects for specific feature sets, but I'm guessing that there's a lot of friction that could be removed.

And yeah, I agree that the money needed to improve Matrix is nothing. It's about getting organized and applying that money well.

To me Europe's push for digital sovereignty has the potential to reshape open source software's competitiveness around the world and in turn, Europe's.

I guess that the European Commission pays a lot of money to Microsoft in licenses. They could pay a fraction of those money to Matrix.

Microsoft may have money, but it certainly does not seem like it is being spent on Teams in an effective way.