It's no surprise the French government is involved in this. They love these moonshot projects that aim to create the French X for any X that is a successful service by an American company.
Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to its old glory by an old guard convinced that somehow their country is so exceptional that it can just launch any product and that people will switch to it.
The story is more sinister when it comes to cloud platforms. A government project to free its companies from American domination over this sector will typically involve a bidding process in which established and well-connected companies with a history of costly, slow, outdated tech will win the contracts through their political connections with no consideration for their capacity to deliver or innovate. MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts. The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world leader in computing.
It's always the same thing. Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies. Always behind, always getting paid, never actually doing anything remotely useful.
Source: I am French. I know how this works, I've seen these ridiculous projects get political support and fail miserably due to corruption and ineptitude. This is more of the same.
That's very true. Another thing is that it is not like EU is somehow very far behind the US in terms of services hosting or "the cloud". There is French OVH provider and there is German Hetzner. While the former has an opinion of being cheap but no so great (especially in terms of support), the Hetzner really shines.
Hetzner does not have all the AWS like "cloud" bells and whistles, however their VPS-es and especially dedicated servers are first class. In many, many situations it makes much more sense (both from costs perspective and ease of migration to other provider) to use dedicated servers and hire someone who will manage them, than throwing tons of money into Amazon pockets to get "X-large instances" that have power of old Celeron laptop (exaggerating a bit, but not that much).
As much as I'd love for Hetzner to step up and start offering more managed services a la AWS, I just don't see it happening, and if it were I'm not sure I'd like the side-effects of that. Hetzner is laser-focused on delivering beefy and very affordable dedicated servers, apparently the way they are able to trim costs is by running most support functions on auto-pilot and having a very narrow set of products (servers, storage box, web space) which can presumably be serviced by a small staff without a high engineering bar. If they went ahead and started building out complex and highly engineered services like S3 or even more complex ones I'd see that immediately eating into their profit margin. Plus: Hetzner is a privately held company.
Isn't that an opportunity for another company to run managed services like S3, RDS, SQS, SES on top of Hetzner servers? I see some issues with multiple companies being involved in support requests, but nothing that can't be solved.
Or, in case their virtual servers suck (which I don't know about), running VM hosts on Hetzner servers as a service.
You can't just run a service of S3 scale on someone else's datacenter, both from a technical and a business perspective. You need fine-grained control over every aspect, from servers to cooling to network fabric to utilization by other applications etc etc. And you need to be in control of the business trajectory. If you forecast your S3 clone to grow 1000% every month, you need to start building actual datacenters and make bulk deals with hardware suppliers months ahead of time. If you tell Hetzner that they should build a new datacenter because your demand will outstrip their current ones, they're gonna shrug their shoulders. Even if you handed them the cash you got from your VCs for scaling, they might say "eh, not really the direction we want to take, thanks".
Regarding their virtual servers: They're great, don't get me wrong! But it's a tiny piece in the puzzle that is AWS, starting from things like VPC/Security Groups to managed services like load balancers, gateways, cross-DC availability, etc. And that's just the EC2 part.
Hetzner Cloud is great for what it is, I personally love it. But the pace of product development at Hetzner is such that I would anticipate something like a managed load-balancer maybe being available in 1-3 years from now, and after that another year for the next product etc. They don't seem to be in a rush to compete with AWS (or even Scaleway) by broadening their product offerings, they'd rather stick to their strength which is fast and cheap servers. I commend them for it, and their approach is very German, but it doesn't help you if you need these managed services.
To give an anecdote regarding Hetzner and them building out an S3 clone: I once asked support if there was a way for me to upgrade the 10TB max object storage solution (Hetzner StorageBox) to more than that since I had outgrown it. Simple reply: No, but you can spin up multiple storage boxes...
I wonder how much that is based on the company background. Hetzner is a traditional hosting company. Cloud companies either had large existing software development base and datacenter expertise, being way larger than a company like Hetzner, (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) or don't run the hardware themselves (Heroku, various DBaaS offerings, ...) and focus on the software offering, typically backed by VC to cover the initial investment. I assume Hetzner would like to expand there, but it's expensive, a culture shift and somewhat risky given their well-founded and established competition.
EDIT: I guess DO, Linode, ... are closer equivalents to Hetzner?
OVH's support is not great but at least it's cheap and they have some transparency. Azure and AWS have shitty support too for small customers but they are expensive.
Hetzner is nice. We also have Scaleway in the same category.
> Azure and AWS have shitty support too for small customers but they are expensive
oh yeah, AWS is terrible with support!
I have to rely on their support forum for any support as 20% of our spend for crappy support is just not feasible. I.e. I get no support whatsoever. You can trick them a bit by wrapping it up in a sales inquiry though.
France also has online.net (now Scaleway?) which I haven't used recently but was very good and reliable for me 3 years ago. Been using Hetzner ever since, which has set the new bar.
You know? When you hire someone to manage some VPS or dedicated server in some DC, why not have them manage your own rack(s) connected via your own fiber on premise instead?
That is one thing i fail to understand, since it goes against the lore of decentralized, packet switching, nuke proof, and so on.
It may have been prohibitively expensive for many in the not so recent past, but it isn't anymore in more and more places. Even redundantly connected.
And to be honest, some pizzeria or hairdresser could be run from some NAS.
Just search for someFAANG is down on HN, to get a feel for the ripples it causes globally when they have a hiccup.
It really is about the affordances of getting access to space, power and the network. Nothing is hard individually, but not knowing how to navigate the landscape is much more daunting than typing some numbers into a web page.
This is basically the same line of reasoning used by people that say you could replace your corporate slack with IRC. Of course you could, but there's a good reason that people don't. If you just want to compare one VPS to another, the only thing you're comparing is cost and availability. But really there's many more factors that people are interested in considering beyond just that. Even if the only service you're interested in using is a VPS, using an AWS EC2 would have so many benefits over a Hetzner VPS that I'd struggle to list them.
Amazon, and Google, and Microsoft... don't win cloud business because people are dumb, they win it because they offer a better product.
well, the thing is, if you literally only need one server, AWS is ridiculously expensive. the value proposition is just not there. you have to design for the cloud from the start to come out on top.
Well literally only needing one server is already a contrived use case. But if I was only in charge of one server, I'd still prefer to be in charge of one server on a platform that had AMI, CloudTrail, IAM, Amazon Inspector, GuardDuty, AWS Certificate Manager, CloudFront, AWS CLI, EBS, CloudWatch, AWS Config, ALB, Route 53, Secrets Manager, AWS WAF, and plenty of the other features that I might find perfectly useful in a one server environment. The value proposition of vanilla VPS providers is just "figure it out yourself". Deciding that a feature rich platform is worth the expense over a single product service provider is often a perfectly rational and cost effective decision.
The idea itself of supporting Europeans alternative to face American and Chinese tech giants is by itself noble (and I think necessary).
However, the usual way it is done is a disaster: top-bottom, funding some existing behemoth company that will have no capacity whatsoever to innovate, nor will to do so. But they will get the money because they have good connections.
If you think about it, it is not very different of the American military-industrial complex and the way the DoD/Army/DoE fund their programs (F-35 ?).
Creating a good environment for startups and giving grants to several ones in parallel to create an internal competitive market would be both cheaper and more effective.
But that would imply first a generation switch....
> However, the usual way it is done is a disaster: top-bottom, funding some existing behemoth company that will have no capacity whatsoever to innovate, nor will to do so. But they will get the money because they have good connections.
That's the tragedy of the government-backed tech in France. You also have a lot of very skilled tech companies there, but they are not the ones getting government support to grow further.
>That's the tragedy of the government-backed tech in France. You also have a lot of very skilled tech companies there, but they are not the ones getting government support to grow further.
That's almost an universal tragedy.
The good techies, the innovative engineers or the avant-garde researchers... Typically, the one doing the work... are generally not the one doing outreach, going around in convention, networking, making connections with politicians.... And getting Grants.
On the other side, many conference/convention/"one-man-show" dudes are generally much better to talk than to produce anything useful.
Their is a million of example of that, in both side of the Atlantic ocean.
I would say it is less tragic in America, mainly because there is a Venture Capitalism culture there that Europe do not have.
I is too easy to attribute this to some „culture“ that randomly formed and which did not happen in europe. I mean how likely is that? I believe there is a much more structural thing to it
> to some „culture“ that randomly formed and which did not happen in europe
Because when WWII ended and Europe was rebuilding, in some low-key corner of the West Coast of the US, some military contractors were trying to figure out what would their next projects look like (and getting more money from the US Gov. to fight the Russians, of course)
Then these guys became the best (read, selling more) in one thing called semiconductors then the best at this other new thing that was called computers and that's how it went.
And I might add that being the junction of tech and (accidentally) some weird hippie corner of the US might have helped in some aspects.
It is also a matter of culture. For example cutthroat capitalism is not really a thing in Europe, social capitalism (or soziale Marktwirtschaft) is. Culture plays a huge role in this. Most Europeans have a lower risk appetite since it's not like Europe is swimming in successful, well funded, well advertised startups to set an example for a new generation of entrepreneurs. Most also value personal life too much to be willing to make all the sacrifices a startup would require.
But one of the biggest issues in Europe is that it's not very unified yet. A French startup will launch a French product, not a "European" product. The only way to get buy-in from enough people is to have a multinational startup and product. An initiative promoted by both Germany and France has a better chance since it may appeal to ~150 million citizens.
France has been world-leading in verification, e.g. CompCert and Coq come from INRIA, model-checking was co-invented in France. This stuff is largely language independent. Yet the big sellers of this kind of stuff (e.g. EDA software from Synopsys,
Cadence, and
Mentor) is in the US.
That doesn't invalidate my points. SAP is a market leader and comes from Germany. A lot of leading finetch also comes from Germany or UK. A lot of major antivirus vendors in the Czech Republic or Romania, etc. Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, London are all big IT tech innovation and startup hubs in Europe.
Yet the overall scene is not quite as dynamic as the one on the other side of the Atlantic. Startups never seem to be as well funded or advertised. People take fewer risks here, there's no obvious culture of risking it all to found a startup. The whole ecosystem is not designed around this. Maybe this is changing now but today the market really isn't flooded with local products but rather with products of Silicon Valley. A lot of investments in European startups still come from SV instead of being local. There are some products that are big in one European country but don't really seem to make it over the border and it's probably because Europe is not as unified a marked as it could be.
I agree with most of your points, and the huge unified, and rather homogeneous market is a core advantage of the US in certain product categories. Since you mention SAP:
clearly, SAP is successful in a space where Europe's heterogeneity should be a problem -- different legal systems, different accounting rules etc ... and yet SAP succeeded.
Maybe it was because SAP was founded in 1972, half a century ago, when European decline was not as pronounced as it is in today?
Well, I think we have no choice in Europe even if it looks weird and too late. Keeping on depending on the US or China for vital infrastructures such as cloud would be a suicide for Europe. US and China cannot be trusted as they only think business and tech in terms of predation and domination. And their tech companies have too many bonds with their intel agencies.
This move should be seen as another evidence of the growing atlantic rift.
Honestly there are very capable and smart engineers in France, and I don't blame the country ambition to develop its own solutions, but the SSII mafia (or how are they called now?) is killing innovation.
It's a very top to bottom decision process (starting from the Government/MP), with big bucks involved, and very little understanding of how to drive these tech projects, all the way to the bottom.
What I don't understand is the status-quo after years and years of failed projects. What a waste of tax payer money.
Thats not really specific to France. Any large government contract in any country will go to bodyshops like Accenture, Cap Gemini, IBM, TCS etc. The difference is that the French government keeps thinking that innovation is a top-down process that can be managed like you would manage an aircraft program or a nuclear power plant
> there are very capable and smart engineers in France
I would not be so sure. I looked at the IT salaries there (both as a permanent and as a contractor) and it just doesn’t make sense to stay there when you could earn way more money elsewhere in Europe.
There's definitely an IT brain drain in France due to low salaries, very few people of my former school actually work for a french company anymore, they almost all went somewhere else to get a better pay.
In the post-covid world of increased remote working, the brain drain will likely increase tenfold since developers won't even have to leave the country anymore.
Romanian programmer here (I still live in Romania), I would choose another European country over a well-better paid job in the US in almost all cases, the reason being that that way I'd be closer to home, we actually have decent healthcare in Europe and the social contract as a whole is more robust compared to the US (it mentally helps going out on the street and not seeing the multitude of homeless people that I've read one can find on the streets of San Francisco), public transport is decent to exceptional and for me personally there's also the gun-control issue (or lack of it, more exactly), I really don't see myself living long-term in a country as gun-loving as the US is.
Have you been to any major French city recently? There is still a crisis of homeless refugees, there is clearly different reasoning behind why they are there but in general I'd argue the effect is the same.
1) Closer to home country.
2) No visa needed.
3) Less anti-immigrant rhetoric.
4) Better work/life balance.
5) Free healthcare.
If 10 years ago there were predominantly outfits servicing larger US/UK/Scandinavia companies, now it's shifting towards building their own products/services. Basically the guys learned how to do it and not they start spreading the wings. The only thing missing in Europe is active and mature VC sector that could match that in the US.
I didn't say there's none. Every single country in Europe has varying levels of it but nowhere near to what the US have been having over the last few years.
I don't know, I think you have to look at it with an EU scope. Within Shengen only Luxemburg and Switzerland pay significantly better than France. Germany is more or less aligned
I don't think the definition of brain drain and remote work allowing people to stay in their country really fit together.
If I, a french worker, stay working in France, I pay French taxes and my lineage and social impact remain in France. I can't imagine how that is not a plus pour mon cher pays.
There are "good" French companies where you can grow a career and get a good salary.
What surprises me is that these companies seem to either hide their French roots, and are often ignored by the academic world. When I was student in engineering school, the only companies we would hear from where the big French corps like Orange, Cap Gemini, Thales and co.
I'm sad to see that these French companies don't get the support and publicity they deserve. I hoped that the French tech thing would help these companies, but I only ever hear about startup with vague pitches founded by business school graduates which don't know a thing nor care about any "tech".
Perhaps that they feel a need to actively hide their french origins is a hint at being seen as an active downside to work with - or perhaps it is just a result of the style being set by the existing "leaders" akin to the name zeitgeist from multiword to acronym companies (IBM/Standard Oil) to single word as fashionable (Amazon, Apple, Google).
Personally I am of the philosophy that if they have to appeal to nationalism they suck as they lack any other qualifications or other features to cite first.
I know plenty of really capable and smart people in France that doesn't want to leave the country. Living somewhere is not just about salary, and quality of life as a software engineer is quite good in France.
that's assuming money is the one important thing in your life though :p I'd personally need at least 3 times my current french salary to start thinking about compromising my other life choices
Salaries have diminishing returns too. If you balance income and quality of life, if you can reach a certain point that's reasonable for you, it doesn't make sense at all to go through the trouble of moving.
Anyway the US is really at the bottom of the list. Most people would prefer anywhere in Europe or at worse Canada and Australia.
I agree that these efforts have been very hit or miss but on the other hand... What should they do instead? Just give up and accept that we're going to simply be technological vassals to America? Or should Macron and Merkel learn Javascript and take the matter into their own hands?
We could've gone the Chinese way and just close the door to American companies, effectively forcing the local populace to use home-grown tools, but we're too nice for that. Instead we try to compete fairly in an open market, except that in practice most multinational corporations manage not to pay taxes in most European countries and they have a huge headstart so it's not really all that fair in the end.
It's easy to be cynical about it but again, tech is too important to just say "well, we lost, I guess we'll increase wine production instead". I want the EU to keep trying.
>Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies.
What alternative is there though? The government also tried to help small start ups and incubators with fiscal advantages. We have the brains, we have the means, the government is just trying to make it happen. The hope is that eventually it'll manage to seed the industry. We also do have significant tech companies in Europe today that actually do interesting work, so it's a bit unfair to say that we only have "ridiculous projects" that are "never actually doing anything remotely useful".
I'm French too, I know that we love to be cynical about everything, always see the glass half empty but it's not a very productive attitude. "MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts", as if France was suddenly the most corrupt country in the world. Look around, see what the rest of the world is doing. We're not doing that poorly.
Listening to French entrepreneurs, the usual suspects (labor laws, taxes...) are not so much of a problem.
They all seem to rally around an kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare of interacting with anything state-related... Especially orgs collecting payroll taxes... The stories I see, where you get nailed huge fines every year, for small nitpicky details. They all talk of nightmares where some admin comes and destroy their company with a single inscrutable letter...
I hear stories like this often, I can believe there's a problem here. It is true that we like red tape over here.
That being said the problem with these testimonies is that you'll often hear people complain when something go wrong but nobody is going to tell you how great the French tax system is when it plays in their favor. It's... whatever the opposite of survivor bias is. People also like to deflect the blame away from them when their companies go under. When you don't have COVID-19 you have to find something else.
But I'm sure that there are things that can be improved regardless, I just wish we were more constructive about it instead of just throwing the whole system in the garbage and lighting another cigarette while looking pensively at empty space Camus-style.
That's where I'm at (small improvements, minding Chesterton's fence) and I hope someday someone will stop listening to big French-capitalism-style conglomerates that are always trying to bring new laws, new contract types, to reform it all to make it more American, or German, or Danish... and start listening a bit more to SMEs. Of all kinds.
And I also think part of the problem is overzealous government orgs, who I'm sure take their job very seriously, but are not encouraged to think mistakes are made with no intent to cheat, by default.
I liked the idea of a 'by default we think you made a mistake, our laws and procedures are too complex, let's settle this without penalty, with a generous paiement plan... let's wait a bit before we punish you'... I don't know...
Merci de le dire... Parfois cette mentalité collective qui nous caractérise me rend dingue... Le Français passe son temps à cracher sur tout et tout le monde, et surtout sur son propre pays. Donc ça fait du bien de voir des concitoyens qui restent lucides et positifs. Big up.
Why not?
The prime minister of Singapore is an active C++ programmer, and has shared
source code on his Facebook page, asking for bug reports [1].
Code is at [2].
While it is easy to laugh at these modern "maginot lines" that the french love to build, the concept of "technological sovereignity" seems very reasonable.
When many goverment bodies more or less have to use foreign software-infrastructure, then "maginot lines" sound reasonable.
Very reasonable indeed IMO if e.g. German police has to use AWS because of lack of alternatives, or the countless local authorities running on windows.
On the other hand, it is not the US to blame for their tech-supremacy. It is Germany and France to blame.
There might be many reasons to cite why we lack behind. But the whole spirit behind a government-google, a government-aws, government-yaddayadda comes across as being more part of the problem than part of the solution.
I am personally very cynical about sovereignty as a concept - it just means "nobody is willing to try to pay the heavy price to try to stop us" dressed up as something noble. Every whinge about loss of sovereignty is a complaint that they cannot control others anymore.
While there may be some good for avoiding outside control it is a cover for their drooling about shoving others inside their domain of control.
One problem that I think is somewhat related to the top-down, bureaucratic situation is that whatever big project they try to do is a copy of something else.
They didn't want to build Google / Facebook / Whatever before those existed. Instead, they want to build a "French Google". Qwant is an example of that. Whatever they're trying to accomplish with Orange in the cloud business is just a "French AWS".
During the lockdown when everyone was using Zoom, some politician was unhappy that EU countries would depend on foreign technology. Solution? Build a European Zoom! I find this kind of ironic, seeing how Skype used to be European...
The Qwant story is even worse than this, the level of cronyism and ineptitude, the extreme turnover of engineers, the lies from well connected french oligarchy hustlers...
There has been no better example of this mindset recently than the development of the StopCovid app. It makes no sense on a number of levels, but there are so many government officials pushing it in the name of “la souveraineté de l’État sur la santé”.
In terms of technology and innovation the German side is likely similar, though I wouldn't go as far as calling it corruption. Larger companies like Deutsche Telekom have been doing local cloud stuff for years now, leading to amusing overviews such as [1].
Having interacted with some of the folks at conferences I'm pretty sure there's a core of people in there somewhat committed to open source which was nice to see. But in terms of innovation none of the projects branded as "German X as a service" over the last decades stood out as particularly innovative or remotely well managed.
OTC is just a rebranded openstack, with a super unreliable api -- we have to use it for certain reasons at a client of mine and they're very keen to get off it.
No, this approach doesn’t. Complex working systems are built on a core of simpler working systems. Picking winners works incredibly rarely. Industrial policy and the infant industry argument barely ever works. You’re far more likely to get the Argentine or Indian car industry[1] or the Irish steel industry than the Korean ship building industry.
Airbus did not arise from the government putting out a tender for an airline company to be delivered in working order. There were many smaller, working, profitable aviation companies first.
[1] They all disappeared absent subsidies/tariffs.
How do they think Google became what it is, or most American companies like Amazon? That the US government funded it and kickstarted them with VC funds?
A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts. But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies?
Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general in Europe is ridiculously low for a comparable position in the United States, or even Japan. How are they going to retain talent?
* A good, free education system
* Social security
* Good healthcare system
* Proper democracy
* Politicians who aren't clowns
* A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950
The US is close to becoming a failed state due to the increasing wealth and income gap.
Also, please do me a favour and read up a bit on the history of silicon valley and us innovation. It's hard to claim the government investment isn't a big factor. The DoD is behind a lot of stuff.
And I say this with envy - the US model of government investment is way better than the European one. OP correctly described the issues we have.
(Not saying Germany is perfect and the US is pure shit, I was being overly provocative to establish an extreme counter point)
> * A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950
None of these things (for good or bad) have anything to do with making good tech products.
But they do have all to do with low salaries. My salary is low for American standards, but I can rely on public hospitals, public schools, and public transportation systems. I do not need to save for retirement either. Or for my kids tuition.
> My salary is low for American standards but I can rely on public hospitals, public schools, and public transportation systems. I do not need to save for retirement either. Or for my kids tuition.
I think about this quite a bit, while the median middle class salary is higher in the US, the burden to fund everything out of pocket here is enormous. If salaries are 10-20% higher in the US, much of that goes out the window to fund things like health care, retirement, higher education, daycare/pre-K education, high rents, etc. Things that most Europeans take for granted. All of a sudden that 10-20% gap seems much smaller.
Also keep in mind that not everyone working in tech in the US is making SV level salaries.
Yes, the DoD is behind a lot of stuff but they seem to get it right, unlike most EU countries with gov funded programs that are an absolute disaster.
EU taxpayers consider unacceptable that govt funding goes to waste, but in the end gov funding goes to waster anyway because the amount of bureaucracy is staggering and we don't even get internal competition like the US.
So we waster money and we basically burn it without any positive outcome.
The US DoD has a unique advantage relative to their counterparts -- I've worked with a number -- in that they culturally have a very high risk-tolerance for a government org. They will readily spend vast quantities of money on a high-risk/high-reward project knowing that it will likely fail, and they are okay with that. They've internalized the idea that maintaining an absolute tech advantage, which is an explicit objective, requires being willing to fail spectacularly. We talk a lot about those failures in the US but they also have many brilliant successes.
In my experience, many EU equivalent programs have a strong bias toward being the "second-mover" because it is seen as too risky to be the first-mover. When opportunities arise to be a legitimate first-mover in Europe with a government program, everything tends to grind to a halt due to analysis paralysis because everyone is terrified of failure. I've seen a number of cases where the US showed years late but ended up taking the lead because they can make decisions so quickly and back that with large quantities of money.
This is because most decisions in the EU are dictated by France and Germany. Germany for example is very hierarchical in how things get done and hence this is reflected in the EU too.
Not sure if if Germany is very hierarchical (not saying I'm sure it's not). I experience it as being very decentralized and as a collection of quite independent actors.
Granted, I never worked in a Volkswagen-style mega-corp, so my perception is biased.
Germany is (until recently) also ethnically homogeneous, unlike the USA.
Its a lot easier to offer those services when everyone has roughly the same income, the same education, the same IQ, the same genetics, the same family experience.
If by until recently you mean the 1960s, maybe? Why do people always assume that there wasn't any immigration to Germany before 2015? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastarbeiter
It's so boring that in every discussion where some other country does something better than the US, people find a million reasons why this could never work there.
The problem is not retaining talent. People doesn't just migrate in mass to the USA. The problem is how easy is to create a company, raise funds and get the needed licenses.
Pretty sure the strict and difficult process of getting a working visa has something to do with that as well, not just that not everyone on the planet is interested in migrating.
Usually you migrate to a better country to improve your life. USA is attractive in some ways, but also unattractive in some other ways that are personal to everyone.
For me the salaries in the silicon Valley are very attractive, but the social issues in the country makes me prefer Europe. Even though my salary is ridiculously low compared to USA.
It was acquired quite early on by Google, but the original Google Earth/Maps project which had been developed by Keyhole had received money from In-Q-Tel, described on the wikipedia page as:
> It invests in high-tech companies for the sole purpose of keeping the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability.
I've said it before, it still puzzles me how come the Russians let the Google StreetView car do its thing on the streets of Moscow and other big Russian cities, the Chinese were smarter than that.
> How do they think Google became what it is, or most American companies like Amazon?
Because of us government funding which created silicon valley. Silicon Valley itself is pretty much a DoD project. The foundation of the internet and many of these companies were laid by government - direct spending, subsidies, tax breaks and in amazon's case, legal protection ( they didn't have to collect state taxes ) until fairly recently.
> A company like Airbus makes some sort of sense since the government heavily funds Boeing/Lockheed Martin via defense contracts.
> But Amazon/Google and VC-backed tech startups and companies?
Many of the VCs had indirect government ties. But that's besides the point. Amazon/Google doesn't exist without silicon valley which the government created, government subsidies and government protection.
And this isn't including the government's role in keeping international markets open to google/amazon/etc. Notice how there wasn't much pushback from most countries while google/amazon gobbled up entire countries? Now compare that to intense pushback china gets for any and everything.
> Not to mention that the pay for software developers and engineers in general in Europe is ridiculously low for a comparable position in the United States, or even Japan. How are they going to retain talent?
Considering american tech companies own the european market why wouldn't american developers get higher pay? If europeans protected their market and european tech companies take over the european market, tech pay would inevitably rise.
> Now compare that to intense pushback china gets for any and everything.
Its much easier to trust democratic governments than autocratic ones. If China were a democracy I highly doubt this would be the case. Sure some would push back but many would back it too. The push back that China receives is also because of their economic colonialism and I guess rightfully so. German car companies for example dont receive as much push back. Ericsson/Nokia doesn't receive as much pushback as their counterpart Huwawei.
> Its much easier to trust democratic governments than autocratic ones.
History shows otherwise. They are equally shady. After all, it was a democracy that broke every treaty with the natives and exterminated them. But I guess it all depends on your biases and agenda. Certainly, nobody can objectively say that US, Britain, France, etc as any less shadier than any autocratic countries.
> If China were a democracy I highly doubt this would be the case.
Really? Bolivia is a democracy. Venezuela is a democracy. Russia is a democracy. If china were a democracy, the chinese people would vote to fully annex hong kong and taiwan. And being a democracy, I suppose the chinese government would have to follow through, huh?
> The push back that China receives is also because of their economic colonialism and I guess rightfully so.
Now this is rather absurd. Especially considering it is us trying to force china to adopt our ways. But agenda tends to blind people.
> German car companies for example dont receive as much push back. Ericsson/Nokia doesn't receive as much pushback as their counterpart Huwawei.
But iranian, venezuelan, russian, etc companies do. And conveniently saudi arabian companies don't. They are not a democracy.
So there goes your theory about democracy. It has nothing to do with democracy. It's about geopolitics and power. The need to maintain dominance over the world as long as we can.
Or Outscale; the "French AWS" owned by Dassault Systemes...they did do a great job of cloning the AWS console feature set; but the backend was supposedly all VMware & Cisco UCS. Surprisingly not Bull hw, given that the people responsible for it came from there. Coulden't be cheap to run, and I've always wondered who used it outside of 3DS.
If you want a real "French AWS", you should look at Scaleway (well, their VPS will be entering beta Q3 2020 so it's not AWS yet, but it's coming closer and closer)
Europe: Politicians want "something great", so there is a verdict that "something great" will be developed. A huge budget is provided, but it must be ensured that the usual suspects (public or semi-public research institutions) get most of the share. The whole project structure becomes fragmented beyond believe, nobody cares about commercial success. The project fails, but not in the eyes of the researchers, who claim that there was never the goal to create a commercial product. With the bazillion of research money they gained "valuable insight" into the whole problem and made "considerable progress".
US: Andy von Bechtolsheim meets with two bright guys, sees the huge potential of their algorithm, walks back to his Porsche, signs them a 100,000$ cheque, and a few years later we have a global tech giant called Google who the rest of the world either admires or is afraid of.
Also: this "something great" must be something they (EU politicians deciding about funding) have heard about! And what have they heard about? Something US companies have already been commercialising, hence started a big PR offensive.
That's why the EU started big funding of research on cloud computing after Amazon made money with it, started big funding of research on search engine when Google made money with it, started big funding of research on AI/ML after Google made money with it ...
I predict that the EU will go all in on supporting research on quantum computing when Google sells it in a big way.
On the other hand there's already some well established hosting companies in both countries.
I would hope that this initiative will not be built from the ground up but capitalizing on that.
Qwant is poorly managed, but that doesn't mean every project is doomed to fail. If you would judge Google success based on their failed projects, it would be the same conclusion.
Well but Qwant has its core product in its infancy, if they can't even manage that, you tell me.
The problem has many layers, Europe is not really united, which makes most markets small, the governments are pretty bad at managing investiments in tech fields, and there's not enough private capital going around pouring money into this.
You're a bit harsh, it does work, so they do manage that.
I don't think there's the intent to kill google or become as big.
Competing against Google is also a huge task...
It's far from perfect, there's definitely stuff they do wrong, but it's also far from being the Quaero fiasco.
Well, maybe you're right, but I tried to give them some feedback about spanish results and the difficulty to use quotes and even when I really tried, it was impossible.
as for your link about OpenStack, was there anything in 2013 which would have been an alternative to OpenStack? If you wanted to build your own cloud infra back then this was the standard to do it with, no?
> The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world leader in computing.
Do you have arguments or is it just a blank criticism?
OVH for instance is built in part on OpenStack, what's so very wrong with it?
There was Cloudwatt also, that was supposed to be the "French AWS", and as you said got hundreds of millions from the government, was created with the help of big, old companies (Orange, Thales, Bull) and was an utter failure.
I hope they learned their mistakes and won't do them again but I fear they'll just do it the same way.
What the French government doesn't understand is that you don't create a tech giant the same way you create the TGV, the Ariane rocket or Airbus. That model worked for those giant industrial projects, but it doesn't work for tech.
Thank you for this, couldn't have put it better myself.
I'll go one step further and make conjecture that the entire Gaia-X thingie is likely from the get-go a nice little scheme to milk public money directly into the pockets of the proponents of the whole affair.
Brussels is teeming with firms whose specialty and sole purpose is fabricating bogus "projects" to squeeze EU research grant money into their and their clients pockets.
Though Bull doesn't exist anymore as independent company.
I did an internship there (before it was bought, in 2012), the river of public money had mostly dried up and I felt like the company didn't really knew what to do, even if there was some nifty tech being developed here and there.
I agree completely: as a European, I find these projects pathetic. We need the humility to learn something from the US and create an environment and a framework in which private companies can thrive, instead of being constantly dragged down by bureaucracy, regulations, and a legal-judiciary system eager not to help but to assert its power.
Definitely, I didn't mention them only because I'm more familiar with the culture of the US (although indirectly). One thing we should certainly learn from China (and I guess other Asian cultures) is to copy first, and only when good at it start innovating. It takes a lot of humbleness and pragmatism over pride. And it works.
That is literally how you innovate! What a lot of people are unaware of is that Europeans had been copying and stealing Chinese secrets for over a millenia:
Hell, even the name America for which we give to the United States today was stolen since America was originally given to "Latin America" named after Amerigo who had only set foot in Latin America.
I was also astounded when I found out how much US brands actually copy each other. So really, there is no shame in copying from others first before innovating, because that's what essentially learning is all about right? I mean we are constantly standing on the shoulder of giants, but for some reason, for certain sectors, we tend to lock out that process.
No kidding. When I was in France I was appalled at the rates they were paying software developers. For a collection of countries that boasts better living standards for people, the comparative gap in pay for technical positions is absurd.
An entry-level tenured professor or a nurse at a hospital earn less than 2000 EUR per month. This gives them barely enough to rent a small room in a shared apartment.
Meh that's honestly not the number one problem in france. I'd even say it's a competitive advantage. Not everyone is willing to expatriate for salary, you can get really great engineers for half or even a third of what they'd be paid in SV
But then why hasn't France been invaded by US companies to hire these great engineers for half of SV money?
I know they have some small offices on campus at top universities where they employ a hand full of PhDs for ML/AI research but that's a drop in the ocean.
You could probably ask the same question of Romania, Russia or Poland. I think it's just a question of the general business friendliness of the place. And there are quite a few American companies in Paris and Sophia-Antipolis
Can't speak for France but London's tech scene is brimming with overseas offices of American companies. Out of my 5 tech jobs, 3 were with American companies, the other 2 being British.
I agree but by paying such low rates / salaries they don't get all the developers they need to do all the projects they would like to do (source: my experience in Italy, where there are more companies looking for developers than developers with spare time for them) and still those companies manage to keep going no matter if projects are delayed or cancelled. If they couldn't either they would close or find more money to spend. Of course that's great for those countries that can move faster, their advantage increases.
Qwant[1], launched as "The French Google" with a focus on privacy, serves 10 million searches a day (a ridiculously small number). No one has heard of it, no one uses it, and it's another project with a dream of restoring France to its old glory by an old guard convinced that somehow their country is so exceptional that it can just launch any product and that people will switch to it.
The story is more sinister when it comes to cloud platforms. A government project to free its companies from American domination over this sector will typically involve a bidding process in which established and well-connected companies with a history of costly, slow, outdated tech will win the contracts through their political connections with no consideration for their capacity to deliver or innovate. MPs will make sure their buddies get the contracts. The kind of buddies that lead companies that have so little understanding of cloud technologies that they went with OpenStack[2] to build this new world leader in computing.
It's always the same thing. Old, well-connected companies like Bull that have zero ability to innovate and not a clue about the domain will rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money and deliver some garbage platform that no one will use except other government-funded moonshot companies. Always behind, always getting paid, never actually doing anything remotely useful.
Source: I am French. I know how this works, I've seen these ridiculous projects get political support and fail miserably due to corruption and ineptitude. This is more of the same.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant [2] https://gigaom.com/2013/11/18/a-guide-to-the-french-national...