Almost everything has been infected by a zero-sum mindset in the US. Some other group of country wins means I must be losing, etc.
The administration doesn’t see that the entire world order is built on many positive sum relationships and coalitions that the US has asymmetrically benefited from. And the same goes for social order. Wealthy people suddenly see themselves as victims(?) of their employees, and investors blame entitled tech employees for companies problems. When the reality is that employee and management - and social classes - benefit economically by supporting each other.
Thanks for this idea suggestion, this spin. Its a framing that, now that I see it, maps well & explain so much. The limited world view is collapsing our world, in horrible ways. Mankind became better than the animals because we grew to encompass more than short transactional views of ourselves, and it's so heartbreaking watching vicious dark side anger unmake the core of spirit that propelled us so far.
As someone in Europe, I'm honestly starting to wonder if the companies whose tech I oversee aren't better off eliminating reliance on US tech companies. Hard to tell what they'll do, being strong armed by Musk and Trump, or even just trying to win their favour.
With server hardware, I can't think of real alternatives, at least x86. But then again, I guess they'll just continue to work once bought :P
Cloud hosting and PaaS: We have some major, reliable hosters (Hetzner, OVH etc), but it's a bit lower level than AWS or Heroku. This part I'm pondering the most, since I mostly want to use stuff you can easily find freelancers to work on. With anything closer to self hosting, that's a bit tricky.
Stuff like Google Workspace, Notion etc is non-trivial but possible to replace with stuff like Fastmail and the Atlassian suite. Not an "as good" replacement, but a workable one.
I still feel a bit paranoid even thinking about this, and I'll ponder it some more before I act. But I can't help but wonder how many European CTOs are in the same boat after the oval office meeting with Zelenski. Kinda brought it home to me that the US is a very different country now, and using anything made there is no longer the no brainer it used to be. If the actual government can't resist their commands, private companies most definitely can't. And with a trade war looming, it'd be easy to just take competitors that rely on AWS et al off the market quickly, spy on competitors in Google Workplace, and stuff like that.
It's definitely a thought I've had too. In particular, there are some tech stacks I know of dealing with critical energy infrastructure which are tied to US cloud companies, I think those represent a huge risk, and I wouldn't be suprised to see a few of them start shifting soon.
I'd love to go with Hetzner (reliable for decades, well known etc), which has almost everything I need in their cloud offering, except an AWS RDS equivalent. OpenStack is probably worth a look!
Sounds naive I guess, but my tech choices are pretty heavily biased towards "can I quickly find someone affordable to work on it?". Makes the market leader the obvious choice, quite often. And that's currently usually a US company.
