alt Hacker NewsI wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
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The way out of this hole is by the EU mandating a 5, 10 and 20 year plan for getting off US tech and pivoting to open source.
Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.
Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.
Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.
The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?
One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.
It's only recently that the united states has become an enemy of the EU though. I'd say there's much more motivation to move to other software and platforms now.
> I wish them luck, but while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
This feels different.
Up to now there hasn't a really good technical reason to want to switch from, say, Zoom to Teams (or vice versa). You might switch because of network effects: all your friends / coworkers are on the other one. But, video chat is basically a commodity (all work "good enough" and the features are broadly similar) and has been for quite some time.
What's different is that now all (or nearly all) the people contributing to the network effect simultaneously have a reason to want to switch. So the network effect, which was the only thing that was really "sticky" about any of these apps, is gone.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking
Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".
Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?
Congratulations, you now use the government-mandated messaging infrastructure.
> while saying folks will drop the dominant apps seems all the rage at the moment people have been saying this for decades with almost no real progress at scale.
fortunately, legislation can help here
start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there
the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure
This blind faith in “the market” is charming, but the market is just the outcome of enforceable ground rules (national, international) followed then by price/value.
This is the biggest step any country (other than China and those subject to US sanctions) has made to reducing their dependence on American big tech.
Its still a small step, but its a start.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide
You can push people to do this. The government can switch as a matter of policy. It can require companies bigging for government contracts to only use systems based in approved countries. It can make it a requirement for regulated industries (e.g. infrastructure, critical financial services, etc.)
Yes, decade(s?) ago some city or state in Germany decided to ditch Microsoft for Linux and OpenOffice. It didn't go well and they eventually backtracked.
What I wonder is if there will be the pay for enticing developers to build it.
I think many of use will love to do this kind of stuff, but is mostly US companies that pay for it.
For example, I like to make RDBMs and ERPs kind of software, but here in LATAM is near impossible to get funding for it, how is in Europe?
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
No they need to tariff/ban things that are non-EU
> legit better
Than ... Microsoft Teams? You're saying Microsoft Teams won because it is better than the competition?
Teams is not better than Slack, but here we are ...
While, there's a real risk of overselling the enthusiasm right now, there's a much bigger risk of complacency making dinosaurs stick their head in the sand and think nothing ever changes.
IMO, if ones thinks the lessons about competition between tech platforms from the previous few decades are 1-to-1 applicable in the current geopolitical, economical, and strategic state of the world, then that person is either not paying attention, or they're in denial.
Companies, governments, and militaries are looking around their office right now and realizing their organization could grind to a complete halt if Trump made a phone call to a very small handful of executives.
That's an existential risk, and organizations absolutely can and do choose products that are on their face inferior if it helps shield them from existential risk. (Western) Tech is one of few industries that has no institutional experience with dealing with geopolitical risk, but it's happening now.
Sry but the world where ”markets decided” pretty much anything ended when Trump started his second term. EU is finishing a trade deal with India that creates a market of 2 billion people. Europe and China are closer than ever. I’m sure we can get along with Teans and police state just fine.
Better is not enough make people change, sadly. This is why VCs burn so much money to establish products.
You're delusional if you think people willingly use half of these products, remove the billions spent on lobbyism and these things will evaporate in 5 years tops
The market makes decisions on quality and pride but it can also use politics, patriotism, religion, and other factors which may not have the greatest impact compared to the first two.
It's possible that both the appeal of home* grown product (patriotism) combined with distaste of the current US government and the tech companies that support it (politics) is enough to push people to switch even if the quality is lower
The big difference is that USA was nor perceived as a threat before. It is acutely dangerours now and there is no perspective of it changing.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
Classic neo-liberalism BS (pardon my french). Markets are not some natural law written in the atoms, it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want. Countries can create or destroy markets just with laws, you put a tax here, you put a legal requirement there. That's for example the reason that big american tech companies have been kicked out of South Korea:
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/08/south-korea-go...
- https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-...
Sure, if there are 2 competing companies that play with the exact set of rules, the mArKeT wIlL deCiDe, but that would be a really stupid decision from any government to not shape the rules in its favor. Europe is slowly waking up to this reality, better late than never I guess.
Did the "market decide" that Nvidia chips won't be shipped to China ? Did "the market decide" to put tariffs to get benefits from other countries ? Did "the market decide" to put embargo to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela.. ?
Hearing that regulations and laws is "wishful thinking" makes no sense at all. It's more the opposite, it's the only way to shape the markets the way you want to.
Products don't necessarily win on merit.
Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force.
You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.