Don't take the Canadian market for granted.

There's a strong desire to forge closer links with the EU now and reduce dependence on products that could be weaponized against us at any time. Geographic proximity doesn't count for much when it comes to software.

At this point I am praying that one of the things pushing back on this administration will be American Companies that have gotten rich on the back of "American Globalism", learning just how much it hurts when the US doesn't do its responsibility to remain Allies with it's nominal Allies.

And the EU, Canada, and anyone else who the current US administration is slighting, should absolutely be moving cash hard and fast away from the American Economy, if they want change in US policy. TACO, is about economic policy, and it's hard to imagine this administration continuing it's more unpopular global (and even local policies), if it's discovering it's not actually backed by US Mega-Corps.

I think it's totally great that competing products get produced in the EU. Not a bad thing from anyone's perspective except the owners of those US companies that will now need to compete.

In a way, isn't it what the Americans and even the current administration want? We want a strong Europe who is keen on preserving and developing the glorious modern civilization that it created. We want a strong Europe who can build and innovate instead of regulating and fining. In contrast, we certainly don't want see the disastrous joke like Northvolt. We certainly don't want to see the joke that BASF shut down its domestic factories and invested north of 10B in China for state-of-the-art factories. Oh, and we certainly don't want to see a Europe that couldn't defeat Russia and couldn't even out-manufacture Russia, even though Russia's GDP is merely of Guangzhou's.

> When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US

well, you can finally hardcode the date in mm/dd/yy format without worrying for a menu to change it.

EU market is by no mean easy, it's heavily fragmented requiring very often intense localization effort.

US perspective: EU looks like a great place to expand into once I've reached some critical size threshold. But I can't imagine starting a business there. In the US we have effectively limitless capital, tons of tech talent, and many fewer regulations.

Just about everything I'd want to do in a startup appears illegal or otherwise infeasible in the EU because of the morass of data and AI and energy regulations.

> When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada

I don't think Canada's pretty entertained about US either. US is completely alone in this regards.

From what I can feel, US wanted to isolate itself from Global economy/Globalization and its succeeding at it.

> 2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market

What about China? India?

Canada is (was?) the single biggest commercial partner of the USA and Trump, in one of his tantrums, threatened to destroy that this week, with 100% tariffs.

Canada is very much in the same boat as the EU.

Some Americans. Others of us are very aware of this.

> there’s not an easy 3rd economy

There isn't right now but India very much wants to be that in about a decade

From a world domination point of view fragmentation is bad. On the other hand heterogeneity is good for choice and freedom as at least on paper if one platform kicks you off due to whatever curbs on freedom, you have alternative choices.

Heterogeneity/fragmentation also makes it harder for companies and countries to impose their mores on others. From that PoV Africa also should develop its own tools so as not to be subject to either North American or European values but their own values.

It's not clear that anything will be kneecapped. You need more than a desire to not use these products, you also need a viable alternative. Using products from China or Russia probably isn't deemed viable if the concern is politics, which leads to a need for Europe or Canada to build alternatives. They have not been good at this for a long time, maybe that will change, but it's not clear that it will.

There is also australian and british markets I assume?

China, India. There are little EU-wide network effects similar to American ones.

We’re also pissing off Canada. This administration is actively destroying America to reduce the influence of American liberal values on the world. Destroying America is part of the plan.

> s in a somewhat unified market

It's really not when it comes to the internet. First of all I'm in a very big minority here in Romania because I can read French (I can also speak somehow), but the majority of the people around me cannot. And let's not mention German. So, when the majority of EU citizens cannot speak the languages of EU's two biggest countries by population then it means that the market is not unified.

And, no, using English as a lingua franca across the continent going forward is not going to cut it, that will mean cultural erasure. Maybe in the future some EU bureaucrats will advocate for that, i.e. to replace French, German, Spanish, Italian etc as people's main language, but I think we're pretty far away from that. Also, making everyone around these parts bilingual is also not going to work, it's either English as a first language (or French, or German) or nothing.

The typical mature technology company in the US earns half their revenue from outside the US. Makes it harder to understand even tacitly supporting white supremacy and ignorant isolationism.

... and Canada doesn't seem very keen on going on like this.

> When we piss everyone off in the EU

Companies are supposed to compete anyway, without having to get pissed off first.

Canada is in the same boat as the EU -- desperately looking for alternative vendors at the moment.

I think they are a decade or two late to migrate away. They will end up developing their own in a time where these are loss leaders. It’s likely they will pay for it in a bundle while just not using it.

Not to mention in my experience EU companies don’t know how to migrate away from anything as their tech companies operate at the efficiency of a US government agency.

Let's not go over the top.

The announcement is about a tool developed internally by the French government to use internally, too. This is a very wasteful approach that does not create real competitors to US giants, and it is liable to be cancelled at the next round of cost reduction...

>2. EU is the easiest second market, and another step change of hundreds of millions of customers in a somewhat unified market

I was making hardware at one point, and it took less than a day to decide that Europe was not getting our product.

The regulations were insane.

I imagine software is significantly easier, but there is a mountain of difference when it comes to electrical and plumbing.

India, but many companies aren't willing to price for the market nor respect corporate norms there.

EU is a colony of USA. If it would be necessary, US can simply force EU to buy US technology.

If you check the EU politics, they never do or say anything that can be interpreted negatively by US or damage US interests.

In 2025, EU and US signed an agreement that obliges EU to buy energy resources from US at ridiculously high prices, despite that EU is already struggling with the high price of energy.

There's only one thing they need to replace if they want to show independence: ChatGPT. They had their chance with Mistral and failed spectacularly with just creating anti-AI regulations.

As a European I'm happy to use their product (and pay for it), I just ask one tiny little thing from them: build a better model with lower latency.

What was the last successful French software project in the Telecom or Conferencing space?

This project has been forced into the hands of 40k users, but likely due to a plethora of bugs and user experience issues they are picking a date far in the future for broad deployment.

Belledonne Communications has been actively breaking Linphone, conference calling broke back in August 2023 for example and remains broken to this day.

If we look to Québécoise in Canada, SFLPhone would crash after 2 dozen calls, and Jami (formerly GNU Ring) is still a beta quality product with some neat DHT concepts that I'd love to see work.

The French sphere has a software delivery and quality problem. The user rejection factor will remain high until they choose to fix the bugs that cause users to run away.