alt Hacker NewsWith 40M people, Canada is about half the size of Germany in terms of population and GDP. Also smaller than France. Canada is more similar in GDP to countries like Italy. The Spanish economy is a bit smaller but it has slightly more people (48M). The EU + UK is a bit over half a billion people.
The thing with Zoom, Meets, Teams, etc. is that these aren't that hard to replicate. There is not much of a technical moat. It doesn't take a very large startup to create your own version of that. And given what a basket case teams is, it's also not that hard to do much better. There have been plenty of alternatives over the years. Network effect is what drives the growth there, not technical quality.
So if the French want to use something else, all they have to do is pick something and they might get the network effect through mass adoption. That would work better if the whole of the EU does it of course. We'd still need a solution if we want to talk to people in the US. The reason why US drives the network effect traditionally is its trade relations. It's convenient for everyone to use the same tools and solutions.
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I'm not sure I agree about the lack of a technical moat. While spinning up a basic WebRTC wrapper is trivial, the real challenge is the global distributed systems engineering required for low latency and reliability at scale. You need a massive edge network to handle routing, jitter buffering, and packet loss effectively across continents. It seems like the hard part isn't the client, but ensuring it actually works reliably when you have millions of concurrent streams on flaky connections.
Teams has the upside that is is deeply integrated in Microsoft products.
We need the EU to do for software what it did for device charging and require interoperability.
There used to be several 'universal' chat clients, for example Pidgin.