If American companies don’t respect Europe regulation it’s time to Europe invest in dedicated software competing with office 365, social networks, even android/apple/windows os.
Many EU Governments run entirely on MS/Meta/Amazon and to a lessor extent Google services. Many (most?) government services run on Azure or AWS, and huge parts of the continent run on WhatsApp.
The EU countries had decades to build and foster alternative companies yet they did not manage to do so. China did though.
Was it a lack of political will or short-termed-ness? Maybe both but the end result is the same.
You can't undo 20 years of inaction in a few years. It will take decades before viable EU competitors emerge and begin to rival US giants and that's if they even are allowed to do so in the first place.
That's my point. This was a decision by China. European countries were happy to just let the US in and not have to worry about building their own alternative versions of the US services.
Now the same EU countries are waking up and realizing that having pieces of your digital infrastructure in someone else's hands was bad bet but unfortunately, it will take decades to build the same thing in the EU.
Same with Holland. The tax office is moving away from their own office package onto m365 right now. They apparently had an alternative all this time, which I find very surprising (the media didn't really elaborate on this).
But Holland, Ireland, UK are the most neoliberal countries in Europe, they worship America and believe that the market solves everything. The rest of europe doesn't share that sentiment to the same extent.
Hell yes I hear you on that. I've been sideways involved with some of their projects too. It's always a minefield because they don't know what they want, what they do think they want makes no sense and they don't care about what's technically possible or is streamlined, maintainable and affordable (us engineers try to find a solution that is also robust and straightforward, not just to tick a maze of boxes).
Governments tend to write the legislation of everything under their purview and they don't really have to deal with forces of nature so they think they can just decree water to not be wet and that's sorted then. So their resulting solutions tend to be pretty awful. Oh and the decision makers tend to be there because they're great at spouting hot air, not because they have a clue what they're doing. Not fun projects to work on.
Most corporates are much more flexible. They come to you with a vision and you discuss how to best make this happen. And an 'Actually, it would be a lot simpler if you do ...' is very appreciated.
