zlacker

>>bwb+(OP)
Americans fail to appreciate a few things about our economy

1. We have a large homgoneous market where you can build a product and it’s expected it can succeed for hundreds of millions of Americans

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

3. there’s not an easy 3rd economy that replaces EUs wealth, population, and comfort with English + technology

When we piss everyone off in the EU tech company growth gets kneecapped and limited to US / Canada. Theres not an easy market to expand to without much deeper focus on that specific market and its needs, for much fewer returns.

>>softwa+Fk
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.

>>beloch+aL
With 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.

>>jilles+Uo2
Teams has the upside that is is deeply integrated in Microsoft products.

>>samus+iB2
I would imagine that many EU governments would like to replace MS Office too. EU sponsoring open source development for a mandated replacement would be a huge risk for Microsoft.

The European Economic Area + UK also have a lot of telecoms and networking experience. If they have to pay for improvements to edge networking for a reliable replacement for Teams they could easily bring farm that work out to their telcos.

With enough political motivation barriers will be removed one way or another.