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
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.

>>storys+Vz2
This stuff was state of the art 15-20 years ago, it's more of a commodity now.

That doesn't mean it's easy or cheap. The moat is more in the installed base of data centers, edge networking, etc. US cloud providers undeniably have a bit of a head start there.

But the EU has a lot of domestic infrastructure as well. And the US outsourced a lot of things as well. E.g. mobile infrastructure and networking is now dominated by Chinese (Huawei) and European companies (Ericson, Nokia). Former telecom giants like Motorola seem to have faded away. Nokia actually owns Bell Labs currently. And of course a lot of the software involved is open source with a very international developer community. The hardware comes from Asia or in some cases Europe. ASML is Dutch, ARM is nominally still headquartered in the UK. Ownership of these companies is of course more complex.