The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide. Anything else is just principled wishful thinking.
fortunately, legislation can help here
start with critical national infrastructure to build the market, and work your way out from there
the US regime cannot be permitted to have an off button for our infrastructure
Its still a small step, but its a start.
> The only way to accomplish this at scale is to build something that is legit better and let the market decide
You can push people to do this. The government can switch as a matter of policy. It can require companies bigging for government contracts to only use systems based in approved countries. It can make it a requirement for regulated industries (e.g. infrastructure, critical financial services, etc.)
Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force.
You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.
I think many of use will love to do this kind of stuff, but is mostly US companies that pay for it.
For example, I like to make RDBMs and ERPs kind of software, but here in LATAM is near impossible to get funding for it, how is in Europe?
No they need to tariff/ban things that are non-EU
I'm unsure the EU could build and require anything worse than Teams, considering the open source landscape for that product category, for example. The primitives exist, scale them up and lock out US companies from the EU market with policy. Recycle the capital internally, just like VC funds do with their portfolio companies.
Start with a target small municipality in each country. Switch to SUSE (with a desktop that supports Active Directory), Collabora and what not. Then switch the mail stack. Then the files stack. Etc.
Next step is scaling it up to a small city, then a big city, then a province, and finally the whole country.
Parallel to this you do the universities and militaries.
The beauty of this is that the untold tens (hundreds?) of billions € in Microsoft / Google / Amazon support contracts will now instead flow into open source support contracts. Can you imagine the insane pace LibreOffice would improve at if a few billion € in support contracts was paid to Collabora each year?
One thing the government would have to resist is thinking that open source is 'free' and that they can cut their yearly spend on digital office stuff to the bone.
IMO, if ones thinks the lessons about competition between tech platforms from the previous few decades are 1-to-1 applicable in the current geopolitical, economical, and strategic state of the world, then that person is either not paying attention, or they're in denial.
Companies, governments, and militaries are looking around their office right now and realizing their organization could grind to a complete halt if Trump made a phone call to a very small handful of executives.
That's an existential risk, and organizations absolutely can and do choose products that are on their face inferior if it helps shield them from existential risk. (Western) Tech is one of few industries that has no institutional experience with dealing with geopolitical risk, but it's happening now.
Government and public services change to (ideally) open source, and "impose"/"require" downstream compatibility.
This would create the incentive and make change easier
The dependencies were therefore seen as a non issue for many. Banks have always been skeptics of the cloud because of the ability of the American government to just pull the plug if they want. Before it was a theoretical possibility that still came up in risk analysis. Today it is something that could even concretely happen.
Prosecutors and others have been denied access to their official work email etc because they displeased the president.
Trust has been eroded.
The evalutation metric for various vital projects has massively changed over the last couple years. These European products still need to be technically good, but they no longer need to be better than American products in order to find customers.
With the current level of geopolitical tensions, this is nowhere near enough to cause a massive exodous where all systems that were previously working fine are ripped apart and replaced with new systems, *but* one can be sure that whenever people are looking at new projects, or updates to old systems, the evalutation metrics have changed quite a bit, and this is creating strong momentum for European tech.
It's possible that both the appeal of home* grown product (patriotism) combined with distaste of the current US government and the tech companies that support it (politics) is enough to push people to switch even if the quality is lower
This feels different.
Up to now there hasn't a really good technical reason to want to switch from, say, Zoom to Teams (or vice versa). You might switch because of network effects: all your friends / coworkers are on the other one. But, video chat is basically a commodity (all work "good enough" and the features are broadly similar) and has been for quite some time.
What's different is that now all (or nearly all) the people contributing to the network effect simultaneously have a reason to want to switch. So the network effect, which was the only thing that was really "sticky" about any of these apps, is gone.
It's hardly rhetoric, from the European perspective. The EU is already embroiled in a proxy war against a major power in Ukraine, and are now faced with the prospect of their strongest erstwhile ally moving to annex EU territory.
Simultaneous war on two fronts, where one opponent is deeply embedded in your supply chains, is an existential threat.
Tariffs + coercion via-vis EU tech regulation + Greenland are rapidly making the transatlantic tech status quo untenable.
Now we have a US leader who may wake up tomorrow and put 100% tariffs on cloud services to EU corps or have the NSA demand chat logs.
Governments have many levers to pull that are only loosely part of "the market".
Want in on those juicy government contracts? Work in a regulated industry (defence contractor, healthcare, banking)? Sell products into the state-funded education system?
Congratulations, you now use the government-mandated messaging infrastructure.
There is a huge gap between spying on someone phone and calling openly to invade a territory.
Every country spies on each other for various reasons (industrial, geopolitics) even between allies.
But I think we can agree that an ally by definition is not suppose to ring your door bell and say he wants to take your land against your will.
Retail movie releases used II since most movies could fit on one tape. Beta I was rare and later betamax decks just ignored it or something for compatibility.
VHS HQ and HiFi, which came much later when beta was basically dead, was probably better than beta II and close to beta I in quality
I agree. All this hem and hawing will not get them anywhere, and will just have Microsoft again dropping bundles of money at the foot of officials to "pretty please don't switch awawy."
Mandate it, top down, make it law, then officials have the legal mandate to fall back on to tell Microsoft and the others to pound sand when they come knocking with the briefcase full of money.
JVC also licensed the VHS format to many manufacturers, so there was a lot of competition on recorders, further driving the price of ownership down. I don't recall anyone ever selling Betamax other than Sony.
Edit: JVC actually released VHS as an open standard, not a license, per Wikipedia.
Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting. The entire purpose is supposed to be collaboration with other people; if they aren't going to notify me on the web app, what's the point?
I know a lot of it is because of their need to support an infinite number of potential configurations, but if it had been a protocol instead of an app, we would have had the perfect frontend by now. (But then, how would they be stealing all of my data?)
Trump fans are saying "this is how he negotiates, don't mind", etc but anything coming from him os just random bullshit and nothing he says can be believed because the next day he can be 180* on the same topic.
There were no such issues between any of the US allies in the time I can remember.
We thought that whenwe help the US in Afganistan and Iraq then it will be remembered when we need help, but now Trump threw all that goodwill down the toilet when he said that the allies basically didnt do anything.
Lol, we use WebEx, and someone actually went and developed an internal app to make it usable by piloting WebEx through accessibility APIs (including starting the call a minute before the meeting starts).
So it's not just a failing of Teams.
Not to mention that threatening to go to war with an ally as a negotiating tactic is crazy regardless of how inconsistent you are about it.
But that process is inevitable, it's already happening. What is not inevitable is hardware sovereignty. If EU doesn't have some form of hardware independence then they might just end up forced to use the US software stack.
It’s not a completely bonkers idea that the US could purchase all or some of Greenland. In the end, we’ll probably just see a strengthening or enforcement of the existing treaty for US military use of Greenland which is all the US wanted. Europe is still getting used to the president’s rather unique, and yes aggressive, negotiation style born out of his NYC real estate developer days.
Than ... Microsoft Teams? You're saying Microsoft Teams won because it is better than the competition?
I think you’ll find the EU doesn’t have much appetite for this sort of thing. They’ll take the risk at face-value, and put mitigations in place going forward (including if necessary, divestment from US tech firms)
Good luck meeting China without friends. Clearly brilliant statesmanship. Europe is able to read, the room, the situation, and the National Security Strategy, which makes it pretty clear that meddling with European democracy is a important foreign policy.
In a multipolar world you don't critically need that if you can order your hardware from party I when party C or U shuts you out.
Remember that China is running their own Android island with Huawei and Xiaomi. Yes, a lot of Chinese people flash the Play Store, but it isn't strictly necessary. Not hard to imagine the EU and India creating their own islands too.
Kind of wicked we have to think this way though. I much prefer a world with the maximum healthy amount of open trade and travel.
Export tarrifs aren't really a thing, particularly for software. Making US cloud more expensive would only make transitioning away from them faster.
Have you used Teams these days? If you think it's acceptable, I suggest that may be the Stockholm Syndrome kicking in.
You did not need any more strengthening of any military treaties with Denmark, the US could already open as any military bases on Greenland, there was nothing stopping you from doing that, sending more of your army there to deter China or Russia, or whatever else. Here, https://people.com/donald-trump-wants-ownership-greenland-ps... He is saying he needs to own it to personally feel good. How does this make sense diplomatically?
Any excuses you make will not make him look better or make him look like he can be trusted. If you want to achieve something in international politics have to be made carefully, not by threatening to annex Canada or parts of your allied countries.
Your president is just destroying the good image and goodwill towards the US with his 'negotiation style'. His style is childish bullying and temper tantrums, he can not be taken seriously as a reliable partner when he can say one thing today, and tomorrow say something totally different, even if you think you have reached an agreement with him on something.
There is a difference between a nation (USA) and its president having the theoretical power to shut down whole parts of your infrastructure which everyone agrees “that would never happen” versus it having happened multiple times already. Then the setting up of separate boards, basically retreating from NATO/NAVO, the military threat against Greenland. It doesn’t inspire confidence. He has been breaking with “things that you just don’t do” for a while now.
If AOSP is suddenly the only acceptable smart-os on phones for 600 million people, I think it would work out yes.
But I suspect that is developers the main problem for the bootstrap phase (ie: that is already the case here in LATAM)
And for all its many flaws it does have some advantages over Meet (which is what my company switched to it from):
* Remote control of other people's desktops (except on Linux unfortunately). Meet has no solution for that. Endless "no up a bit, left.. no you had it. Third one from the top. Here let me share my screen instead".
* Conversations you have in meetings don't disappear into the aether. In fact for recurring meetings it's even clever enough to use the same chat.
* You can directly call people. Meet requires you to create a meeting and then invite someone.
Ok that's all I've got. My list of complaints is much longer, but even so it just about makes it to acceptable.
Kind of crazy that Google hasn't just solved this though. Clone Slack, integrate it with Meet. Make a high performance desktop client (not web app) with remote control. They'd make a fortune.
This is what someone would say if they only know Donald Trump from TV.
Everyone who knows Trump from his NYC real estate days knows that he's (and this is possibly the worst insult any New Yorker can hurl at someone) "a bum." There's a reason NYC would never vote for him.
He doesn't pay his contractors, reneges on legal agreements he himself created, and uses legal threats and fights to screw over anyone he pleases, especially if they can't afford the legal fight. It's a lie-cheat-steal mentality, and might makes right.
It's not like, some hard-nosed NYC negotiating strategy. He's a crook. There's really not much more than that.
And then build out Google App suite, Office 365 exquivants
It pushes money into the market, creates skills and business and, crucially can look beyond quarterly profits (for better or worse).
Classic neo-liberalism BS (pardon my french). Markets are not some natural law written in the atoms, it's a human construction, and we shape it the way we want. Countries can create or destroy markets just with laws, you put a tax here, you put a legal requirement there. That's for example the reason that big american tech companies have been kicked out of South Korea:
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/08/south-korea-go...
- https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-...
Sure, if there are 2 competing companies that play with the exact set of rules, the mArKeT wIlL deCiDe, but that would be a really stupid decision from any government to not shape the rules in its favor. Europe is slowly waking up to this reality, better late than never I guess.
Did the "market decide" that Nvidia chips won't be shipped to China ? Did "the market decide" to put tariffs to get benefits from other countries ? Did "the market decide" to put embargo to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela.. ?
Hearing that regulations and laws is "wishful thinking" makes no sense at all. It's more the opposite, it's the only way to shape the markets the way you want to.
That's a category error. It's a social construction, a thing that emerges from the interactions of many humans. "We", an authority nominally working for the citizens, can shape it by using the law, a blunt instrument. It's like how you can shape the development of a musician by using threats and a baseball bat.
Not necessarily. Red Hat is a billion dollar company just on FOSS support services and consulting. And if you put hundreds of thousands of clients on a completely novel FOSS stack, you're going to need several of those.
Continuing a already existing open source OS is far down on the list of challenges.
The most important thing would be a (drop-in) alternative for Firebase Cloud Messaging. Without it, you can say bye bye to any decent battery life.