Europe doesn't need to create these companies. If Europe used this money to create the infrastructure for smaller companies to work together horizontally and vertically to form similar offerings they could end up with something better, at lower cost.
This is a model that worked extremely well in Japan in the latter half of the 20ths century, and was mostly responsible for its economic miracle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu
In the cloud sector this would mean small companies that did everything from running electrical transformers in Berlin to data center management to running blob storage (on S3 protocol) to running machine learning SAASes or elastic compute services. All companies would work together to form a cohesive whole. Each company would own shares in related companies to insulate each other from stock market fluctuations and takeover attempts.
The hard part is building something resembling a cohesive service out of all of this where smaller companies can plug in to the network easily and end customers can use every service they want and still have one bill to pay.
If they can use the 10 billion euros for that - to minimize fragmentation - then the market will take care of the rest.
Of course, it could just be handed over to SAP to build "SAP cloud" as a direct competitor to Amazon. In which case, yeah, we'll get a pile of shit.
This is already how a lot of IT companies in the EU function, someone makes the iOS app, someone the backend, someone the project management, someone the security audit, and someone does the logging of the different services that are analysed by yet another company. It leeds to a lot of backstabbing and over-billing, I don't think we should subsidise this.
I don't think any industries in the EU function like keiretsu, and what you're describing certainly isn't it. It's not the same thing as "just using small companies for everything".
It requires a set of small, interlocking companies, (many of which own pieces of each other and have very tight knit relationships) that form part of a greater supply chain. It requires trust and human relationships.
The set of companies in Shenzhen responsible for the "pearl river delta electronics manufacturing miracle" might be the closest analog we have today.
It is perhaps easier in manufacturing because standardization on interlocking components is easier, but it's by no means impossible in software, and with cloud computing we do have an emerging set of interaction standards (e.g. the S3 protocol).
I don't think that the EU actually will follow this path, because it requires pretty deep technical and economic understanding to follow through and policymakers who are resistant to lobbying from, e.g. SAP, but they certainly could, and the EU has surprised me before with smart policymaking where they clearly listened to experts (e.g. with GDPR).
Almost every major banks has its own startup incubator project that functions as a type of lead investor that directs the mariage of its children into these incestual relationships. This tends to skew the market towards serving the needs of its host company instead of looking at a market as a hole.
A bigger issue IMO, is that the EU can't grow business that grow a cloud business and instead thinks it can just will this into being.
I think I know what they want to do, define the economic relationships between companies and standardise them in RDF and other semantic web standards. Dunno maybe even set internal prices for memory, processing and network utilisation sort of like LIBOR does for intra-bank lending.
TB approach with „national champions“ can work too and may work better in a situation where there’s competitive market with few dominant players with unlimited resources. Look at Russia: they have achieved very high digitalization of government and society on locally built infrastructure. There are some state actors involved, e.g. Rostech, but large private companies did the majority of work, quite often not being directly affiliated with oligarchs or officials. The only thing they needed was to direct SOE to buy from local players and close the market for services hosted abroad. Technologically and CX-wise local platforms are strong enough now to expand abroad, but due to political climate this won’t happen soon. Europe can learn some lessons from this and try to do better.
One dollar spent in Russia gets you more than in US. You cannot compare household income directly, you must go through PPP (purchase power parity). Even then, you might have expenses that they don't (medical, for example).
So in the end, objective comparison would have to go much deeper, than median household income.
It doesn’t even make sense to compare economy in general. Russian economy didn’t grow during last 10 years, but there was significant growth in digital services with big investment in new technology and infrastructure. The government failed in many policies, but digitalization was their real success.
Nah, try to lose your paper internal passport. Your life will become very difficult. For any medical service, a paper "SNILS" and a paper "OMS" are required too.
Don't forget while the rest of the world(non US-EU) nations have to do back breaking work to produce products,
the euro dollar system can just print and buy those products and life beyond their means.
That's the power of having the world reserve currency system.
Not, it isn't. It is 915 EUR (before VAT) here, which makes it 1072 USD today. Makes it somewhat more than $1000 :-/.
On the other hand, my spending on Apple Stands in the last years was very similar to your personal spending on Russian nuclear fuel as used in US nuclear plants. That being $0. Turnips leads this one :).
That is wrong. I have lived in both US and Russia. Some things are cheaper, but, overall, life is more expensive in Russia due to sheer inefficiency. For example, you usually pay nothing for delivery of online purchases in the US, but it's a minimum of $5 in Russia, and you should often sit all day at home waiting for the courier with the package. Taxes on labor are higher. Sales tax is 20% in Russia, so all merchandise is more expensive. Cars are much more expensive, and even the gas is more expensive.
Depends. It could be argued that DARPA and it's development programs during Cold War were top-down. They were providing a market for the innovators, so they could pop up and do whatever their vision was.
But that is something different that taking all the funds by incumbents.
The US didn’t shoot for “building a cloud” with the DARPA investments. The goal of those investments were for very specific projects that assisted the military (short and long term) and the Internet and SV were a side effect.
Trying to build a “Rival Cloud” immediately sets off red flags for me because of how vague it is. What are the concrete goals? To replicate AWS? How much would you want to replicate? Which services? Which features in the services? Why would customers choose this over AWS? How could this organization be run (somewhat) profitably while being useful?
They already have Hetzner. Seems like the EU government could work with them to fund the new services they think are important. Maybe open source the components that they build so other EU companies could build similar services if Hetzner went bust.
And don't be fooled by all this "start-up friendly" propaganda. Yes, funding does exist. But it will be doled out $50k at a time. And remember to log all your hours and write reports for the program administrators.
I watched a talk by David Graeber, author of On Bullsh*t Jobs. He observes that actual service sector jobs, where someone does something for someone else, have made up a pretty constant 20% of the economy. According to wikipedia, 74.7% of Europe's economy is services [0]. It's going to be a rude awakening when the curtains are pulled back on a 55% bullshit economy.
I think the most successful model is when large gov agencies (DoD, NIH, etc) fund core, basic research and then intermediaries (Research orgs, Universities, etc) allow that research to be spun off into private companies. Stanford’s approach has been pretty successful.
You can apply even as a single person, just need to know your ways through the bureaucracy, how to formulate your application, business plan, etc. Not easy, but doable.
Or use one of the many services which support you in doing that. There seems to be a service industry around that nowadays, which wasn't the case when I did a few years ago, or been to scroogy and stubborn because I can speak and write fucking AMTSDEUTSCH if I have to :)
I really hope that works for already functioning small business, because I did write and apply everywhere I could.
I have a British friend who would work with me on this idea of an appliance reuse/recycling factory in NRW (because it's the closest state to the best suppliers from FR/DE/BE/NL). We've done the research, there's little competition and we could be profitable within a year.
To summarize the idea: take broken/used/returned electronics like washers, fridges, dishwashers, dryers, TVs, laptops, smartphones. Fix whatever can be fixed and sell as refurbished, break down the rest and sell for parts and scrap.
Seems simple? That's because it is, at least the basic idea. The hard parts are securing suppliers and selling everything for a profit. But we believe it can be done, because there's a huge market for refurbs, and especially spare parts.
There's a myriad of small repair shops all over EU that are starved for parts. I used to get them for cheap from my previous employer and sell them at a profit. I never had enough parts to satisfy the demand.
The UK has several big companies and a whole lot of small ones. Mainland EU is lacking, there's a few big recyclers in the Netherlands, everywhere else it's just small companies that don't seem to aim for scale.
I could publish the business plan if anyone's interested. At this point, I don't care if it's me or anyone else who does it. But it has to aim for scale, it's a must have for the environment.
In France, the non profit organisation Envie is doing exactly that. It also employs long term unemployed to teach them a trade, it runs similarly as Emmaus. I buy stuff there because of what they do with unemployed people, but I am not sure they turn a profit.
Honestly speaking, it is hard for them to compete with cheap chinese white goods, their used goods are just a tad cheaper than brand new chinese goods.
Interesting, non-profit? Yeah tbf training technicians for appliance repair isn't that hard. People just need some basic knowledge and willingness to learn. 6-12 months is enough to turn anyone with basic capabilities into a decent repair engineer. But you also need a well made course and tests.
Just my own opinion, used white goods that were once high end will last longer than the cheap new stuff.
They just have more thought put into the design, there is no corner cutting like missing components and thinner metal, they're just better built. And they have features that are missing even on the newest cheap models.
Haier washers, for example, are a nightmare. They fail catastrophically very often, even the cheapest Bosch will last more. And the parts are simply not available, not new, not refurbished.
I'm not sure about that. It seems to work for refurbished computers, which are end of lease. For general appliances I doubt it, because not energy efficient enough, liability, warranty and so on.
Of course common sense would say refurbishing is better for the environment, but common sense? EU?
Computers are actually the more competitive electronics. Probably because they're easy to acquire, refurbish and transport.
Refurbished home appliances like washers/fridges/dryers/dishwashers/ovens are a good product to sell, there are lots of small shops that buy dozens or hundreds of them for resale, and of course, lots of individuals furnishing their own place.
Energy efficiency for them is not going up anytime soon, they've been stuck in the same ratings for more than a decade. They're simply as efficient as possible already.
Liability and warranty would be handled by the resellers, and if agreed, by us. Mostly by return and replacement, but it could be feasible to create an on-site repair service. We can provide the necessary parts, too.
The thing is, a properly fixed appliance will last just as long as a new one. In fact, the failure rate on used electronics can often be lower - newer models that use a new internal design fail more than older, "proven" appliances. The saving grace for them are the warranty and return policies.
Customers will still give 4-5 stars even if their first purchase was a dud, but it was swiftly replaced with another one. That always surprises me, btw. It's like, "oh my new Indesit fridge was DOA, but they replaced it the next day. 5 stars."
Anyway, a big downside is that transportation costs are rather high. And they can only be loaded by forklifts with special attachments, or several people at the same time.
However, the more thoroughly they're checked, repaired and cleaned, the fewer returns, the less money spent on transportation.
I know that. I'm using an old and big fridge from Privileg (Duo Cold). I thought of 'tuning' it with a microcontroller, but deemed it unnecesary after logging temperature and power use at different settings for a few days. Only impractical thing is the needed deicing after about half a year. But then I can at least clean and disinfect it thouroughly.
Which I btw. got for free from the streetside, it was just standing there with other stuff, probably houshold clearing. Saw it on my way home, checked it out, was clean. Looked OK. Went home, got my foldable sack barrow and a few rubber straps from my bicycle, went back there and had a nice upgrade to my even older, but much smaller and louder fridge. Which I then rolled to the communal recycling center a block away :)
Living in the EU and working as a consultant for some time, I could not agree more. In 2020 when every major company and gov agency uses cloud computing there are still many companies in Germany who refuse to do so because of security. I mean nothing concrete or factual, just "because of security concerns". The same companies have weekly security breaches that they are not even aware of always, sometimes customers notify them. There is still a heavy management focus in the EU, the kind of the manager is always right, no matter what happens. I could go on and on but when I hear about 10B spent (wasted) on a giant EU cloud I always envision these smart managers sitting in a room and doing white boarding session without a single solitary clue what is going on outside in the word. It is going to be the most expensive shitshow in the history of the EU. Popcorn is ready.
And when this boondoggle inevitably fails, and Europe falls further behind, the EU will reach for their tried and true hammer - protectionist laws and regulatory capture.
This is a model that worked extremely well in Japan in the latter half of the 20ths century, and was mostly responsible for its economic miracle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu
In the cloud sector this would mean small companies that did everything from running electrical transformers in Berlin to data center management to running blob storage (on S3 protocol) to running machine learning SAASes or elastic compute services. All companies would work together to form a cohesive whole. Each company would own shares in related companies to insulate each other from stock market fluctuations and takeover attempts.
The hard part is building something resembling a cohesive service out of all of this where smaller companies can plug in to the network easily and end customers can use every service they want and still have one bill to pay.
If they can use the 10 billion euros for that - to minimize fragmentation - then the market will take care of the rest.
Of course, it could just be handed over to SAP to build "SAP cloud" as a direct competitor to Amazon. In which case, yeah, we'll get a pile of shit.