US tech rules the European market
87 comments
·August 6, 2025dijit
kinow
I think Microsoft servers include GitHub? If so, that'd have a huge negative impact on research and academia in EU, as well as software development (even some web pages using JSresources from GitHub pages directly).
pbmonster
> I think Microsoft servers include GitHub? If so, that'd have a huge negative impact on research and academia in EU
All academic institutions I'm aware of run their own self-hosted GitLab instance.
victorbjorklund
I wondered if it could be a question of definition of "rely on", maybe they're just talking about for their product but yeah I agree probably if you count everything that the company is using, I doubt it is as low as 74% who is not relying on Windows operating system or Microsoft email or Google email and so on. I think it's probably much much higher but it might be what they define as rely on for the core service, their product, but they're not counting on the accounting staff doing their financial of projections in Excel.
Xss3
Youre forgetting about the tradies and other micro businesses that still do everything on pen n paper. I still know pubs and hotels local to me that do everything on paper.
rdsubhas
I read the definition of "rely on" here as production outage, not operations.
For example: Say you use gmail and excel at work. If Gmail is down, your Windows PC crashed, or Excel does not own, the product (machines, websites, etc) do not stop working straight away. The specific term is unattended production hot path.
The 75% is already reasonably high when most production/industrial stuff runs on Linux or embedded derivatives. This shows the level of unattended production hot path on US tech.
rich_sasha
I worked for two companies who ran two separate stacks. One was all Windows and was a glorified email / Excel thing for talking to clients. All the business logic was on a separate network and was all Linux.
If Windows pulled the plug, it would be a major PITA but no more.
kazinator
FOSS may not be exactly "US tech" but from the perspective of the EU, it's perhaps even worse.
The EU doesn't control FOSS any more than it does US tech, and it can't threaten it.
pbmonster
I think the EU would be very happy with every major company running their own FOSS stack instead of handing their money/control to US tech firms.
Sure, this doesn't mean the EU would have control over the FOSS stack, but it would keep the data/money/soft power away from the US. And the EU would have a much easier time enforcing its security/privacy laws on those EU companies running FOSS on hardware inside the EU.
Kim_Bruning
Because the EU is relatively low-corruption so far EU goals trend towards transparency, privacy and interoperability (despite some efforts to the contrary). FLOSS naturally aligns with these goals, without needing extensive threats or control .
dismalaf
> Excel rules the world, and even if it didn’t: nobody is running libreoffice on linux professionally, at least not that I am aware of- and hosting mail?
It has remarkable stickiness but the replacement for Excel isn't another spreadsheet, it's programming + databases. SAP and other custom business software are pretty big especially in large organizations. Word is pretty replaceable, as is the rest of MS Office, especially if you have a custom solution instead of relying on Excel. Self-hosting email is definitely a thing for massive corporations. And don't forget 2/3 of the big Linux vendors are European.
74% tracks. Lots do depend on MS and Google solutions, but enough don't.
gbalduzzi
You can replace excel with programming and a DB only up to a certain point.
The advantage of excel is that any office worker can perform data manipulation there. It can't be replaced for una-tantum operations on data, because it isn't practical to do custom implementations every time you need something.
The alternative is to teach programming to every office worker and give them access to the db. Not sure it's a good idea
rusk
> alternative is to teach programming to every office worker
Programming in business environments is becoming ever more popular using languages like Python and R
It’s nowhere near as pervasive as Excel but I could see AI playing a big part here. Most Excel domain projects don’t require a high degree of technical understanding so autogenerated Python code that is “good enough” can be easily generated. Hell AI alone could take over most of the basic data crunching usecases.
dismalaf
I wish this site had emojis so I could spam the facepalm emoji.
You don't make every worker learn programming. You either hire programmers to make a custom financial suite so that people can input things and then the software does the relevant calculations, or you buy one. SAP is an example of that. They're not worth 300 billion for no reason. There's also custom suites for many different industries, because many have different needs.
The point is that the ability to make custom software replaces Excel... Since Excel is extremely prone to allowing users to mess up.
Edit - I guess no one's adjacent to industries where accounting software rules? Like O&G?
betaby
Somewhere in 2005-2010 mail was declared for some reason a hard problem and outsourced to Microsoft and Google. The rest if the history.
esafak
All apps simply moved to the cloud. It was not just email. Let somebody else worry about it.
daft_pink
i think most technology professionals just prefer to outsource mail in general.
people really freak out when it goes down or you screw it up. i’m willing to roll my own of most things, but I don’t want to roll my own mail server or phone server.
these things are just so specialized and publically exposed and the penalties are too severe if you fuck it up or lose data.
smnrchrds
My alma mater moved from self-hosting email to Microsoft after a major data breach. Keeping high-value internet-connected things secure is indeed hard.
ruszki
You can misconfigure your SaaS too. And it’s not that difficult to learn how to secure your system… you just need to want to learn it, which is rarely the case. The topic itself is not that difficult, you don’t need to know cryptography in details in reality to make something secure. You just need to care. But most of the people are fine with copy-pasting from StackOverflow level of caring, which is absolutely not enough with security. But once again, you have the same problem with SaaS.
The main reason to switch to SaaS is that it’s less of your responsibility anymore. The decision is made mainly not because of technical but legal or budget reasons.
tallanvor
Saying "you just need to want to learn it" is oversimplifying.
It's not just learning how to secure it once, it's constantly watching for announcements regarding new vulnerabilities and being able to patch at short notice or being able to pull the infrastructure offline if you can't patch right away.
The world is a different place now with what virtually amounts to criminal companies trying to find every vulnerability that allows them to get into your system and either holding your data for ransom, extracting it for their own uses, or both. Even if you really do want to employ someone solely to stay on top of patching and watching for vulnerabilities, it's safer and often cheaper to let one of the big companies host your data.
astrange
Receiving mail is a hard problem because of spam filtering. Spam filtering works better the more different email accounts you can see at once.
hulitu
> mail was declared for some reason a hard problem and outsourced to Microsoft and Google
lobby and corruption. But i repeat myself.
edg5000
I agree with the premise of the article. It really bothered me when I realised I couldn't delete my business listing Google Maps, only set it to "permanently closed". And my bank, my countries' largest, one year ago dropped NFC in favour of Google Pay. Not to mention the Google popups that seem to appear on what seems every website (how did the manage this?!).
Personally I've moved to Zoho for mail and use Ubuntu with a rsync/zfs based backup solution. I'm not logged in to Google but I do use Google Search. On my phone I use a separate Google account specially for the phone, and I use F Droid, except for my bank, which only distributes their app through Google Play.
Why do you think the EU is trying to bully (ineffectively) US tech companies? I don't think bullying US companies is the solution. More embracing of Linux would help a lot. Banks need to behave; making Google Play store a requirement for banking should not be allowed by the authorities, since banks play a special role. Then there is search and maps. Something should be done about that as well. Maybe something like an EU-based perplexity/anthropic competitor would be great.
mcv
> And my bank, my countries' largest, one year ago dropped NFC in favour of Google Pay.
Dutch banks used to have a great system for contactless payment through your banking app. Worked perfectly. Last year, it seems they all abandoned it in favour of Google Wallet. I don't understand this move. Why outsource this to US tech giants when we had a perfect system already in place?
I think regulation that requires banks to keep their payment infrastructure in the EU and out of the hands of advertising companies would be a really good idea.
N19PEDL2
> making Google Play store a requirement for banking should not be allowed by the authorities
How would banks distribute their apps and make sure they are up to date then? F-Droid only accepts open-source software.
> Maybe something like an EU-based perplexity/anthropic competitor would be great.
Maybe it would be even better to have a EU-based app store that must be pre-installed on every Android/iOS/iPadOS device that is sold in the EU, so as to break the monopoly of Google and Apple in the app distribution.
edg5000
> How would banks distribute their apps and make sure they are up to date then? F-Droid only accepts open-source software.
Publish an APK on the website
dismalaf
> Maybe something like an EU-based perplexity/anthropic competitor would be great.
Mistral?
hulitu
> Why do you think the EU is trying to bully (ineffectively) US tech companies?
Because this increases lobby spending. Win-win.
black_13
[dead]
rurban
My previous company in Germany was all macOS, the current all Ubuntu. Sorry, no crap.
pjmlp
Until we get something like SuSE and Jolla being sold on the shopping malls, dependency will continue.
And even then, people need to really want to buy that stuff instead of Microsoft, Apple and Apple OSes.
Note how even with all the geo-politics, pirate copies of Windows abound in China, they aren't all running away into Linux install parties with deepin or similar.
wolvesechoes
Every discussion that treats EU or Europe as a political entity equivalent to national state is a waste of time.
demarq
Should be the highest comment.
t43562
I am not sure this is avoidable. Whatsapp (and perhaps Telegram) are the dominant messaging/chat apps for example and that is European tech but it was inevitably going to be bought by some bigger company that wanted to be dominant and that was obviously going to be American since they managed to make big money first.
Skype was at one point extremely popular and this is European but it was bought and squashed under the mountain of American poo that is MS Teams. Forgive me the rudeness but I wish to dispell the thought that American tech is automatically superior or that it wins by being good.
Then there's Linux - another European development that has rocked the world but has been bought and ruled by mostly American companies with the noticeable exception of Ubuntu (and a few others).
The World Wide Web - a blow for freedom and the spread of information coming from CERN that has again been captured and perverted into an advertisement delivery and spying system more powerful than the East German Stasi could possibly imagine.
We have Big Tech to thank for Nazi saluters, quite potentially for the attempt to break the world economy and the idea of turning all of humanity into basic income serfs which will not, of course, include the owners of big tech itself.
The EU is the only powerful entity that hasn't been completely perverted by the power of big tech and we have to hope like hell that it won't be. To all those with shares in big tech or jobs in it who want to expand and rule - go ahead and vote me down - who would expect anything else!
KoftaBob
> Whatsapp (and perhaps Telegram) are the dominant messaging/chat apps for example and that is European tech but it was inevitably going to be bought
Nitpick: Whatsapp was American from the start. It was founded in Mountain View, CA by Brian Acton and Jan Koum, former employees of Yahoo.
t43562
I should have checked :-) Sorry.
dismalaf
> bought and ruled by mostly American companies with the noticeable exception of Ubuntu (and a few others).
2/3 of the big Linux vendors are European (Suse and Ubuntu)...
t43562
SuSe seems invisible to me whereas Android has probably made many many billions of dollars and I think it counts as potentially the worlds largest linux distribution.
can16358p
Good luck expecting this trend to change anytime soon, as long as EU doesn't relax their regulations which cripple a huge part of innovation.
Apparently you can't regulate big tech heavily and expect to compete with US big tech.
trinix912
You can by regulating foreign big tech with stricter rules than domestic. But try to pass that and Trump will throw a tantrum how it’s unfair, while doing the same in the US.
notepad0x90
I don't know why proton's leadership just doesn't shut up and make money while providing awesome pro-privacy services.
Is coca-cola american? most people would say so but their hq is in china!
These multi-nationals don't have 'branches' in Europe, they are incorporated there as well, that's why they're called multi-national. they pay European taxes and are subject to European laws such as GDPR and other data-residency laws, which means their data-center, and a large chunk of their support staff (Europeans are cheaper than Americans to hire/pay) are in Europe.
Should Americans avoid Proton and its products so they don't rely on Europe? Hypocrite much there friend? Should we avoid European cars? Maybe Ozempic/glp-1 medication should be manufactured by US companies in America (Denmark's GDP is seeing most of it's multi-digit growth thanks to American Ozempic usage).
Proton's leadership supported Trump and the GOP and now they want to promote nationalistic brand loyalty?
These people make it hard to be against trump's b.s. tariffs and hostility against our allies. Proton has a good product, why isn't that enough? They also have to meddle in politics and make it about "America vs Europe" or "Republicans vs Democrats"?
You know what would be great? if employee and customer owned companies replaced even the likes of proton so we can democratically vote incompetent leadership like this out. Make good products, let the products sell themselves. Why should Europeans have to put up with inferior products for the sake of nationalism? If you want to support Europe so much, tell us about how great your company's product is and how superior it is compared to American alternatives, I'd be down for that. Europeans can and do buy European goods and services of better quality, try finding a Swizz that enjoys American cheese and chocolate, or a European that drives oversized American pickup trucks.
Unless you're speaking as an individual or you are an elected politician, don't misuse whatever platform you have to meddle in politics.
slumberlust
> Is coca-cola american? most people would say so but their hq is in china!
Wasn't aware of this, citation? From what I can see they still list HQ in Atlanta.
lossolo
It's not really about nationalism. It's about other nations (especially those likely to face serious problems in the near future) having leverage over you, which they could use to serve their own interests at the expense of yours.
Look at how Huawei was essentially destroyed in Europe, even though it was growing by double digits each year. This happened because they were blocked from accessing Google services by U.S. government.
You can't just easily switch to an alternative when U.S. software monopolies dominate the market. Replacing them would take a lot of time and money. Ultimately, this is about national security and geopolitical concerns.
neobrain
> Proton's leadership supported Trump and the GOP
... this again? Come on.
The CEO once expressed support for Gail Slater as head of antitrust and subsequently criticized lack of effective work towards tech regulation on the Democratic side in the same social media thread.
Calling that support for either Trump or the entire GOP is a massive stretch, and throwing the claim out without context borders on disinformation.
notepad0x90
He did in fact support the GOP since they will tackle "big-tech abuse" more (aka benefit proton): https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...
I can only assume they're actively donating to the GOP and trying lobby. In other words, it's not even support for trump that's a problem, but willingness and desire to get into bed with political parties that favor them in the moment (shouldn't at all).
neobrain
> He did in fact support the GOP since they will tackle "big-tech abuse" more
The context was that some GOP-affiliated politicians attended certain meetings for supporting tech regulation whereas democrats didn't. The article doesn't mention this original context but talks about the secondary tweets as if that had been Yen's primary message.
> I can only assume they're actively donating to the GOP and trying lobby. In other words, it's not even support for trump that's a problem, but willingness and desire to get into bed with political parties that favor them in the moment (shouldn't at all).
Do you have any other data point that supports these ideas, or are you extrapolating from this single specific event?
bigyabai
Wait until they find out whose market Taiwan rules.
SilentTiger
[flagged]
> 74% of Europe’s publicly listed companies rely on US-based tech like Google and Microsoft.
Only 74%?
That feels wrong.
I don’t know a single company off the top of my head that wouldn’t suffer serious damage if you null-routed Google and Microsoft’s servers.
Excel rules the world, and even if it didn’t: nobody is running libreoffice on linux professionally, at least not that I am aware of- and hosting mail? Conventional wisdom is that you should outsource that: I don’t seriously believe that people would outsource mail and not go with Google/Microsoft and get a productivity suite “for free”.