I ran a shared services org in a Fortune 50. Enterprise costs don’t scale down well, and things that are absolutely essential to supporting 100k people sound insane for 100 people. Our senior leaders would sometimes demand we try and the CFO and I would just eyeroll.
Nobody would hire the JP Morgan IT team to run a dentist practice IT workload. Likewise, AWS can save you money at scale, but if your business can run on 3 2U servers, it should.
The greed/“capture all of the value” mindset of SaaS kills it, because you can infer the cost of delivery in many cases and beat it.
For anything that is billed by the human, O365 is the benchmark. I’m not paying some stupid company $30/mo for some basic process, I use our scale to justify hiring a couple of contractors to build 80% of what they do for $400-600k in a few months. Half the time I can have them build on powerapps and have zero new opex.
Yeah true, the downfall of most SaaS services I used was that they were too careful trying to build too much moat and sabotage any competing efforts.
If they were a little more chill then I'd think they could make much more money. I personally would pay a few services, even as an individual, right now, if I knew I could always get a good database / JSON dump of everything at a 5-minute notice, and build my own thing on top of it.
The math of college still holds true in the US depending on what you major in [0][1].
Most non-college goers are not attending apprenticeship programs or joining union jobs - which nowadays increasingly require a college education [2].
This isn't the 1970s anymore where you can go to the local factory and screw parts by hand - manufacturing, carpentry, metalworking, and other industrial arts increasingly require STEM fundamentals which for most students they can only acquire in some form of college (be it 2-year or 4-year).
I've seen this first hand now that I've been taking carpentry courses at my local CC as a side hobby - the union track apprenticeship program that's part of the CC expects an associates degree at a minimum.
What is the political element in Germany that makes these very public walk away from Microsoft viable?
I’ve run projects for a few different employers to look at doing this. The math doesn’t math unless you can segment your workforce. For example, at one place we had a field workforce that operated dispatch centers and field techs. That was all iOS + Linux or Chrome.
When the US government has become erratic, unreliable, untrustworthy, and aligned with your enemies then it's necessarily time to de-risk your infrastructure and supply chains by removing America products and services from them.
It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
"Poland provoked occupation by Germany" (1939)? Germany "liberated Czechoslovakia Germans" by occupation and annexation (1938)? How occupation and annexation of neighbors ended for WW2 Germany (1938-1945)?
In 2014 Moscow invaded Ukraine, occupied Crimea, Donetsk, Luhanks. In 2022 Moscow invaded again. No NATO forces in Ukraine. No Moscow forces on NATO members territory. Trump officials unable to answer who started war, you blame NATO, both you and Trump aligned with Moscow.
> What is the political element in Germany that makes these very public walk away from Microsoft viable
Germany has had a fairly active Linux community for decades. A large portion of German local government has had experience using or RFPing FOSS alternatives since the 2000s all the way back to Munich's bake off of Windows vs Linux.
While the geopolitical portion is sexy and fun to look at, in most cases American vendors just don't find much value in supporting DACH customers because their budgets are significantly lower and they tend to be much more on-prem heavy unlike their Scandinavian, CEE, or British peers.
DACH local governments also tend to rely heavily on MSP/MSSPs and for these kinds of businesses, margins really matter and vendors don't like dealing with channel sales because they just don't bring enough money to the table for the amount of money you have to spend wining, dining, and supporting them. And given MSP/MSSP margins, it makes sense for them to adopt FOSS.
Finally, some German local governments have used public proclamations like these to renegotiate vendor deals (I think Munich did something similar).
That said, private sector players in DACH have largely consolidated around American or Israeli vendors, such as Schwarz - despite their proclamation for digital soverignity - using American-Israeli SentinelOne [0].
It's good to have competition though, and I do strongly feel that MSP/MSSPs and organizations dependent on Channel are better suited to using FOSS tooling.
I think you’re closest to reality here vs the geopolitical stuff. I find it really interesting, because virtually none of my tech colleagues in the US would reach these conclusions.
>Mostly the widespread perception that the USA has betrayed the security guarantees given to Europe, and that the USA isn't a reliable partner anymore.
Mostly the widespread perception that the Trump administration has betrayed the security guarantees given to Europe, and that the USA isn't a reliable partner anymore.
Hardly a distinction worth making; if the USA votes for such unstable and highly egoistic politicians TWICE, it's quite clear they aren't a reliable partner anymore.
Even if they vote in a sane president next, we cannot rely on them in the long run, because the one after that could be a lunatic again.
Recent comments (and by now published strategy) of the US administration have certainly shifted public and political perception. Not necessarily 180° but enough too make such projects/attempts more viable.
In the end, from a European/German perspective, it matters little whether these thoughts/comments/strategies are a negotiation tactic, "trolling", serious threats or something else entirely. And the fact that "Government adjacent" people like Elon Musk behave the way the do certainly doesn't help.
The fear that the United States may use it's tech companies as blunt offensive weapens does now exist (in a semi-abstract form) where it didn't 5 or 10 years ago.
I think at this point in time nobody can say what the end result will be or how things may develop in the future.
Either on the political or the technological field.
Here is a concrete example of what other comments are talking about (threat that MS/USA is no longer reliable partner).
Microsoft blocked official email account of Karim Khan (a prosecutor of International Criminal Court). That was due to Executive order by president Trump (Executive Order 14203 - Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court).
Maybe. I highly doubt Apple or any other company isn’t complying in some way.
It’s been widely speculated that there are gentleman’s agreements where strategic bugs do not get fixed. To apple’s credit, unlike say BlackBerry, they designed iMessage where many of the intercept methods are tamper evident.
Everyone is the star of their personal movie. They shine it up on their own.
A good friend of mine had an awakening when he realized that his civil war ancestor suffered and sacrificed so that rich men could own other humans, and use those people to suppress his wages.
Reality is people are people and those before us had the same struggles we have about different things. We’re no smarter, but have access to the worlds information.
Their objective shifted to occupying your time, and TV you’ll accept vs. movies you’ll love is a cheap way to do that.
reply