As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the private sector in europe is currently unable to produce GAFA-sized companies in the IT sector.<p>My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings.<p>EDIT : and i should add, helping politicians look good. All in all it will only help everybody pretend they're doing something, while letting the ship sink even more.
As an EU citizen, I don't believe for a second that this will result in anything useful, ever. There's too much vested interest that's quietly making the politicians do what the big business wants. Has been the case for a long time now.<p>The only thing that's going to happen is that those big and old companies will get their hands on that funding while fulfilling exactly zero of their promises.
BTW Hetzner is a top notch EU cloud with an excellent proposal to finally learn Linux and deploy whatever you want on their industrial grade networking and storage. Instead of feeding an exploding complexities and costs of AWS, Google and Alibaba.
I hope they will come to other continents soon.
Whenever I read about the EU's struggles to compete with american tech companies (also SAP vs Salesforce), I think of Steve Yegge's rant on AWS, quote:<p>> So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.<p>> His Big Mandate went something along these lines:<p>> All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.<p>> Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.<p>> There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.<p>> It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.<p>> All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.<p>> <i>Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.</i><p>Emphasis mine. Good luck trying that in europe. Full rant: <a href="https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611</a>
A great opportunity for Siemens to collect money for their abysmal Mindsphere IIoT platform...
I get a feeling the EU is on a very bad trajectory into a more and more planned, copycat economy.
Someone develops some product / service (e.g. flexible infrastructure as a service aka "cloud") market decides if it is good. EU falls behind in that category. EU commission throws money at pet projects that in best case will come close to the original offering but will just burn money (/ flood money in certain pockets) in most cases. Farewell market economy (or what is left of it)
Let me guess, SAP and Deutsche Telekom will grab the funding?<p>It will be the most expensive and unreliable "cloud services" with arrogant customer service and 24 months contracts.
„€10B over 7 years [...] to rival foreign corporations such as Amazon, Google and Alibaba“<p>Does not sound like lot when compared to the annual invest of even just one of the IaaS giants.
There has been a similar project developed in Poland already. (<a href="https://en.media.pkobp.pl/78483-strategic-partnership-between-operator-chmury-krajowej-and-google-for-digitization-of-the-polish-economy" rel="nofollow">https://en.media.pkobp.pl/78483-strategic-partnership-betwee...</a>) In practice it's not much more than government-branded version of Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. So far it serves well as a marketing vehicle for a handful of the biggest corporations, but it's barely used by anyone.<p>I can see it could make sense as a solution to some particular problems though – European regulations often forbid banks from processing/storing customer data in other countries, so even though the tech is provided by the American tech giants, having everything hosted locally makes it possible for local financial services to finally move away from hosting everything on premises.
you cannot "force" funding. if you lack behind the competition, you must embrace protectionism.<p>China is successful in that sphere compared to India because they closed the market and developed sustainable and partially better alternatives to American products.<p>Europe must so the same - tax and limit American products. Let the home market copy and adapt then innovate. This is THE ONLY way.
Whenever I think of the EU I can't think of a single tech giant from there, countries that come to mind for me are the US, China, Japan and Taiwan. The only things I know about the EU when it comes to tech is it trying to push massive global regulations around tech.<p>For reference I'm a 23 year old from the US. Nothing I have is made in Europe and I don't deal with any EU companies. Even my bike computer was made by a US company and built in China.<p>What EU tech companies should I check out? What ones are on your radar?
The internet means ‘winner take all’<p>Alibaba wants to spend $30B just to compete:<p><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/20/alibaba-to-invest-28-billion-in-cloud-as-it-battles-amazon-microsoft.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/20/alibaba-to-invest-28-billion...</a><p>If the EU wants to win, it would have to spend an order of magnitude more, and even then, there is a risk that such a top down endeavor wont work. That’s probably why it was scaled back to 10B, because it would be more amenable.<p>They should try to move to where the ball is going.<p>Invest the money in decentralized resource management. Incentivize citizens to install software that contributes computational power to something bigger than itself that is useful for everyone.
This smells a bit Soviet. Instead of allowing small businesses to breathe more freely, take more risk and grow to US size companies (in 3x larger internal market!) they try to build a top down copy using an army of grant and procurement funds eaters.. despicable.
I see that the EU is wasting money in the same corrupt way the UK is right now with Deloitte and other consultancies.<p>Let’s face it - our politicians are bought and paid for and local tech companies want to skim from the gravy train.
As a European I can't help thinking that this amount of money is the result of lobbying from the tech scene and that they are now waiting to bid for public contracts to win projects that they set up themselves through consultancy jobs that also were public call for tenders.
Another hard earned €10B gonna go down the drain.<p>It's pathetic that people in Germany and other countries have to pay 50% taxes for BS like this.
This will be such a huge waste of money. Most of the work will be outsourced to private companies that will make sure that the project will cost 10x as planned and will never be delivered. Time to found a new company?
The cynic in me is reminded of something similar from about a decade ago, european search engine, and so on.<p><a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos_Europe" rel="nofollow">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos_Europe</a><p><a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Mohn" rel="nofollow">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Mohn</a><p>I don't remember the amount of money anymore, but it was <i>huge</i>, and dead for me from the moment of announcement of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertelsmann" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertelsmann</a> involvement.
Feels like it would make more sense to simply insist that European companies must house sensitive data in EU-owned providers, and use this money to subsidise the cost difference. That said, Asian Tigers have shown directed economy can work
Given Conway's Law, I wonder what sort of structure this cluster will have. The companies which recieve this funding will have to report according to some standard, which becomes the metric which becomes the target. If the project does not succeed it really should spell the end of the EU's organizational structure...<p>Does anyone know examples of EU-wide mega-engineering projects like this?
I feel a lot of anger in this thread, and I share your frustration. Is there anything we can do about this jokers?
I feel that the EU is very toxic in the way it tries to make us all work together. Maybe things like FIWARE are, I don't know what is FIWARE?<p><a href="https://www.fiware.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.fiware.org</a>
Call me a pessimist but I think it's gonna end up as usual.<p>Some European BigCos are gonna grab big bucks and show barely anything for it. Smaller fish are going to massively milk the program for grants that vaguely have something to do with the cloud. All the while the eurocrats are going to gather political points.
I often think it's part of the Western mentality to think what must be <i>added</i> to fix a problem.<p>These EU folks can't take a step back to see what could be <i>removed</i> to get there?<p>In an era of cheap money, when investors don't know where to put their money the EU believes tech needs state funding? Really?<p>#Bureaucracy
What's the actual content of this stuff?<p>The form of this article exemplifies a common problem: Money is only part of the equation. What, in practice, is the money going into? What's supposed to come out?
Governments can, or at least did* outperform the private sector in some technologies, but not in all and I would be surprised if cloud computing was one of them. The experience of government trying this is littered with failure e.g. ICL mainframes. Who’s going to take the lead on this, Groupe Bull??<p>* e.g. aerospace not withstanding companies like SpaceX.
Yes! Let us use your own cloud provider which are not on top.<p>This leads to issues for everyone who is then limited to EU cloud providers.<p>General speaking, perhaps its good enough for base load of small companies but you do not want to develop on a telekom based cloud platform.<p>They are much slower and basically non innvative.