Somewhere in 2005-2010 mail was declared for some reason a hard problem and outsourced to Microsoft and Google. The rest if the history.
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.
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.
Every discussion that treats EU or Europe as a political entity equivalent to national state is a waste of time.
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!
My previous company in Germany was all macOS, the current all Ubuntu. Sorry, no crap.
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.
Wait until they find out whose market Taiwan rules.
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.
> Big Tech companies dominate, not because they’re better, but because they have the first mover’s advantage
Uuuh says who? I think they dominate because they are in fact better for business for one reason or another.
You need talent to make tech that people want to use. Europe does not have that talent pool nor do they actively retain or attract such talents.
Also them being fully subscribed to capitalism: let other people solve my problems.
I think plenty here are asking the wrong questions.
The question is not so much are EU enterprises currently depending on offering by Google and Microsoft. The real question is what are the alternatives these companies could turn to if they needed to.
And the truth is that there exists solid alternatives from Asia to nearly everything they offer.
EU companies don’t need to reinvent anything. They have a great opportunity to diversify their supply chain.
> 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”.