| ▲ | eduction 15 hours ago |
| It’s great yes, but if we in the US weren’t proving so untrustworthy, EU startups and tech giants could focus on building things that actually might out innovate us and everyone else. Which would be a win-win. Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much. I don’t blame them. There is value in trusting your tools and not risk having them weaponized. It’s just sad all around. |
|
| ▲ | BrenBarn 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Duplicating things is underrated. It's good for there to be multiple operators doing basically the same thing. Innovation can happen at the margins. It will be easier, not harder, for EU companies to innovate in meaningful ways after they've built their own systems and are no longer just following in the wake of big US companies. (Not to mention that half of what passes for innovation these days is actually bad.) |
| |
| ▲ | akst 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you’re assessing things entirely on a strategic basis makes total sense. It’s understandable why they are doing it but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s underrated or suggest there are no drawbacks. Duplicating things without reason is wasteful. With a hobby project sure that’s your own time and is likely more an act of consumption and personal fulfilment. But these are national economic resources being redirected away from other things. In software in a large codebase where there are coordination costs with reuse due to the organisation structure, there’s a strategic reason not to reuse, but it might highlight a limitation of the organisation structure, but that’s not something someone making the call to reuse code or not can do much about. Likewise France really can’t do much about the state of the US and dependency is understandably seen as a risk. | | |
| ▲ | BrenBarn 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I mean there are pros and cons to many things. What I mean by underrated is just that a lot of people say "oh duplication, how wasteful" and don't realize the benefits that may exist in redundancy and diffusion. I think the US would benefit right now if there was more "duplication" in the sense of greater diversity across many industries. More car makers, more film studios, more news organizations, more social media companies, more record labels. Not more stuff --- not more cars, more films, more news, more social media, more records --- but just the same stuff spread over a greater number of entities. The consolidation we've seen over the past several decades is a bad thing. |
| |
| ▲ | account42 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's even better if they end up not doing exactly the same thing. For example we could use some tech companies that aren't so user hostile. | | |
| ▲ | BrenBarn 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Right, and we can't get that if the only players are huge companies that face no competition. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | tdrz 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > It’s great yes, but if we in the US weren’t proving so untrustworthy, EU startups and tech giants could focus on building things that actually might out innovate us and everyone else. Which would be a win-win.
Instead they will spend a lot time duplicating tools where only US companies are providing options, and maybe not innovating much if anything in those areas. Or not enough to matter much. You could apply this to Slack vs Teams as well. Slack was already good, Microsoft just duplicated their work, came out with an inferior product and won. So, was it worth it? |
| |
| ▲ | XorNot 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | Teams won by being good enough and bundled into O365. There's probably some value in making a product so available that people can use it where normally they wouldn't have the opportunity. | | |
| ▲ | ornornor 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | Teams won by being bundled with the rest of the Microsoft stack and shoved down captive (corporate) users throats. | | |
|
|
|
| ▲ | fireflash38 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Sometimes rebuilding a tool makes it better. You hopefully learn from the past. |
