> So much cheaper to operate and control.

Until you factor in the salaries of the new employees you have to hire now, the cost of that hiring process, the compliance and security implications of operating servers on your premises, the ongoing maintenance of the software and operating systems, the new infrastructure to maintain, including but not limited to backup power supply and overall redundancy, the need to manage the lifecycle of the new hard- and software, the documentation for all of this… I could go on for a while.

It's not like these cloud solutions are just solving laziness.

Most European "cloud" providers sell "wood": https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dear-hosting-providers-you...

> We already have excellent cloud providers in Europe.

Please provide a list, no sarcasm. And please don’t put Hetzner on it, as it is not a cloud provider.

No, most wouldn’t. Too much risk and overhead for most companies to do so… most companies should and do just focus on the business value they add, rather than the underlying physical infra

Exactly. People used to think that aws is somehow convenient(partially true) and much cheaper which it absolutely isn't. Hooking on anything trendy and pretending it solve all the issues is tech illness.

For example micro services. You do not need infrastructure heavy software paradigms for large majority of use cases but it was just blindly accepted as new standart which we are now, again, moving away.

Right, but have you tried recruiting someone recently who is capable of running a pair of local servers (including organizing redundant power feeds), upgrading the OS on them with no downtime, and arranging for off-site backups of the enterpris's data?

These used to be the skills of a generalist sysadmin for a small-site with on-prem services.

Those skills are no longer available on the market. Students in the local apprenticeship program have one class about hardware, and they don't even touch it, just talk about it.

They are not European. They are French, or Swiss, or Scandinavian, each of those countries who may sooner or later not align anymore with your strategic interests. Countries should only trust themselves for sensitive stuff.

> set the right free market conditions for real competition to happen

Just as a curiosity, what exactly are those "right free market conditions" and where have those been successfully implemented before? Because I think most of us (Europeans) are desperately trying to avoid replicating the American experiment, so if that's the "right free market conditions" I think we're trying to avoid those on purpose.

But maybe you're thinking of some other place, then I'm eager ears to hear what worked elsewhere :)

> Europes bureaucratization and the growth of the size of states has increased the last 10 years.

None of these things matter. They're trivially set aside. All that matters is how many insane threats the US Gov keeps making. Hopefully as many as possible. This is what creates demand, and from demand, everything else follows automatically.

Like, how can you not see this based on recent events? I'm willing to bet a house that in Feb 2026 there will be much more relative movement from US to EU clouds than in Feb 2015. Despite all of that "increased bureaucracy".

Ok, but it's not like nothing was done after Draghi report - EU formed at least 5 committees and commissioned multiple think-tanks to develop reports about possible development of the pathway to the programme that will work on bureaucracy and overregulation.

You mean late scale capitalism that treats employees like serfs?

I have used Hetzner off and on for years, nice products and services.

I don’t care what provider you use, if your business or app use case needs any sort of reliability have a plan for reinstalling code and data on alternate providers quickly as possible.

There are horror stories of people and companies being cut off because of pressure from the US government, or having one of the Google/Microsoft/Amazon tech giants cancelling accounts.

Really, in today’s world, why totally rely on anyone?

EDIT: it seems prudent to maintain a cloud account in Europe, US, and Asia and have a plan for moving application code and data around if required. Outside the US I have mostly only used Hetzner, but Alibaba has impressive looking services.

Price is probably not the only factor in competitiveness.

The dependence on US companies is deep and multifaceted. I don’t think we should attempt nothing until a perfect solution is available.

I have seen transitions from MS suite at universities and I don't think what you are saying is true.

First assumption is that there are no alternatives so you can't replace Excel as a software. Obvious ones for Excel - LibreOffice, Collabora, OnlyOffice or Grist (which i highly recommend). The paradoxical problem is there is no clear THE ONE so organizations get into decision paralysis and never move anywhere.

The other assumption is that even if there were alternatives people will not adopt them. In reality this is rarely issue. Turns out users/employees/students actually don't care much what software they have to use. They just use what is available or what they are told to use. So the reason why people use MS Office is actually because it's mandated from the top. Lawyers use it because state/gov/court communication requires it. Students use it because they need to submit thesis in MS Word. It's socially locked in.

I've been at a university which switched over the summer from MS Office to LibreOffice. The results were boring. 40k people just adopted it, no drama, some liked it more (works on linux yay), took some people few weeks to learn/adjust. People are used learning new things.

So can we stop with that story that 40 year old software which barely changed in last 20 years can't be replaced?

This whole digital sovereignty is i think extremely scary proposition for Microsoft because just as they are now mandated solution by most western world... they are one law away (all state/university communication must be with libre software) to be on the other side of their current mandate / lock in.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

Proton.

Also, Collabora office looks really great too.

Fucking Libre Office!