Empty words, time for European digital autonomy
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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Not sure if this is too little, but it definitely is too late.
Have a feeling it's either too little or too shit. Or both
Germany east border has gone PS1 polygonal, Poland is elongated, Ukraine ZaCarpathia is corner and Romania is completely wrong
They're American, give them some slack. I've seen videos pointing to Sweden when they had to say where Spain was and vice versa. Also someone pointed at Switzerland when asked about Iran sooo
Forty-two years ago, Microsoft released the very first version of Microsoft Word.
Damn im getting old
You're old if you remember what came before
Pfew I'm still young
Get the fuck out from Europe Microsoft ! Fuck off.
I hate that eastern europe on the thumbnail
What do you mean? What's wrong with it?
Germany east border has gone PS1 polygonal, Poland is elongated, Ukraine ZaCarpathia is corner and Romania is completely wrong
Oh... holy shit my attention to detail is so bad. But anyway, we shouldn't care too much about that, it's just a random pic probably made by some random dude who doesn't know how Europe countries are divided. I guess we should focus on the fact that the US is starting to understand they are losing Europe.
Look, its good that we'll have some of the business move here but in the end I'd rather have an RU service (or really, anything but microsoft)
You know. Considering the unlikelyness of ever getting off microsoft - it is a very reassuring thing that at least volatility in US isn't going to harm statewide over here
The headquarters are in the US. The company is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the US. If the US government is putting a gun to the head of Microsoft management, the company will comply and mess with things in places outside the US.
So when they say "Microsoft is headquartered in the United States, but we provide cloud services to Europe through corporate entities headquartered in Europe." (Point 2) and continues that it will be run by a european board of directors...
Do you know what happened to mcdonalds in russia after the american company left? They rebranded and continued on like normal.
Isn't this like having the system set up so that a gun to the head of microsoft US doesn't matter?
Things are very different with software. For starters we don't know which influence the US government currently wields over Microsoft. We don't know if the software used in the European data centers has deliberate backdoors, kill switches or the like. We don't know if the datacenters are requiring specific hardware from US manufacturers that could be compromised. Unless the software used in the data centers is also entirely developed, owned and maintained by the European entities so that these can be held accountable, it does not matter whose address is on the paper.
This is completely different to McDonalds, where the business model revolves around selling food that is sourced locally or could be sourced locally.
The only way to protect from US governmental influence is to provide European alternatives that are developed, owned and maintained by companies here and not dependent on any software subject to US governmental influence.
So because software and hardware is in US control, we can't trust even the intent of the company. Yea shit, okay that makes sense. (Thank you for a very good and understandable explanation!)
But say if, a EU alternative is developed by Hungary and in use, what's stopping it from essensially doing their Russian sock puppet thing? ๐ค
Is there any alternative that works without open sourcing, or maybe monitoring any data that goes outside of the EU? Because the second alternative is dystopian, I'd much rather prefer the first - but it seems implausible
I guess it's not a black and white thing, just a matter of trust.
Imagine you have a kilo of gold, you wouldn't just store it anywhere.
For me, Hungary and USA are bad places for my personal data and my gold (if I had any).