It never was.
The US have a history of using their intelligence agencies to help US companies win bids abroad, we may have been militarily allied, but in the business world we have been enemies for a long time
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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Citing from Bert Hubert's article:
Acknowledging painful changes is not easy. In the 1930s, the Netherlands realized the world was becoming pretty dangerous, and therefore planned to buy weapons and ammunition from Germany (!). However, the ordered weaponry was not delivered on time, or at least not in the way youβd want.
I love his clarity (and humor) combined with an incredible will to make things better - and fierce optimism that we can, really.
Never was.
The cloud was always a slow walk off a long pier approach to data takeover. It sickens me.
Never was, honestly. If it's not on your computer it's on someone else's, and it's only a matter of time until that's somebody you don't trust.
As a dev I have had this workflow at a previous employer:
I start my Windows 11 work laptop. I write emails to my coworkers on Outlook, I take notes in OneNote, I make presentations in PowerPoint. We have remote meetings on Teams.
I use GitHub and GitHub Actions. I host packages on npm. I write my TypeScript code with VSCode with help from GitHub Copilot, the C# .NET Core code with Visual Studio.
I login in to everything usingusing Single Sign On with Active Directory.
And everything we make is of course run on Microsoft Azure.
Yes, everything mentioned here is owned or maintained by Microsoft.
many businesses has it like this, finally its up to the money. i asked our ITs why they moved everything to MS clouds and why they finishing with local data storage archives and the answer is very simple - it costs less than maintaining data locally. second thing is that i work for corporate with 60-70k employees world wide. so its up to top level mng decision.
I am not advocating for anything specific here. Well.. Maybe a bit using european clouds instead.
Cloud is probably the way to go in most cases. It's more secure, more reliable, often cheaper, and less work.
Everything I do is cloud native and has been for a while
I use all of those Microsoft products at a sensitive department of the Federal government of Canada, and they are NOT ready to transition away.
(btw VSCodium is an open source VSCode without the telemetry)
a sensitive department of the Federal government of Canada,
Ha! I know who sold you that.
I've moved all my services into Europe. Earlier on I didn't care much about where they where, but given recent actions and attitudes of the sitting government of the US of Assholes I've decided to leave all US services. Ain't that hard really. https://www.goeuropean.org/ gives you many options for a lot of them.
I am still on the way to ditch all US services, but it cannot be done overnight without huge additional cost - new devices, new services etc. So I am doing what I can withing my budget.
*It was never safe
"But now it's kinda obvious so we better spin it as a newly discovered development in order not to look too bad."
I have warned about this for decades ... To no avail - Sweden is TOO Microsoftified.
The entire world is too Microsoftified, but with the rise of flatpaks, Linux may change that.
Ugh. Flatpaks are really not the answer.
Go ask a security guy. Go ask an experienced build guy.
Whats wrong with flatpaks?
Distros need to make working with flatpacked applications easier. It's way too hard to figure out where files are being saved or how to give apps access to the right resources. FlatSeal helps, but it's not really geared towards casual users.
Maybe this year will be the year of the Linux desktop
Microshittified* FTFY
It was never safe
The mask is off now.
No longer?
Was never!
Brazil saw the paint in the wall years ago and created a government company to manage the government cloud services with brazillian located data centers.
And yet we still do it. See Germany.
Took you long enough. Weβve put our lives in the hands of the US for too long, itβs made Europe complacent and now weβre so far behind. We could be equal to or greater than both the US and China, but if weβre honest we have a long way to go.
I work in data engineering, European cloud providers do not seem to be able to provide alternatives to managed data warehouses like Google Big Query or Snowflake.
Can't or don't ?
It's hard to compete against the mega buck providers, however if there is suddenly political willingness to buy locally then there are vendors that can build the capability. They'll only do so if it is likely to be profitable though. Chicken / egg conundrum that the EU and national govts can help solve
Might be over due setting something up. Unless you donβt care about security.
Was it ever?
I think the EU should have a bloc-funded cloud program, where all nations in the EU fund a collective cloud. Each nation has their own servers, but collectively purchase the same hardware, have the same security standards, internet quality, and so forth. The majority of these servers can be housed in bloc facilities that are collectively owned by the EU, while particularly sensitive data can be kept within secure facilities within each nation's borders. Military blueprints, diplomatic comms, ect. The generic facilities can be used for holding taxes, driver licenses, and so forth, maybe excess space of the general servers can be sold to the public for use.
This would allow the EU to be mostly economical, while maintaining their safety. Plus, it gives an "public option" of sorts on cloud services, so commercial companies have to exceed the baseline standard set by the government cloud service.