Accenture is operating from Ireland, legally speaking. It may be in American hands, serving American shareholders and American interests, and it may have been started as a European front for an American business, but it's technically an EU company.
I don't think those kinds of details matter to a government looking to start yet another trade war, though. The list is based on the question "what legally European tech companies do business in America, sorted by income".
FAANG usually only operate what is necessary to collect payment and maybe do some lobbying on the side. Accenture actually has a full HQ with people on the ground in Europe.
But yes, legally speaking, FAANG is also EU, same way Volkswagen is an American company. That's not really how people tend to talk about these companies, though.
> FAANG usually only operate what is necessary to collect payment and maybe do some lobbying on the side.
Google, Meta, Microsoft do a lot of R&D un Europe. Google more so than the others. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple had substantial R&D in Europe as well, although I couldn’t name specific sites like the first three. Maybe you meant big corp instead of FAANG specifically?
If American companies don’t respect Europe regulation it’s time to Europe invest in dedicated software competing with office 365, social networks, even android/apple/windows os.
Many EU Governments run entirely on MS/Meta/Amazon and to a lessor extent Google services. Many (most?) government services run on Azure or AWS, and huge parts of the continent run on WhatsApp.
The EU countries had decades to build and foster alternative companies yet they did not manage to do so. China did though.
Was it a lack of political will or short-termed-ness? Maybe both but the end result is the same.
You can't undo 20 years of inaction in a few years. It will take decades before viable EU competitors emerge and begin to rival US giants and that's if they even are allowed to do so in the first place.
That's my point. This was a decision by China. European countries were happy to just let the US in and not have to worry about building their own alternative versions of the US services.
Now the same EU countries are waking up and realizing that having pieces of your digital infrastructure in someone else's hands was bad bet but unfortunately, it will take decades to build the same thing in the EU.
Same with Holland. The tax office is moving away from their own office package onto m365 right now. They apparently had an alternative all this time, which I find very surprising (the media didn't really elaborate on this).
But Holland, Ireland, UK are the most neoliberal countries in Europe, they worship America and believe that the market solves everything. The rest of europe doesn't share that sentiment to the same extent.
Hell yes I hear you on that. I've been sideways involved with some of their projects too. It's always a minefield because they don't know what they want, what they do think they want makes no sense and they don't care about what's technically possible or is streamlined, maintainable and affordable (us engineers try to find a solution that is also robust and straightforward, not just to tick a maze of boxes).
Governments tend to write the legislation of everything under their purview and they don't really have to deal with forces of nature so they think they can just decree water to not be wet and that's sorted then. So their resulting solutions tend to be pretty awful. Oh and the decision makers tend to be there because they're great at spouting hot air, not because they have a clue what they're doing. Not fun projects to work on.
Most corporates are much more flexible. They come to you with a vision and you discuss how to best make this happen. And an 'Actually, it would be a lot simpler if you do ...' is very appreciated.
This reminds me o sharp knifes argument. In programming you may want to provide tools that can shoot you in the foot, if the alternative is not as powerful. here is a conversation with DHH about it [0]. For instance, you may consider dynamic languages if the alternative is too much type gymnastics.
The first time I've seen the argument was in the prag-prog magazine that sadly is not active anymore.
Couldn’t we try to rely more in other topologies other than client server. I see technologies like wireguard and Tailscale could reduce the dependence on data centers now that we have considerable compute on our homes.
I was working in ASP.NET when projects like Backbone.js, Knockout, and Angular started to pop up. They were trying to address issues on mainstream tech at that moment (compilation times vs. hot reload, avoid full-page reloads). There was a lot of criticism around the use of JavaScript in the server back then.
Now I see the opposite. Web standards can solve the full reload page problem, so it's time to rethink if we still need to manage state in the client, with all the complexity that this involves.
The biggest issue for me it’s the division between backend and Frontend roles. I like to do both, but lately I’m doing backend. It changes a lot how we do things, refinements are mostly to create contracts between the Frontend and backend tasks, we’re they should focus on business use cases.
> Europe and US have decreased fossil fuel consumption a bit
We did not decreased fossil consumption we externalised the fossil consumption to developed countries production.
Developed countries use a lot of fossil fuels but most of that is to promote the lifestyle of developed countries.
Oxfam estimates that 1% of the richest people emit double the carbon emission of the half the poorest of humanity
I once worked at a place where we all called each other “NERD.” One time a person outside the IT circle turned to us in the cafeteria and shouted, “What's up, NERDS?” There was complete silence in the room. I guess only a nerd can call another nerd a nerd.
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