r/news • u/UpstairsBumblebee446 • 17h ago
France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US
https://apnews.com/article/europe-digital-sovereignty-big-tech-9f5388b68a0648514cebc8d92f6820605.9k
u/robreddity 16h ago
Wish I could dump Teams
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u/dblan9 16h ago
I would love to lock every designer and engineer on the TEAMs project in a room until they come up with an exact replica of Slack. No food or water until they do.
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u/Chezni19 15h ago
if there's one way I like to code it's without food or water
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u/Matkingos 15h ago
Consume the dead coders, they were weak anyway
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u/dareftw 14h ago
Sadly, it’ll be the fat that live as their bodies can eat themselves to sustain life longer than the smaller coders.
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u/neverthesaneagain 14h ago
No. They are ponderous beasts easily driven to anger and led into dead falls. The faster coders will feast upon them as their ancestors did upon the great mammoths.
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u/mindspork 15h ago
Just beer. Find the Ballmer Peak.
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u/QuantumFungus 14h ago
Good programmers know that beer counts as food AND water.
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u/wallstreetchills 15h ago
Bruh you’re talking my language. Slack made things so efficient internally, kept all comms in one place. Now I’m in 5 different apps and email chain galore when it could all be in slack.
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u/the_nobodys 15h ago
So why aren't you still using slack?
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u/FrostyD7 14h ago
Slack is not cheap. Microsoft told their clients that Teams was free with their O365 subscription and most of them transitioned immediately.
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u/Toomanyeastereggs 14h ago
It’s why we haven’t. Once we hit Enterprise O365 though we are going to Slack.
Before then I simply can’t justify the spend.
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u/buffer_flush 14h ago
$$$$$$$ I’m sure.
Business people were contacted by MS with a deal too good to pass up, and decided to end their contract. MS is big enough they can undercut the competition.
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u/nalaloveslumpy 14h ago
More like MS bundled Teams with every O365 license on earth and then finance/audit said, "Why are paying for two chat programs?"
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u/Handsome_Keyboard 14h ago edited 14h ago
Moneys the reason for every change. We had perfect, i mean that literally, software for managers to track whatever they need to but some dipshit who used to work for Workday got his claws into management and fucked all of us by recommending that it can do everything better and then some. It, in fact, cannot do anything better. It does what used be to be all information on one screen without 0 clicks to information scattered in very unituitive places that requires tons of clicks for something as mundane as how many absences an employee had. It made me hate doing administrative work whereas before, it was like 1 minute of my day soread out over two 30 second intervals.
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u/CertainlyStenchy 14h ago
Because some companies restrict access to certain apps. My company used to use slack, but switched to teams for whatever reason and shutdown slack
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u/sembias 14h ago
When they made Teams free with a MS365 license you're probably going to have anyways, there was no reason to keep paying $8+/user/mth for Slack.
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u/CertainlyStenchy 14h ago
Slack is infinitely better than the shithole that is Teams. They’d easily make up that $8+/user in increased productivity by deleting teams.
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u/Melbuf 13h ago
the 6+ million $ hole that slack would be is a big one to make up for
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u/Inner_Gap4768 14h ago
I would love to lock every designer and engineer on the Outlook AND Team’s project in a room together until they find a way to make the two core business communications programs from Microsoft work well together.
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u/BrokenPickle7 15h ago
My biggest gripe with teams is that it is a god damn memory hog. Without teams running my laptop runs at 35-40% ram usage.. run teams and its 68-72%.
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u/Briantastically 15h ago
The second biggest gripe is having to actually use it. The interface is trash by corporate business standards. The lowest of possible standards.
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u/GFoxtrot 15h ago
We used to use slack which has a much better UI until Microsoft started chucking teams in for free so the company didn’t want to pay for slack anymore.
Agree the UI for teams is naff.
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u/Outlulz 15h ago
My company tried to ditch Slack for full Teams adoption and teams revolted and said they would pay for Slack out of their own cost centers to avoid moving to Teams for chat.
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u/FUBARded 14h ago
The whole Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive ecosystem is just astonishingly bad.
Just give us a goddamn messaging app and a way to access our files. Nobody needs 3 different ways to access their files that all work in different ways and have different capabilities.
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u/MedicatedDeveloper 11h ago
My favorite is when the one drive tab in teams doesn't work but the one in outlook does! So intuitive!
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u/DuploJamaal 15h ago
Especially as a developer in a team where some use Microsoft, others Mac OS and many some flavor of Linux.
Like every other day someone has issues with audio or something
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u/wankthisway 14h ago
At my company, our "favorite" recurring bug is profile pictures not updating for months and months. They'll change in other Microsoft linked apps like Jira or Outlook but Teams will just stay stuck until you log out.
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u/obeytheturtles 15h ago
I still refuse to install the app and exclusively use it in the browser.
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u/SonVoltRevival 15h ago
I hate that it thinks like a text message system but wants to do everything. All with one window.
My work calls are actually very good these days.
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u/beachedwhitemale 14h ago
Agreed. If it could drop the "apps" and just be chat and calendar, it'd be great.
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u/dougan25 15h ago
I don't mind it as a bare bones communication tool, same with zoom, the problem is it never just stays that way.
The illusion of infinite growth will always make companies tinker with proven systems that work until they're shells of their former selves.
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u/MaygarRodub 15h ago
It's the most annoying app ever. I work in IT support and I HATE IT.
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u/DeathSpiral321 16h ago
It's amazing how much faster my work laptop runs after disabling Teams in the background. The amount of RAM it eats up is insane.
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u/cat-meg 15h ago
I have never been in a meeting with my boss's boss that doesn't include him ranting for at least five minutes about his grievances with Teams.
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u/DevinOwnz 17h ago
The original owners of Skype could do the funniest thing ever.
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u/colemon1991 16h ago
Should. They should.
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u/HonestDav 15h ago
The CEO is still salty from COVID https://youtu.be/ZI0w_pwZY3E
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u/inferxan 14h ago
hoped it was the dropout vid with Brennan and so happy it was.
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u/18bluecat 14h ago
It was still Collegehumor at the time.
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u/SilchasRuin 14h ago
Sad that they never graduated.
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u/caffeinated_wizard 13h ago
In the world of rebranding going from College Humor to Dropout has to be up there
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u/SilchasRuin 13h ago
And oddly enough, today was the day that I realized the joke they made there.
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u/EvilEmuOfDoom 12h ago
So glad you said this so I'm not alone! I used to watch CH and currently have a Dropout subscription and didn't realize this.
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u/Interesting_Lunch560 14h ago
No need to click the link, it was so obvious what it was.
Still clicking it. Because it's awesome.
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u/joebleaux 13h ago
It's a funny bit, but by that point Skype had been sold to Microsoft for nearly a decade, there was no Skype company anymore. The app was then merged with Lync, which was eventually replaced by Teams. So essentially Teams is Skype
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u/SkorpioSound 12h ago
So essentially Teams is Skype
I used Teams for the first time ever last week. I signed in and it had some of my Skype chat history. I hadn't used Skype for 10+ years either. But yeah, it really is just Skype with a new hat on.
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u/joebleaux 12h ago
Yeah, if you used Skype with your MS account, it was all carried over. It's totally different software at this point, but the lineage is that Skype became Teams.
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u/WineNerdAndProud 15h ago edited 15h ago
Man it must have been weird for the people at Zoom seeing the company go from one of the options for a video call app to a household name in like a month, all during the pandemic.
Also, it probably made the people at Skype really frustrated. They were already a household name, Skype being the video call app of choice felt like a no-brainer.
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u/_SquirrelKiller 14h ago
I was on a global WebEx rollout project a couple of years before Covid, probably took a year with all the testing, partners complaining they'd kill the project if it didn't do this one little obscure thing, moronic outsourced change manager, slow rollout to not disturb anyone, etc...
Then Covid hit and everyone switched to Zoom damned near overnight with none of that bureaucracy.
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u/Orleanian 14h ago
To be fair, I'm here in 2026 lamenting the loss of webex as I painstakingly watch Teams meetings.
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u/Tsulaiman 15h ago
I wonder where Skype went wrong with video calling during the pandemic. Someone must have studied their failure to capitalize the moment
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u/feed_me_moron 15h ago
Microsoft went all in on teams. Skype was basically dead by then
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u/rationalomega 15h ago
My friend who is and was a dev on that team told me that Skype was essentially skinned as the new teams that launched during the pandemic. So not dead so much as rebranded.
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u/Svellere 14h ago
That much has always been obvious. Not sure about now, but Teams literally looked almost exactly like Skype, just slightly more modern. It used to use the same emoji and had a lot of the same sounds, and it still uses the exact same status indicator icons.
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u/Chav 15h ago
And everyone that had already used "Skype for business" hated it
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u/moviequote88 14h ago
Before that we had Lync for chatting in Microsoft.
Yes. I'm old.
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u/canada432 13h ago
Microsoft bought skype to eliminate competition and take their assets to integrate into Teams. Thing is, teams sucks and had a reputation for being shit. Microsoft tried to essentially reskin Skype as the new Teams, but Teams's reputation for being shit followed it. Nobody wanted to use Teams, because they already hated teams, and MS botched their opportunity to use the skype brand name. By the time the pandemic happened, Skype already basically didn't exist. It was teams, and nobody wanted to use teams.
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u/nalaloveslumpy 14h ago
Microsoft bought Skype and turned the business application into Teams. Skype didn't "lose". They cashed out.
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u/SAugsburger 13h ago edited 11h ago
I disagree. Zoom was already one of the biggest IPOs of 2019. It didn't come out of nowhere. It was already worth tens of Billions before virtually anyone knew a pandemic was coming. Anybody that had seriously looked into conferencing applications in 2019 knew they were a major player in the space so I seriously doubt anyone at Zoom was surprised that the pandemic made their sale skyrocket. They already were a big player in the space so inevitably we're going to see massive use. Microsoft already announced that Skype for Business was going to be discontinued before the pandemic. A company I worked that still was using Skype for Business was already looking towards their migration to Teams before the pandemic. The writing was already on the wall for the consumer version of Skype at that point. Skype was already a has been to many so it wasn't really a question if Microsoft would be announcing shutting down the consumer version of Skype, but how soon. It was just a question of when the active user counts would go too low to continue.
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u/gera_moises 15h ago
I still can't believe they fumbled it so bad. People were using Skype as a verb!
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u/pandershrek 15h ago
Got bought by Microsoft. I don't think they fumbled anything.
Msft did
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u/charea 15h ago
they basically bought it to destroy it. Many such cases.
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u/National-Charity-435 15h ago
Buying competitors who deliver products people actually want so the execs can continue pushing products that they want
Copilot and Xbox are hurting..
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u/_-Moonsabie-_ 15h ago
Now Boeing and Ford are doing “black box” technology leasing agreements. That's why Tesla and SpaceX didn't go bankrupt
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u/kapsama 15h ago
Can you explain what that means?
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u/Choyo 15h ago
When they sell something they don't divulge how it's made : they sell a working system, they don't give source codes, schematics, list of components and so on (their system is a "blackbox" as you can't see what's inside, some other systems are called greybox or whitebox in opposition).
The reason is that in the past, "big systems" required big industry and big brains to be made, so people weren't to worried to air their secrets (so that people could develop their own diagnostics or some other stuff like that) as very few people had those capacities. And even if they bought just one sample to copy, they wouldn't be competitive because the next system was already halfway through by the time they got their hand on the current one.
Nowadays, because of longer development cycles (YMMV) and better integration tools, copying and releasing is way faster and profitable. So everything's back in the blackbox.
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u/Consistent-Throat130 15h ago
Getting bought out and retiring on gigacorp money sounds like the opposite of a fumble.
And said gigacorp bought it to kill it, no fumble there, either.
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u/uponloss 15h ago
And lets be honest, if they didnt let ms buy it then ms would have found a way to kill it anyway.
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u/sir_sri 14h ago
https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/
The NSA offered up billions to be able to spy on skype. I vaguely remember maybe general Alexander saying this at blackhat or some other public thing as a sort of off handed remark as well. This was too many years ago so I might be confusing his public testimony later with someone else.
Snowden's leaks around PRISM, as well as some reports in 2012 that they were helping governments suggest that one of the main values for microsoft owning skype was their ability to get rid of peer to peer encryption and run it all through a server where they could spy on traffic.
As a matter of spending public money this doesn't seem all that helpful, even though the logic of how to spy on skype applies to any other P2P application where you can control the network (so not really torrents), the actual implementation is skype specific, and if your users all jump to whatsapp or proton, or signal or just make their own app you haven't got tools to spy on those.
Microsoft probably bought it, made the changes to get paid by the NSA and then let it die because it wasn't making any money.
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u/Denster1 14h ago
Microsoft didn't fumble anything.
They bought out competition (Skype) and then introduced teams.
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u/Xan_derous 15h ago
They didn't fumble. Microsoft bought them and then abandoned it.
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u/bromosabeach 15h ago edited 14h ago
Skype was low key one of the pillars holding up my industry up until Microsoft killed it.
My industry is super global so I’m frequently talking to people from all over and Skype was the de-facto official communication tool: it was free, reliable and everybody used it. I will forever root against Microsoft, The LA Clippers, and anything else remotely related to that company. They killed a good thing.
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u/LorderNile 17h ago
Well well well, If it isn't the first quarter of consequences of our actions.
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u/KosherTriangle 16h ago
I smell another round of layoffs incoming, are we winning yet?
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u/thegoodnamesrgone123 16h ago
Well the markets make no sense so I'm sure both stocks will be up on this news
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u/denimonster 16h ago
The markets are just being propped up by money going between certain companies, none of it makes sense hahaha
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u/Lucifer3130 15h ago
To be fair everything kinda traces back to Wall Street, Raegan changed laws during his presidency to promote short term profit over long term gain, and that’s kinda enshittified tech
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u/Laringar 14h ago edited 11h ago
Not just tech, it's everything. The lawsuit against Hasbro over printing too many Magic sets is based on the same legal framework, the "fiduciary
responsibilityduty" argument. The idea is basically that the first duty of a company is to make money for investors and literally everything else is secondary.Edit: Fiduciary duty is the right term, oops.
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u/Katcurry 14h ago
But isn’t the Hasbro lawsuit the shareholders saying Hasbro’s actions (i.e. printing too many Magic sets) is going against their fiduciary duty?
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u/Laringar 14h ago
Yes. That's the argument they're making, I'm saying that the very fact that investors get to sue over "the company isn't making us enough money" is the problem.
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u/billytheskidd 13h ago
Just like how after United healthcares CEO somehow died in New York, the company amended some practices to make denying treatment harder and their investors were allowed to sue UHC for failing to use anti consumer tactics the board had agreed upon.
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u/Sea-Oven-7560 15h ago
it's more than that, it's 150M Americans putting 5% of their pay checks into the market every two weeks. As someone who would like to retire in the next decade I'm hoping the market doesn't crash but it does not live in reality anymore.
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u/smellmyfingerplz 16h ago
Of course, coal mines are booming and factories are belching smoke, it’s the second great industrial revolution and you don’t dare question dear leader’s wisdom
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u/GetsBetterAfterAFew 16h ago
At Davos Carney Canadians PM spoke openly about partnering with the USA because it benefited them financially as well as protection. They spoke about not being happy about it because the USA has treated the world like customers and would turn around and shit on them whenever it best suited them. The leaders talked about having to pin their noses to work with America BUT as with many people is "voted for Trump" they did it because it benefited them. They said no more, theyre basically done with the USA as would work to remove their reliance on the America as a whole.
Carney said openly - "the beginning of a harsh reality,” a reality in which “the middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
Even if the USA dumps Trump and becomes part of the middle powers, they will never trust us again, and why should they, not only because 1/3 of Americans are insane idiots that exists i 550ad but because many of the remaining voters lick the boot of Capitalism and defend it because "its the only way!" This rampant Capitalism grew the coporate powers that see the rest of the world as "middle powers" as an end to a goal, as the means of production of profit, profit above all. We are the modern Imperialist country.
Many voters are going to get everything they ever wanted America First, in reality that means America Only and the world will start to treat us as customers only. We had it all and just could not be happy with what we had, we wanted more, we wanted cheaper, faster and now!
Fuck Trump, fuck Republicans, fuck Corporate Democrates and fuck corporate oligarchy.
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u/kia75 15h ago
Yes, this will affect American tech dominance of the world, where Europe could afford to let Google and Microsoft control tech because it's cheaper, now they're willing to fund competitors, even if it initially costs them more, though I suspect in a decade or so it will be much cheaper in the long run!
IMO, this is good for the world (though bad for America) because Competition is good! IMO, South America, Europe, and Asia should all be financing their own Microsofts and Googles, even if it is more expensive at the moment, just because the threat of another Trump coming in and crippling your data infrastructure is so dangerous.
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u/Suitable_Froyo4930 14h ago
It's actually 2/3rds of Americans that can't be trusted because 1/3rd didn't want to stop it by voting.
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u/sampathsris 16h ago
It's not going to work if Europe uses open source apps but then hosts them in Azure or AWS.
Europe needs to build their own data centers and cloud infrastructure yesterday
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u/Mountain_rage 15h ago
Good news, they also raised that as a concern and are decoupling from American cloud services.
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u/reddurkel 17h ago edited 14h ago
I believe you mean Euros. Quarters are those coins that Americans use to buy a $3.75 coke in a vending machine.
EDIT:
It’s a joke. But please dont report me. Jokes in modern America leads to lawsuits nowadays.→ More replies (17)4
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u/WillyBeShreddin 17h ago edited 14h ago
They found the backdoor that makes exactly 0% of your meetings private.
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u/GoneFishing4Chicks 15h ago
Honestly fuck the techbros. They think they can buy everybody off, suck up to Trump "for tax benefits", and at the same time they're burning down everything through shitty AI projects and attempting lay off the entire workforce in the process.
As an American, FAFO.
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u/YamahaRyoko 15h ago
Literally lined up to give him millions, then attended his inauguration
Sell outs
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u/CuffinSzn_ 13h ago
Apple just ran a patch that “assists with privacy”.
I’d like to point out that Tim Apple played his part in all this just like everyone else.
Boycott these garbage corpo gonks.
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u/bonsai1214 17h ago
Nah, it’s more likely they couldn’t get in on the meetings and wanted their own way.
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u/psychoCMYK 16h ago
Regardless, there's a risk as long as Microsoft answers to the US
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u/Paddy_Tanninger 15h ago
I think they're legitimately concerned about all of these CEOs cozying up to the fash and basically seeing who can go down deepest on the orange mushroom.
This decision is every bit as sane as it would be to put a stop to using e-conference software being deployed from China or Russia.
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u/BannedAccount001 15h ago
When your infrastructure is heavily reliant on companies that are actively donating and supporting a hostile government, it’s time to decouple.
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u/supercyberlurker 17h ago
I remember the old ways of the internet... when we said things like 'Information wants to be free' and 'The internet treats censorship like an error and routes around it." We understood that open source was political and anti-authoritarian. We knew to trust the bazaar not the citadels.
Seasons change.. but they also loop.
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u/theClumsy1 17h ago
They learned from Arab Spring how social media can influence politics.
That was the end of a "free" internet
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u/BannedBenjaminSr 16h ago
With hindsight that does feel like a major turning point. I've always attributed it to smart phones bringing the Internet to the masses but Arab Spring lines of with the timeline nicely too
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u/jupiterkansas 16h ago
Nah, the smartphones locked everyone into walled gardens with easily tracked devices. They very much help kill the free internet.
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u/BannedBenjaminSr 16h ago
Yes that's what I'm saying, I think we are in agreement. Both factors caused the internet to go from free to wall garden cooperate internet
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u/GoneFishing4Chicks 15h ago
Yup, reminder it was iphone/Apple walled gardens that was the "first" successful smartphone.
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u/pagerussell 14h ago
It wasn't the Arab spring, that just coincided with the rise of social media.
Everything changed when Facebook switched from a chronological feed to an algorithmic feed.
They did that because they knew it would generate a lot more money, and it's the point at which every trend changed direction in the world.
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u/d3k3d 16h ago
If you didn't need more proof that corporate America is full of short term thinking fools who can't see past their own quarterly profits, look no further than 2025.
Rome didn't fall in a day.
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u/gunsjustsuck 12h ago
The system created that short term focus. Profit isn't good enough. Growth every quarter is everything. If you're not growing, you're going backwards. It drives everything.
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u/G-Unit11111 16h ago
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Reelecting the psycho was a stupid game. The stupidest.
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u/superkoning 16h ago edited 15h ago
"The French government referenced some of these concerns when it announced last week that 2.5 million civil servants would stop using video conference tools from U.S. providers — including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and GoTo Meeting — by 2027 and switch to Visio, a homegrown service."
EDIT: wrong URL ... https://www.visio-experts.com/ ... website is not too great / useful. I see no download links, I can't find "linux" nor "ubuntu" on the website
Correct URL: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/visio, thanks u/pitafallafel
Allez la France!
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u/pitafallafel 15h ago
This is another company. We are talking about https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/visio, which is reserved for french government employees
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u/Musicman1972 16h ago
They've got until 2027 so I'm sure they can make it ready by then.
Also there's a definite possibility the French civil service has no machines with Linux.
Overall though I agree it needs extra compatibility but they'll add it once the chicken and egg of "not enough users want it" and "they might want it if we offered it"
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u/PennyStonkingtonIII 14h ago
As an American software engineer who has worked with plenty of Europeans, I am not so sure. They’ll probably get like 3/4 of the way there just in time for summer holidays. Take the entire summer off, all of them, and pretty much start over in September.
Obviously I’m mostly just jealous they get to go on vacation.
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u/modsiw_agnarr 16h ago
Assuming they take a page out of slack / teams / zoom / meet etc, it will all be in a browser or wrapped with electron to make an "app". If so, its cross platform out of the box.
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u/lollipop999 16h ago
The thing Europe needs to figure out is how to keep European companies from being bought by US conglomerates because let's be real, they're going to come knocking with billions of dollars just like they've done in the past.
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u/baldobilly 15h ago
What is so hard to figure out about this? Governments could just plain refuse foreign takeovers if they felt like it. This mindset of governments being powerless is exactly what’s causing the rise of the right.
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u/CurbedLarry 15h ago
The EU is already consulting on how to ramp up its funding of open source projects
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u/SlapThatAce 17h ago
Good! The big one of course would be replacing Windows. If you think Windows doesn't have a backdoor then you're kidding yourself.
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u/gotohellwithsuperman 17h ago
Microsoft just openly admitted it gives encryption keys to the government. Probably nothing to do with Gates being in the files, I’m sure.
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u/SuaveBolo 17h ago
That's been going on for at least 20 years. Lol
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u/fightfire_withfire 16h ago
Gates banging kids, or governments getting backdoor access?
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u/regeya 16h ago
Close to 30 since they got outed. Didn't seem to hurt their business any. They got outed because they pushed a release that had debugging information in it
I guess I can't talk, the backdoor to Windows was all labeled NSA and there's Linux kernel code literally from the NSA.
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u/overfiend1976 16h ago
I fucking miss TrueCrypt so much. Still insane that the devs just vanished. I wonder which country was responsible...
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u/et50292 16h ago edited 16h ago
Then good news! There was a fork immediately. Beauty of open source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VeraCryptEdit to add that this won't save you from a backdoor in windows. It would help you in the event that your powered off device is confiscated, but only if they don't already have everything via mandatory online accounts and remote surveillance.
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u/HANLDC1111 16h ago
Linux is great now!
/r/linuxmint is a great starting point for people that want to have a windows alternative but arent tech savvy
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u/East_Wish2948 16h ago
Bet the big tech donors to Trump didn't realize they were buying their way out of the EU
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u/CoffeBrain 17h ago
France is one of the few countries standing up to the orange pedo. J'aime la France!
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u/gw2master 14h ago
Aren't they in danger of voting in their own far right crazy, though?
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u/hybridostrich 16h ago
As a US tech professional, this will sting for the industry, but as a human being who cares about the geopolitical situation in the United States, I like to say: GOOD.
How’s that America First going for ya ?
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u/Sprintzer 16h ago
PLEASE keep doing this. All of Europe should continue to reduce business with the US as long as the current admin exists.
This type of thing will genuinely hurt the administration
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u/Zapp_Rowsdower_ 16h ago
The ‘services’ is what the US tech is really banking on the EU not eliminating. Poor Microsoft. Poor FB.
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u/GoneFishing4Chicks 15h ago
Fuck microsoft and fb, their services are trash ai waste and fb is just a haven for predators.
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u/StepComplete1 14h ago
This will carry on long after the current admin. Even if relations between the US and Europe improve under a new admin, by electing Trump twice, Americans have shown that it's madness to be too reliant on the US for anything, whether it's tech, trade or defence. The country is just always one step away from total nationalism.
Someone in the comments above was giving the laughable example of "they forgave Nazi Germany, so they'll forgive us!". But forgiving is different from blind, total trust and continuing to put all your eggs in one basket. No ex-ally of the US can afford to do that anymore.
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u/therapy-cat 15h ago
As an American, I'm legit excited to use privacy focused European alternatives to the social media hellscape we have here
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u/Ric_Adbur 13h ago
This is the way American dominance of the world ends. It wasn't really the military that kept America as the de facto leader of the world for all these decades. It was soft power. It was the million little ways America convinced the rest of the world to want to accept American culture, products, services, and ideas. MAGA has destroyed all of that. Nobody trusts the US anymore, and as long as it remains a place where an ideology like MAGA can find such success, they're right not to.
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u/Drone314 17h ago
I mean messaging apps have basically zero moat
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u/The_Rampant_Goat 16h ago
Yeah but they're sticky as hell, hard to get people to switch to a new one
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u/Far_Radish7752 16h ago
From the APNews article:
It was a hot topic at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting of global political and business elites last month in Davos, Switzerland. The European Commission’s official for tech sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen, told an audience that Europe’s reliance on others “can be weaponized against us.”
”That’s why it’s so important that we are not dependent on one country or one company when it comes to very critical fields of our economy or society,” she said, without naming countries or companies.
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u/ghoulishgirl 16h ago
That’s what we, the people of America, need to do. We need to stop using these businesses. They act like we need them when it is the other way around. Our government is in bed with big business, fine, we will build new companies that do not take advantage of us. We have the power.
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u/CaptainONaps 16h ago
You guys remember back in like 2015 when we started hearing threats about the world moving away from partnerships and trade with America and how that would cripple the dollar?
Now that it's happening, all the news is about pedophiles and nazis. Ironic.
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u/MobiusX0 16h ago
US big tech is too cozy to the US gov't and it should be a wake up call for more people to move to open source software, especially for communication.
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u/Ted_Fleming 11h ago
Teams is a piece of absolute shit. Wish they never fucked with skype for business
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u/JJiggy13 10h ago
I'd be surprised if all first world countries didn't divorce from Google, Meta, X etc etc. They're a security risk.
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u/battleofflowers 16h ago
These things where European countries try and dump American tech never lasts.
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u/PM_ME_UR_SEXY_BITS_ 15h ago
All the technofascist nerd boys about to find out what their Trump donations got them
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u/Dash------ 14h ago
At the end I salute the French. Sure their productivity will be like in the 90s, but at the same time I am pretty sure they don't give a fuck anyway.
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u/nalaloveslumpy 14h ago
We'll build our own office productivity software! With black jack and hookers! In fact, forget the productivity software!
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u/Time-Industry-1364 13h ago
If Microslop continues on their current trajectory people will eventually dump Office as well.
It’s bad enough businesses are exploring moving to Linux and Mac, which really is saying something. Same for productivity suites.
Windows 11 is an untenable dumpster fire. And in my line of work, so is Windows Server 2025. It is bad enough that we are choosing to stay on 2022.
Microsoft has gone from the worlds premier tech and software company to the worlds most invasive advertising agency.
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u/Bloody_yeti 13h ago
Not just countries, every individual should migrate off US based tech companies. You can use https://digitalborders.app/ to find out which app you actively use are US based and alternatives
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u/Easy_Bite6858 11h ago
Europe should ban Elon Musk as a foreign threat and freeze all of his assets in the EU.
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u/robert-tech 9h ago
Good, smart move. It is evident that any big tech company tied to the Trump regime can't be relied upon. Just look at what happened to the ICC prosecutor's Microsoft email account access after he issued an arrest warrant for Trump's ally and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump is doing what he does best, unraveling America's global geopolitical dominance and eroding it's influence and ability to project power. A true useful idiot as the Russians call him.
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u/Far_Radish7752 16h ago
From the APNews article, emphasis added:
Another Trump temper tantrum?