The thing about Europe: it's the actual land of the free now

> There are few unicorns in Europe, alas, and too little innovation.

There is most definitely innovation in Europe. It just gets bought by the US, who is quick to forget where the technology came from.

As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug. It's great to claim to have free speech and competition, but when a few people own a few big monopolies and control the media, is it real? Regulations are not bad.

> As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug

Cope much?

As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries critically depend on AWS and Microsoft, especially now that the US has fully embraced governance by RNG. The choice isn't having or not having your own digital infrastructure, it's either having your own or having to depend on someone else.

As a Microsoft employee who spent 25 years in telco before joining and was very much into the enterprise hosting scene, let me tell you that nobody in Europe was/is able to build comparable infrastructure and managed services.

Telcos sunk a considerable amount of money into building hosting facilities but could not deliver the same scale, international coverage and breadth of features that AWS could, so when Azure came around a lot of telco and datacenter people jumped ship.

Since then (it's been ten years for me) I've seen dozens of EU hosters consistently fail to add the kind of enterprise and security features that hyperscalers provide, and that IT departments _need_ for compliance purposes (Google is still catching up on some of those).

It's not about hosting VMs anymore or having Kubernetes for your startup, it's about the whole enchilada (auditing processes, distributed datacenters, management APIs, development ecosystem, etc.), and not even major hosting providers (some of which, by the way, were almost completely reliant on VMware...) can actually deliver.

And the same goes triple for all of the EU-sponsored/state-sponsored initiatives for datacenter creation/public cloud services/etc.

> could not deliver the same scale, international coverage and breadth of features that AWS could

Amazon's biggest superpower is their ability to convince customers that they need the scale, international coverage and breadth of features regardless of the reality of their needs. Being on $BigCloud is a signal many small companies are sending to show they keep in step with the times. The real needs could often be addressed in simpler, cheaper ways.

Your car doesn't do everything a road vehicle can do. Your software doesn't do everything a software could do. Why would your cloud provider need to offer everything a cloud can offer? It's that "nobody got fired for choosing AWS" even if any future move is a prohibitively expensive redesign of everything.