Wake me up when governments actually start writing checks. I bet the ICC will stay on Microsoft because doing anything else would be difficult. All anyone in big org IT knows is Microsoft, and no one wants to change.
Oh, they are writing checks. They have been writing big checks to create GAIA-X and a few other things as the European alternative sovereign cloud. But basically no-one is using it because "but my Outlook doesn't work!". So it is all wasted money because of stupid bureaucrats and politicians as users who cannot be arsed to remember that their email isn't in Outlook anymore...
You might say it is a little more complicated, but actually it isn't. Nobody wants any kind of change, so things stay as they are. Only the Americans can change things and change your Windows/Outlook/Azure, because then "it is like it is, we have to update"...
In the last discussion about this that I read here and participated in, as someone who got paid from that fund for a while, I think the consensus was that the project was less meant to deliver something tangible, and more of a camouflaged general subsidy for participating European software firms.
But as always, most of it is pork for some cronies anyways.
One related thing that has been developed/packaged is the "sovereign cloud stack" https://scs.community/ . However, it didn't see much use yet, for the reasons mentioned.
Yeah, that's unironically cool, but I don't see any customer success stories or any mention of big corpo/gov customers. The quantity and security of funding that long-term contracts bring leads to different outcomes than a subsidy. When I look at this my first thought is that I fear it will become abandonware when funding dries up.
This is already happening. US multinationals will face a huge reduction in user base and revenue, or they will have to truly globalise and shift to neutral locations. Software companies are especially vulnerable.
Locations are not relevant, company structures are. As long as the datacenter/subsidiary/employee in Europe can be instructed/pressured/circumvented by the USian mother company to do things, the problem remains.
So globalisation is actually not the answer here, the opposite has to happen.
