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Comment by thomasz | Hacker News Reader

No, Europe will not go back to the Stone Age. US services will be substituted for somewhat shittier European services. That’s how it goes. On average, everyone will be worse of. The European customer loses, US tech loses, European tech wins.

I’m somewhat surprised about this kind of gleeful condescension in this particular forum, of all places.

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I think this is essentially the exact same approach as the "bring back US electronics/heavy industry"-- you subsidise a sector (either directly, via regulation or tariffs). This can have positive outcomes (crisis tolerance, less reliance on international trade), but all those jobs that it brings, are basically paid for fully by additional costs for taxpayers/consumers (and there are also negative side effects on other sectors).

I think this is currently in vogue globally (both sides of the political spectrum), but its important to remember that we had good reaons to stop doing this in the past (or at least scale it down to absolutely vital sectors like agriculture).

I would be pretty happy if the EU ploughed a load of money into a FOSS office suite on an ongoing basis.

Import substitution is one of these ideas that sounds great but seldom works out as intended. Bureaucracies instead of markets now pick winners, and their picks tend to be significantly worse. I really hope they are smart about it and treat this as a measured retaliation against easily substitutable products like twitter, Facebook and gmail, maybe cloud hosting and Amazon marketplace. There is zero chance of any initiative to produce a competitive office suite or operating system, but there will be undoubtedly real pressure to burn billions of taxpayer euros to try exactly that.

I sort of agree, except they are already picking by making Office their IT procurement choice. Choosing to only use documents in .odf format would definitely do something, and they could start funding bugs etc in whatever libraries/office software would bring value to their org.

I'll take a hezner and ovh cloud.

But you are right, we might have to use SAP instead of siebel and peoplesoft

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