- Absolutely 0 care for having a de-risked supply chain. In fact, IT leaders are extremely happy to have fewer and fewer suppliers, I think it is even one of their goals! And look at it now, what to do when 70% of your company runs on Microsoft and this happens?
- Buy always, no matter what the process is, just buy more tools. So what could have been 1 Python script now is a 5 years contract with yet another US supplier, all data stored in proprietary formats locked under complex APIs of course
- Bundle everything, and I mean everything, in the ERP. Make the ERP so big and complicated that adding anything to it requires tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of euros and multiple months of "development" (as an aside, did you know SAP ABAP code is stored in a database???)
- Lock yourself up completely with whatever Cloud provider you decide to use. Using AWS? Let's do everything with lambdas! Because, who cares about being Cloud agnostic and de-risking your AWS investment?
- Never invest in your internal tech talent, always go after shiny new tech solutions that deliver at best 20% of what they promise, while good motivated employees could have delivered 80% at a fraction of that cost
- Never push back on business asking for specific tools just because the vendors of such tools are amazing at marketing. 90% of manufacturing companies could replace Salesforce with much simpler tools (who knows, maybe even EU based?) and save millions. But no, let's go after brands and never consider the actual 1) business process we are trying to improve; 2) the reference architecture; 3) the underlying data we want to do CRUD on
The re-thinking of the tech stack is not a US tariffs issue, it is an IT leadership problem, and a serious one. The overwhelming lack of understanding of simple risk management strategies has gotten us here, EU companies should never, ever, have put themselves in this position in the first place.
I'm not disagreeing, but you are mistaken if you think this is just an EU thing. It's everywhere. I seems to be driven by two things.
One is focus on the knitting - and outsource everything else. Everything else includes your security infrastructure - which you outsource to Active Directory running on Azure, or Okta. Amazing, since both have been ripped new ones in spectacular fashion.
The second is de-risking requires redundancy. Redundancy is expensive, and worse hard. It means you have to deal with multiple suppliers and glue them together. That requires internal expertise, but you just outsourced the external expertise so you could stick to your knitting.
The theory was that Industry 4.0 should somehow change that, at least in Europe, by adding more automation and tech to production. I have seen only 1 factory built that way and, let me say, it was a complete mess IT wise. There is also the issue that the same people that were building factories in the 90s are now also building the "new" factories.
Ordinarily, trust is earned in drops and lost by the barrel.
However, in the last eleven weeks, the current administration has sunk and destroyed supertanker-loads of trust in The United States Of America, and in every field including defense, security, health, science, academics, political, economic, and anything you can think of.
Even if the goals are good, the way they are being implemented is insanely stupid and damaging to everyone involved. (And I mean stupid in Cipolla's formal definition [0] of actions that harm both others and yourself.)
Any rational non-American person will not consider the US to be a reliable trustworthy partner in any venture. They may do deals at arms-length, but never again as a trusted partner.
Even if the policies are 100% reversed, the uncertainty will linger. Will international students really trust they won't be disappeared into a Central American prison if they say the wrong thing on social media? Will businesses really make a major capital investments when random tariffs may be added or removed on any day? Will allies really trust we will be there to defend them as they have come to our aid every time? A key part of trust is certainty, and uncertainty alone is deadly to relationships.[Edit: added this paragraph for clarity]
Much of America's prosperity was based on the tacit assumption of goodwill.
That is GONE.
If it is ever rebuilt, it will take not years or decades, but generations.
[0] https://principia-scientific.com/the-5-basic-laws-of-human-s...
Which is not to say that the tariffs are a good thing at all, of course. But if it encourages international communities to build their own stacks and add them to the marketplace, that's a really strong silver lining in my mind.
Even if Republicans are removed from office in the next election, the damage is done. Europe simply can't trust in the long term stability of US policy. If Europe cannot trust in it, neither will any other continent.
Cloud isn’t VMs, it’s managed services.
They are going to be big targets for trade retaliation and I am not sure how much help the US government will be able to offer. Moreover, if the administration changes, the Democrats will absolutely take apart these tech companies.
The problem they had was Lina Khan, who was dead set on breaking up their monopolies. They all decided to get into bed with the Trump admin and help het the guy elected, they all say it was for free speech but let’s get real it’s only because Lina Khan is no longer at FTC.
But now they have a different problem because Trump decided that tarrifs are a great idea and now they are going to take a massive hit over the next few years as folks outside the US increasingly look for non US cloud solutions.
This is a unique set of circumstances; given any other combination of parties in power, with any different President, and they'd be in the bullseye right now.
Guess what? The breakup of their monopolies is still going to continue :-)
Free speech? Did Biden put a Bridle in their mouth to control their speech?
I don’t know if it will happen though. Tech companies have a lot of cash and lobby power. But some kind of move is highly needed as the tech sector morphed into something despicable
Now would be a perfect time to take advantage of the stupidity of Trump and channel these government investments into building European infrastructure providers (cloud and AI), but I very much doubt this will happen.
Without goverment support there is just no way in Europe to raise the capital that is required to compete with the American big tech.
EU assigned as commisioner of Startups, Research and Innovation a bulgarian politician called Ekaterina Zaharieva. Bulgaria is the poorest member of EU - shows you how much EU values startups, research and innovation.
On top of that Zaharieva is a member of the political party Gerb, well known for corruption. A few years ago somebody took pictures of their leader sleeping in his bedroom, surrounded with gold bars and stacks of euros. An ex-financial minister from Gerb is sanctioned for corruption under the Magnitsky Act.
Honestly, who doesn't do that?
