alt Hacker Newsthere is no european cloud operator able to offer what AWS/GCP/Azure offer
That's true right now, yes. But things are changing rapidly, e.g. there is evroc [1], Mimer [2] and others are popping up too.
it took Google about 15 years of pouring money into Google Docs to be almost as good as the MS offering
I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark, things in principle can be done much faster if you are smaller, nimbler and more focused. The solution to EUs problems is less paperwork and meetings, and more smaller bespoke companies that are laser focused on solving a specific sub-problem. Can they do it? Probably not if they try to create their Google or Microsoft.
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> I know, and I'm not saying that EU will do any different, but this is not necessarily an absolute gold-standard benchmark
My point was that even with Google's money, they're still not on par with MS even if the Office files format has been standardized for a number of years. And if you extrapolate that to any other technology, you will find out very fast that it is very expensive to come up with a replacement solution that will actually be embraced by potential customers.
Getting Google Docs to be a Word alternative was an order of magnitude easier than getting GCP to be an AWS competitor.
Now that AWS has two serious competitors (and some non serious ones), privately funding another one just seems impossible to me. Who is gonna chip in tens of billions of dollars to fund "that, but European, and 15 years from now"?
I think the only ways we can get serious Euroclouds is some combination of:
1. EU intervention (nasty regulations and expensive subsidies).
2. People using non-equivalent products (Europeans have to use lower-level infra and do a lot more ops in-house). This part would have its upsides anyway TBH.