That’s not what I’m saying. They forgot that cloud compute isn’t the only area where America holds EU by the balls. It’s also the software. You can set up 500 data centers all over Europe and companies still won’t migrate away from M365 or GWorkspace. Cloud compute is good, but there also needs to be an effort to reverse engineer American technology and start offering alternatives.
Example from a friend: He is working in construction planning, and they also have to locally check that everything is being constructed as planned. They have to create protocols for all these visits. These protocols are mostly text and pictures, need to always have the same layout and of course they need the company branding etc.
In word they always had to make sure that everything was fine. After they switched to Latex they can now simply write their text there (in an extra tex file that gets imported by the main.tex file, the extra tex file is basically empty). All they need are two commands: \section (and \subsection, \subsubsection) - those are pre-defined but sometimes need minor adjustments, and \begin{figure} (gets autocompleted and they just have to adjust width, path to file, caption, label).
Obviously for people who finished a technical school or studied at a technical university this switch was super easy. And now they never have to worry about formatting again, they just write their protocol, compile, done.
(and in Overleaf they can collaborate and compiling is a button on the GUI or gets triggered by ctrl s)
That’s not what I’m saying. They forgot that cloud compute isn’t the only area where America holds EU by the balls. It’s also the software. You can set up 500 data centers all over Europe and companies still won’t migrate away from M365 or GWorkspace. Cloud compute is good, but there also needs to be an effort to reverse engineer American technology and start offering alternatives.
Like what? Which technology are you talking about?
Many companies are currently migrating away from MS/Google. LibreOffice, Collabora, LaTeX, …
Is latex really an alternative? Sure it is, but it’s not very user friendly, which makes that it can’t be a larg scale alternative.
Example from a friend: He is working in construction planning, and they also have to locally check that everything is being constructed as planned. They have to create protocols for all these visits. These protocols are mostly text and pictures, need to always have the same layout and of course they need the company branding etc.
In word they always had to make sure that everything was fine. After they switched to Latex they can now simply write their text there (in an extra tex file that gets imported by the main.tex file, the extra tex file is basically empty). All they need are two commands: \section (and \subsection, \subsubsection) - those are pre-defined but sometimes need minor adjustments, and \begin{figure} (gets autocompleted and they just have to adjust width, path to file, caption, label).
Obviously for people who finished a technical school or studied at a technical university this switch was super easy. And now they never have to worry about formatting again, they just write their protocol, compile, done.
(and in Overleaf they can collaborate and compiling is a button on the GUI or gets triggered by ctrl s)
That’s a good and inspiring example. Thanks for sharing.