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by mike_hearn 300 days ago
Russia has a homegrown Google competitor in the form of Yandex. It runs its own search engine, mail, cloud services, office suites etc. There isn't an EU equivalent AFAIK. And they had many years to prepare because Russia has been sanctioned in various forms for a long time going back to 2016.

Windows is not that important. It's more about Outlook, Office, all the enterprise apps running on US clouds, etc.
2 comments
general1726 300 days ago
Which EU cloud providers can easily create knock offs and then let EU services migrate without changing anything on companies side, except just endpoints.

Furthermore EU equivalents of Yandex do exist - https://www.seznam.cz/ (Do you see the Yahoo in it?) or French Google: https://www.qwant.com/?l=en or equivalent of Google Maps https://mapy.com/en/ just have a look here: https://european-alternatives.eu/

They are small, sure, but the moment competition is gone, there is no reason for them not to scale

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jjani 300 days ago
It doesn't take years to set up a local equivalent of Yandex, or indeed what Russia has set up. It's very feasible to do the same as Russia.
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mike_hearn 300 days ago
Yandex is older than Google itself is.
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jjani 300 days ago
The building you in being 30 years old doesn't mean it takes 30 years old to build a new building.
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mike_hearn 299 days ago
Buildings aren't comparable to tech companies, are they? Tech companies continuously build out their technology stack. They don't build a product then fire everyone who isn't a keep-the-lights-on-sysadmin. Modern Google or Yandex is the result of 30 years of continuous building, every day.
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