Germany, France launch Gaia-X platform in bid for ‘tech sovereignty’
As a German who&#x27;s been exclusively working in the US tech space for the past few years, there&#x27;s so many anecdotes that come to mind to highlight how far behind the old world is, both in tech as in spirit:<p>- Article about Gaia-X in major German newspaper FAZ explained that on AWS you can spin up your own infrastructure, &quot;sometimes even without talking to anyone from sales&quot;, from your home!<p>- When I tried to read or watch reviews about SaaS solutions for invoicing &#x2F; bookkeeping for German companies, the first half of the review is usually spent trying to convince people that moving off paper-based invoices and folders to all-digital is a good idea in the first place.<p>- University-educated people in my social circle are often woefully unaware of economic trends that have swept the US, be it the gig economy, X-as-a-service, the nature of Venture Capital, the idea of scaling a company aggressively, the value of information, mobility of labor and paying market rate for experts, the high profit margins of offering a software product vs. (for example) doing one-off consulting for a German industrial company, etc. None of these things bode well for the best talent in Europe working on anything remotely resembling an innovative European tech company. Not even saying we&#x27;re worse off for it, but the reality is that any European who truly grasps the pace of the US tech industry would rather go there directly than work for a Franco-German government moonshot and hope to be paid maybe a 10% premium over their regular European salary.