European Union officials have drawn up an aggressive 173-page plan to counter both President Donald Trump's trade moves and American tech giants including Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook.
According to a document obtained by POLITICO, European Commission officials are pushing their president-elect, Ursula von der Leyen, to set up a European Future Fund that would invest more than $100 billion in equity stakes in high-potential European companies.
The goal: get Europe competing head-on with the American and Chinese tech giants it has lagged behind for decades.
[...] The EU would use a so-called draft "Enforcement Regulation" if the Trump administration succeeds in its efforts to grind the World Trade Organization (WTO) to a halt.
[...] The EU is hoping to emulate past successes, such as its development of the GSM mobile global standard, which fueled the rise of companies such as Nokia.
[...] The document seeks more stringent measures to block Chinese companies from taking part in tenders in Europe to penalize them for the level of subsidies that they receive from the government in Beijing.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/22/europe-plan-trump-tech-companies-1472326
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:40AM (1 child)
StarDivision (Germany) produced StarOffice, which begat OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
The problem with most of the products you mentioned, is that they are inevitably monopolies. Interoperability requirements has led to near monocultures in most of these categories. This is not a reflection on the countries, but on the companies which got there first and entrenched themselves. No one can produce a Windows replacement. No one can produce an Office replacement. Because they are so huge and complex, that to replace it you have to be equivalent to it. Making a better, alternative product is possible and has been done, but it's not going to be as interoperable, and that's going to kill its commercial viability. That's why most alternative operating systems are niche embedded stuff or server-side.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:22AM
Even Office is not interoperable with Office. I have to open old Office documents in Libreoffice at times because Office will not open them.