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Charles Cooper reports that venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has called former NSA contractor Edward Snowden a traitor for leaking national secrets about US surveillance practices and says that foreign nations may use the disclosures as an excuse to promote their domestic technology suppliers over American rivals. "Obviously he's a traitor," says Andreessen. "Like if you look up in the encyclopedia 'traitor,' there's a picture of Ed Snowden. Like he's a textbook traitor. They don't get much more traitor than that. I will say that I'm in the distinct minority out here. Most people in Silicon Valley would pick the other designation."
Andreessen added that NSA leaks may well wind up getting used as a cudgel by foreign governments against American companies that depend on overseas sales. "There's a big open question right now how successful our companies will be when they go sell products overseas," says Andreessen. "I think there are a lot of foreign companies that are very envious of Silicon Valley and America's domination of tech and wish that they could implement protection policies. And they are going to use this whole affair as a reason to do that ... as an excuse."
(Score: 2) by Popeidol on Sunday June 08 2014, @03:39PM
Hi guys, non-America here.
Snowden had an effect on IT purchasing, but not what you'd expect. Most companies are still happy to buy US software, they just want it to be private. This means that we've had a huge expansion of local cloud services. Some of it is locally built, some is open source, but a huge chunk is US companies who provide local hosting options.
You know who's doing great? Microsoft. While they're pushing the cloud hard to compete, they have locally hosted copies of almost everything. We're legally required to have things hosted where we physically control it. We run a windows domain exchange email, and dynamics crm. I snuck in half a dozen linux vms running various services, but everything business critical run locally and comes from Microsoft. I don't see that changing unless Microsoft makes some serious mistakes.