• All of computing is moving to the cloud at a rapid clip, including (government) parts you might want to keep under your own control
• Europe has no relevant ‘hyperscaler’ cloud providers at all, and there is a desire to change this by policy means
• Competing with the IKEA-concept is nearly impossible. Offering IKEA-like products but then with a smaller range is not an attractive proposition. You can’t replicate IKEA without a LOT of upfront work
• Replicating a company like Airbus (or ASML) is similarly very hard: both companies (and their ecosystems) are one of the very few places where you can buy modern wide body jets and extreme UV wafer steppers. Their products are technically incredibly advanced.
• The ‘hyperscaler’ cloud providers (like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba) are both IKEA and Airbus/ASML hard to replicate. They offer a huge and complete range services that are also incredibly advanced and years ahead of commodity products
• Europe has precisely nothing that competes, and is 100% dependent on the ‘IKEA clouds’. We only have partial companies.
• Fixing that situation will not be possible through legislation, standardisation or concerted government action. You can’t procure a competitive mega cloud into existence. Europe did assemble Airbus from its component parts but it was very hard
• Although IKEA exists, you can still get (better) furniture from more specialised places. A European owned email, communication and collaboration cloud might be a feasible idea
• European procurement law makes it entirely doable for governments to order their services from such European communication clouds
• From that, a more viable European cloud ecosystem could perhaps evolve

Source: Taking the Airbus to the IKEA Cloud by Bert Hubert

We do have some (smaller) cloud (Scaleway) and datacenter players (Leaseweb, could use some innovation) and some inbetween (OVH, Hetzner)... But none are really a true cloud provider with serverless, all the storage stuff, etc.

Evroc is trying just that -- being a real competitor to GCP and AWS -- but that'll need a lot of funding, and it's been rather quiet from their end for a few months.

To be seen what'll come out of it ...

Then again, I've recently (year or two) seen a push from medium-sized companies to get away from the cloud (Basecamp/Hey for one, but they are not alone) -- at least the big players -- due to exaggerated vendor lock-in and pricing.

It's now been roughly 6 months I've switched from DuckDuckGo to Kagi. I started paying right away after roughly the one month trial.

I had not been very happy with DDG; mostly the results were very low quality (having to switch back to Google one too many times; results often lagged behind by months of publishing), many search bugs, and there's been that thing with Bing advertising, and generally not seeing many improvements over the ~2 years I tried to use it full-time.

Kagi, on the other hand, has his search engine worked out. I know they also pull data from Bing, but also various other sources (apparently that includes Google) and their own scraper (Teclis, TinyGem), etc.

You can compare the Google and Kagi results. While not entirely the same, I don't think Google's are better than Kagi's.

So search is really good and I very very rarely ever need to head back to Google. Only for very obscure errors with very few results, and Google almost never has a better answer.

It also adds some cool other features, like rewriting URLs.

For example, I run my own Libreddit, so when search results include reddit, I can now redirect to my own Reddit instance (sorry, you won't have access).

There's a bunch of other cool stuff, like Bangs (short codes that would redirect directly to a site, for example w for wiki -- so w flightradar would show this result instantly; and there's more like hackernews, reddit, google, etc).

You can also lower priority of certain sites. Seeing too much Tiktok or Pinterest? Want to boost Hackernew results? All possible!

To make it work on iOS, you need to install a browser extension, but that works relatively well (it rewrites your search from Google to Kagi).

I was a bit apprehensive as it's a very small team, and they are also trying to reinvent the browser space with Orion, which is a cut-throat tough market to get in. Two massive enterprises that would need a lot of funding and a lot of dev time.

Orion is based on Safari, and far from good enough to replace Firefox, but I'm actually mildly enthusiastic about this project as well.

The company is very transparent and there's clear progress. If you want to get involved, they also have a Discord and a feedback/bug forum.

I'm considering a family plan and will force Shan to switch once released.

So, all things considered, quite excited about this. Looking forward to see if they can revolutionise search. And I truly hope they make it.

The only thing I don't like is that their logo looks too much like Google's... 🙈