US to EU software: you can’t regulate people into better tech

The most obvious problem with a European social media platform and software migration, touted by the EU, is that a political stance is not enough to shift the dial. I’d also like to explore the other reasons for expressing doubt. Network effects don’t care about your values, which is why a ‘European alternative’ rarely become mainstream.

A political push will attract the Europhile fanboys and girls, so become a European BlueSky, a blue bubble of insufferable conformity to the view of almost everyone, part from those who are more libertarian, which is a vast number of even European citizens. Activism and a skewed political push are never wise when it comes to neutral platforms.

The EU’s tech problem isn’t politics,  it is product. We saw this with the European Mastodon and the Fediverse, both disastrous in terms of user experience and never mainstream, despite the efforts to push Mastadon as an alternative to X. BlueSky, is US owned, and has turned into an echo-chamber for those who don’t like X and Musk. These sprove how difficult it is to shift users from the incumbent platforms.

Quality matters

Quality has to be superior to effect a large migration, yet most of the options on the table are significantly inferior to their non-European comparators. There’s a good reason why many have a tiny fraction of users compared to US tech; they are more expensive, unreliable, have poor security and above all have much poorer functionality. 

Europe can’t migrate its way out of big tech

Consumer inertia also means that people stay with what they’ve got, as they are familiar with the platform. You can leave big tech, but your friends won’t. Then there’s the cost of change, losing your past data, friends and have to relearn a new platform and build again from scratch. It’s not often a monetary but time and social cost. But the biggest barrier is the network effect, where you are literally enmeshed in a vast network of friends , others and potential viewers. That’s hard to leave, like leaving home.

Facebook has faced endless claims of imminent death and decline. It has not happened. Network effects and the fact that we are creatures of habit, with a huge backlog of posts and memories on the platform, means we stay. We are not only creatures of habit, we are creatures of memory and identity. 

There’s a reason WhatsApp has not been replaces by Signal and Telegram. Millions said they’d leave but they didn’t. Platforms are sticky and when everyone else is on WhatsApp, you have to disentangle all of your existing social groups, and start again.

Organisational software

With organisational software, most European companies of any size use Teams. This will be fiendishly difficult to shift as they need to reduce risks on cybersecurity, outage and reliability. It is often a procurement as part of a wider Microsoft ‘house’ project. People complain about Outlook, Teams, Office, but the alternative, LibreOffice is worse. There’s also Google Workplace, which has oodles of great functionality. Google has a global revenue model, a massively integrated ecosystem, including its own operating system. It dominates search, video through YouTube and global maps with street view. There is no European entity that comes close to this. Both are solid as they have well-used file formats, are embedded into existing companies and their workflows, and people are familiar with their user interfaces and expected functionality. This inertia is hugely expensive to migrate to other platforms.

One way to push this European initiative is to mandate change in public institutions. But this may only result in even lower productivity in the public sector, compared to the private. That’s the last thing a stagnant economy needs.

Killer objection - AI

But the killer objection, for me, is the failure of Europe to embrace and utilise AI. This could have been a chance to break the US dominance but it is too late. Mistral is good but open source and now a bit player. The US and China are now unstoppable. More worrying is the failure of European companies to embrace AI within their own tech-stacks.

One exception

There is one exception to the rule, that’s Sweden’s Spotify. I’d have said SAP but their shareprice has dropped by a third in six months and they now look like a wounded, if not dying entity, under attack from those who can quickly code alternatives.

Good intentions, bad software

You can’t just legislate them out, there has to be choice, and as long as there is choice European tech companies are largely, but not entirely, screwed. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, OpenAI and Anthropic dominate in scale and global reach. Most of those major platform players are US firms but operate extensively in the EU and are regulated locally under laws like the Digital Markets Act, and include WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok and YouTube.

Europe’s tech strategy is full of good intentions, but bad software. Most of the options are significantly inferior to what is available today. Using outdated technology will only set Europe even further back, through a clear drop in productivity, first in migration, then in poorer functionality and support.