Happy Thursday Friday!

It's another edition of Let’s Talk Tech Thursday, the newsletter that will always Talk Tech, and mostly do it on a Thursday.

Our main story this week is America's tech dominance, and how Europe is kinda done with it. We also check in on the super complicated tech problems a space rocket might have (they aren't as out of this world as you'd think), and look at why Excel purposely doesn't know what a leap year is.

And for our blog spotlight this week, we explore the dangers of AI for AI's sake, through the lens of Mao's China.

Let's dig in...

Top Story

💪 The beginning of the end of America's tech dominance...?

A quick summary

In a recent poll, almost two-thirds of Europeans back replacing US tech.

This isn't the first time we've covered this sentiment. Just last week, we looked at Germany's new law on open source file formats, and the launch of a new open source office suite. On top of that, European-based companies like Proton are seeing a huge increase in users (and not just from UK users worried about the Online Safety Act). In fact, speaking of Proton, they've released a resource outlining European alternatives to everything from email providers to navigation.

And they aren't the only game in town. Back in February, the Guardian ran an article with a similar aim, and there's plenty of discourse on how to lean into "small-tech" on platforms like Mastodon and Reddit.

What's causing this rhetoric?

I'll give you three guesses. You won't need them...

While GDPR may have set the stage for data sovereignty as a concept, the geopolitical fallout of the combined wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran (among the many others currently ongoing) have really highlighted how unstable American policy has become.

This isn't an overnight thing. As far back as the Snowden revelations in 2013, the public sentiment towards both government and big tech has been turning. Cambridge Analytica took us a step further in that direction (at least in the UK). But perhaps it took until 2022 before we were forced to acknowledge the sheer scale of American tech companies' reach. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Elon Musk's Starlink satellites came to the rescue by provided key infrastructure to Ukrainian forces during the early parts of the war. But when Musk 180ed and switched off coverage over Crimea, it provided a very stark reminder of what happens when you give one person unilateral power. Answerable, effectively, to no one, Musk had an influence on a live conflict matched only by Putin and Zelenskyy themselves. As a direct result of that revelation, Estonia - a country also under threat from Russia - began accelerating it's own open source procurement processes.

Fast forward to more recent times, and we've already discussed in previous issues of this newsletter the ways in which the wars in Gaza and Iran have highlighted Palantir's relationship with the US Department of War. What we didn't get to, was Amazon's role in the surveillance of Gaza, Google's contracts with the Israel Defense Ministry, or Microsoft's role in collecting, storing, and analysing millions of phone calls from the West Bank.

Issues closer to home

We don't have to look at the global geopolitical landscape to see distrust in American tech. Even UK mainstream media can't ignore the growing number of NHS staff worried about our old friends Palantir and their deepening hold on our health service (though Chief Data Officer, Ming Tang, has rejected these concerns and wants an even more comprehensive rollout).

All of this, compounded by increasingly draconian laws around online privacy, and an almost impressive display of deliberate misunderstanding by the government of child protection online, and it's no wonder people are more and more worried about what services they're using.

So are habits changing?

Yes and no...

As we discussed briefly up top, we're seeing a small shift at the individual level away from bigger players. But it's one thing to move from GMail to Proton Mail, or Chrome to Vivaldi. It's another entirely to reckon with the underlying infrastructure of the internet. When Amazon hosts everything from a third of all websites, to services like Netflix, how far can the average person go?

Between them, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud account for 70% of the European cloud market, with actual European providers making up just 15%. Ironically, the big three actually have less of a market share in the global market, accounting for only 63%.

So what is changing?

So far, I've not been very clear in my distinction between what "Big Tech" is doing, and governments are doing. And that's been deliberate.

Since the second Trump administration, US foreign policy has used it's relationship with technology companies in a sort of symbiotic way. This was perhaps most clearly demonstrated by Trump's sweeping range of tariffs, ostensibly meant to protect domestic production, but in fact only really focusing on protecting US technology companies. In other words, when it comes to the US government and big tech, it feels like to speak of one is to imply the other.

By contrast, the reason we're seeing the rise of open standards and open source in European countries, is because that is the only real way we have of separating the power of tech (small t) from the power of government.

The EU faces a significant problem of dependence on non-EU countries in the digital sphere. This reduces users’ choice, hampers EU companies’ competitiveness, and can raise supply chain security issues as it makes it difficult to control our digital infrastructure, potentially creating vulnerabilities, including in critical sectors.

I've used the term "open source" a fair bit throughout this section. I could write a whole other newsletter on the topic, but suffice to say for now that the term refers to software to which the underlying code is open for anyone to review, and anyone can take it and build on it for their purposes. Much like Oracle last week, you've almost certainly used something today that has, in part or in whole, made use of open source software.

It's been around since the dawn of computers, and one of the things that sets it apart is an inherent resistance to political sway that big tech can't avoid. Earlier this year, the EU launched a major review of it's own use of open source software, with a view to addressing some of its weaknesses. These include high barriers to migrating from big tech, limited scope to include open source in public procurement, and that underlying problem of American-dominated hosting infrastructure we spoke about earlier.

It's early days, and the EU is not known for its quick pace of change. But it seems that we've finally reached the tipping point that means real, commercially viable, large scale alternatives to current Big Tech might be on the way.

What else is happening in the world of tech?

🚀 Even Artemis II Astronauts Have Microsoft Outlook Problems

I'll be honest, when I first saw this headline, I assumed it was from the Onion or something. Sure, the Artemis II rocket has Outlook installed. And yup, it broke. Okay 👍

But, it turns out it was a legit story. And to fix it, Houston had to get a tech guy to remote in and solve the problem. I assume they had to have had the conversation about whether Mission Commander Wiseman had tried turning the rocket off and on again.

There's nothing about this story I don't love. Astronauts (like, actual people who are trained to go into space) having the same tech issues that I fix on a regular basis. On their spaceship. A spaceship that has Microsoft Office installed. Because it's 2026, why wouldn't they have email on the rocket? How else are they going to get mission reports?

To boldly go where no person of colour, woman, or non-US citizen has gone before...

And by the way, the Artemis trip in itself is a masterclass in physics, maths, and literal rocket science. Not to mention the crew comprises the first person of colour (Victor Glover), first woman (Christina Koch), first non-US citizen (Canada's Jeremy Hansen), and oldest person (50 year old Reid Wiseman) to travel beyond low-Earth orbit. And, as a side quest, there was also a spot of real humanity thrown in too.

More like this please, internet.

🤓 Excel incorrectly assumes 1900 was a leap year, and Microsoft will never fix it

Sticking with Microsoft Office products for a second, did you know that Excel - the most popular spreadsheet application on the planet - doesn't properly calculate leap years? Specifically, it thinks that 1990 is one, and if Microsoft corrects that, the entirety of Western civilization might collapse.

In a good example of how most modern tech is built on some forgotten legacy code, it turns out it's not totally Microsoft's fault. You know, in a "if your friend jumped off a cliff, would you?" kind of way...

Blog spotlight

🤖 The AI Great Leap Forward

This week's blog spotlight post comes from Han Lee, an AI and Machine Learning expert. His post draws comparisons between Mao's "Great Leap Forward" of the late 1950s with today's AI hypewagon.

Comparing vibe-coded AI dashboards with pig iron from mid-century village farms is not a simile I would have arrived at. But that's why we read!

You may have heard the same arguments before, but this writing is a really visceral and clear reminder to question where and for why we are using AI. Not to mention a warning of the very real dangers of what happens when you don't do that reflection.

That's it for another week of LT3! (Or "LT2F"?)

I'll see you back here next week. Probably on Thursday.

Will