> As a startup you are typically better served by a DigitalOcean-level of complexity, and there are plenty of such offers in the EU (Hetzner Cloud, Gridscale, OVH, etc)

As an actual startup founder who started as a 1 man startup, strongly disagree.

Spent maybe $200 a month on Google Cloud, got an actual production ready cluster. Scaled up to Millions in revenue, never had to deal with any Linux Server admin BS.

More time on business, less time on Linux Sysadmin.

Working on a consumer SaaS startup and I strongly disagree. A virtual machine on something like DigitalOcean does not provide any of the nice abstractions that something like a Google Cloud Run (or similar on AWS/Azure) provides. The amount of time a cloud provider can save you administratively is difficult to exaggerate. That is from day 1. Should your startup succeed, and you need to scale, the real savings start to kick in since scaling to a large degree is handled for you. Good luck re-architecting your app into a kubernetes cluster and handling load balancing manually while your competition gets all that with almost no effort.

All Office docs contain a GUID that's closer to PII than an IP address.

The free credits are nice, but run out quickly. Azure is expensive, but has a lot of nice tools from key vaults, log analyzers, CDN, databases, pipelines, to firewalls. I mean, yeah, you can implement similar stuff on a DO platform but you're going to be wiring it all up yourself, taking on the liability for keeping it all secure, and providing the warranty for its availability and effectiveness. The value to AWS/GCP/Azure is far beyond free credits. They've commoditized services - it rarely makes sense to pay for in-house expertise in managing those services yourself.

Also, the offline version of Office is going away, to my knowledge. I think the current boxed version is the last boxed version they plan to sell.

I would say that looks at the state of things as they are today, which may not be the case as technology advances. If there's a service that provides a real competitive advantage that is only available outside of Europe, then this might exclude businesses in Europe to innovate and compete.

> Maybe an unpopular opinion, but imho AWS, GCP and Azure are popular with startups because of their generous free credits, not because they are good tools for startups.

That’s a complete misunderstanding of the cloud’s value proposition. The point of the cloud is to have things “just work” so you can spend more time shipping features and innovating. When I see startups not using it and “rolling their own cloud” by being their own sysadmin I question the strategic decision. To me it’s generally a sign that they failed to raise the appropriate amount of capital and are therefore trading velocity and agility for cost savings.

> So I'm not really sure what part of the ecosystem we are missing here? European companies often have the smaller advertising budget and mindshare, but it isn't like they don't exist.

Also because they can’t scale within a mostly unified 300 million market like US companies can, they have to special case and deal with all special snowflake regulations in every small European country they want to serve.

Plus, that’s not even touching on the engineering talent gap.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft 365 is GDPR-compliant and is storing data in whatever jurisdiction you set it up to.

I know we've had a lot of issues with an European company we bought; we're both using Microsoft 365 but they're set up in France. I don't think the IT folks ever figured out how to merge them (even though we probably pay a shitton to MS for support), so those folks keep using their old domain (but we can share documents and whatnot, so at least that's set up).