Economic development is too complex to be micromanaged from the top down. It also suffers from the kind of trade barriers this plan advocates.

Most importantly, all economic development initiatives face an uphill challenge if the underlying macro conditions aren't right. The solution for the UK, the EU and Canada is simple but politically anathema: cut taxes

A 2018 study shows tax increases significantly reduce innovation. A 1% increase in the top marginal income tax rate leads to a 2% reduction in patents and inventors, while a similar increase in corporate taxes causes even larger declines.

The study is quite rigorous too:

https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumprogress/p/tax-cuts-and...

While I like what he says, I wonder how serious I should take him. Is he part of an always ignored fringe group, or can he push his ideas forward? He sounds progressive, and all over Europe the politics shift to conservatism. Also, I've never heard about him on the news, only here on HN.

Politics is unfortunately more about who is talking than what is said.

I'd focus on building a modern product that is easier to use, has more transparent pricing and better support, and makes transitioning from AWS/Azure/GCP a breeze. Start simple, and keep iterating. Start with a platform where I can easily deploy my favorite popular web framework and hook it up to a popular SQL database. Most companies just have a web application with a database. Make it super simple to get off App Engine/Elastic, Cloud SQL/RSD GCP/AWS Storage. Get small and midsize customers to switch, and then keep iterating up to big companies. They'll come if the tech and service is solid. It is not that hard to beat the big American cloud providers at this. Their services are bloated, difficult to understand, have poor service, and terrible pricing models.

The reason most EU companies don't want to switch now is because alternatives suck even more and it cost too much time and effort.

Plain and simple, I don't want EU hosted services because the EU isn't a good proprietor. It offers less privacy or speech guarantees than alternative locations.

I am an EU citicen but believe the EU is a lobby group with its proponents often idealists in the best or fanatics in the worst case. Both don't allow any criticism and cannot hold this mostly purely executive behemoth to account. It is fundamentally unbalanced construct that needs strong restrictions. And therefore it would also not be the best place to host anything.

I wonder if a managed K8S approach wouldn’t be better? Most Enterprises I know will anyway need to deploy legacy software, so the need for something like K8S never really goes away. The question is if EU Enterprises really need stuff like AWS Sagemaker rather than just spinning up Jupyter Hub on K8S…