Europe's Self Inflicted Cloud Crisis

I've been trying to understand myself about why there are no European cloud providers.

Recently I've starting thinking that the cloud business required a particularly unusual set of circumstances that was mostly true of only the US.

1. Developers in a position to chose infra vendor 2. Young companies encouraged by external investors to optimize for growth over conserving cash.

None of that happens in Europe.

If you're growing quickly, being in the cloud is a genuine advantage. But if you have static growth it just looks expensive.

It was only relatively recently that the big American cloud companies started to seriously get into the enterprise space. Which is not to say that they were excluding them but that wasn't who they were designing and building for. For example, if your customers are only enterprise you would build a UI and not worry about an API. Eg VMware. Whereas AWS clearly builds the API first and the UI second and cloudformation forth.

Having relatively few well funded startups meant there were no customers to support a native European cloud ecosystem.

Otherwise I find it very hard to explain why none of the European hosting providers even 15 years on have made any meaningful progress in becoming cloud companies. Their existing enterprise customers weren't looking for cloud. Their cheap VPS customers certainly weren't either.

Isn't OVH a French company?