France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US
apnews.com654 points by AareyBaba 6 hours ago
654 points by AareyBaba 6 hours ago
Worth pointing out: France is not adopting existing open source software, they're building their own software and releasing it under the MIT licence. Most of it (or all of it?) is Django backend + React frontend (using a custom-built UI kit).
Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/
Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suitenumerique/
Dev handbook (in English): https://suitenumerique.gitbook.io/handbook
Not French and I can't say I personally tried deploying any of them, but I've been admiring their efforts from afar for a while now.
I work at Grist, the "tableur collaboratif" (collaborative spreadsheet) listed on the La Suite homepage. We're in the interesting situation of being both a NYC-based company, and open source software the French gov has adopted and is helping to develop. Grist is mostly a node backend. So it is a complicated story. The key is having code the gov can review and trust and run it on sovereign infrastructure.
Grist https://www.getgrist.com/
A write-up of how the French gov uses it https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-so...
wow it reminds me of Microsoft Access, a great piece of software in terms of rapidly building an application!
Does grist have forms?
Form support is touted on the homepage: https://www.getgrist.com/forms/
For what it's worth, which isn't much because this is probably outdated: I remember trying grist a few years ago and leaving mildly unimpressed with form support (I think because I was hoping to have image upload in the forms and that wasn't supported yet).
I'm not an MS dev type, but I've often seen these forms questions. What made their forms so easy, or more in general what is so complicated about forms that this was even a tool so many liked?
MS Access was on its way out by the time I started working in software, but the simplest explanation I can give about why the "forms" question is this, let's say you're a business person and...:
* You have a huge Excel document that's basically a DB. (What Access kinda was)
* You want users to interact with said data document, i.e add record, find/query record(s), edit records
* You add a "form" for users to do just that. You can also add a "login" form to give some users more permissions.
With Access, a business doing data entry could -- with a business user not a software engineer -- craft a Form and voila, easy onboarding to train new employees instead of filling out sheets of paper and filing them.
If you want forms try https://visualdb.com/ it is another tool that aims to be Microsoft Access
Not open source though?
Right but it is cheaper than open source products if you self-host. Most open source products in this space, including grist, are only partially open source.
I've been using the docs tool in my homelab for ~3 months now as a knowledge base for some projects I've been working on with some friends.
It's really good. The typing experience "feels" right and the collaboration features work. I haven't played with the other solutions yet but I'm very excited if they are up to the same standard.
I deployed it with docker and it was relatively smooth. I had to play a bit with the OIDC but I'm pretty sure that was more a me issue than anything.
I am certainly not going to complain about more well-funded FOSS software being out there.
> Code bases are on GitHub
Not a very solid way to move away from American big tech :/
If the move away from American big tech is for practical reasons rather than political, there is no harm in using GitHub. The worry with using an American firm is that the US government could force the company to handover confidential information, or shut down access.
For open source code, there is no risk of confidential information being given to the US government (since there is no confidential information), and moving to another forge would be pretty simple if necessary.
The other commenter nailed it down. But I want to add that removing dependance on US companies is not some kind of spiteful act. It's purely down to both privacy and reliability.
Having private companies in the US becoming more involved with politics is fine for the US apperantly, but the EU just don't want to be involved.
Open standards, private software is the way to go. It makes sense for any entity to control their own destiny.
As if EU doesn’t involve itself with software, policy and censorship which has its own inherent risks
Maybe they have local copies as well, and just figured they might as well take GitHub’s free bandwidth and social networking features.
Next year: LeGit !
This is probably just the first big step (communications) in a series of big steps.
I remember seeing some projects by the French government on their self-hosted Gitlab. Maybe these are just public mirrors of their private repos?
Hmmm not entirely true. The text chat of their suite is simply element.io (matrix) and they're paying them for development.
Visio does seem built from scratch but I wonder if it's a temporary thing until element is feature complete with their move away from Jitsi.
You can find more about la suite on their website and the opendesk one (German project using mostly the same software). Unfortunately I don't have the links to hand here.
Tchap (the chat part of the suite) is indeed a fork of Element. Unfortunately they haven't funded upstream development for many years (otherwise both Element and Tchap would be much much better!)
Visio (aka meet) began in parallel with Element's work on MatrixRTC and Element Call. Hopefully the two can converge, given they are both built on LiveKit.
We do support the foundation: https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/sinformer/espace-presse/dinum-...
It boggles the mind as to why they choose a name for this application that is very clearly a Microsoft trademark.
In understand it's also the French word for Videoconferencing, but even still...
It really has been a huge disappointment the extent to which governments using open source projects for mission critical work go out of their way to avoid financially supporting them.
How much better could open source alternatives to Teams be in this moment if only 1% of what Europe paid Microsoft for Teams went to investing in open alternatives?
Refreshing and impressive indeed. I wish other governments did this, esp those that are larger / have a reasonably large tech scene (e.g. Northern Europe, Nordic, AUS, Japan, Canada, Germany, India, etc).
It's time governments realize(d) that IT sector is as strategic as the Defense sector, which is usually/always given preferential treatment (e.g. Airbus, etc) and that they don;t have to be beholden to American tech behemoths. If this realization happened ~20 years ago, they might have stopped FB, Goog, Amazon, MSFT, etc. much earlier, and wouldn't be hand-wringing now trying to stop or delay the evil effects of social media.
I am pleased that AUS has banned social media for teens < 16yrs, and perhaps Finland is thinking the same route.
Already, China, Russia have their local tech companies supply their critical infra needs. Other governments should be wise enough to catch up, and not just to support + enhance local languages but to grow their critical ecosystem.
Germany has https://www.opendesk.eu/de and https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund. both mentioned on HN
I agree with this totally. But while they certainly talk the talk I’m not totally convinced that European governments will actually walk the walk and follow through on this.
To me a really significant signal that they’re serious will be when there’s an official Linux version of Solidworks.
It’s remarkable to me that France has control over one of the premiere CAD suites but theyre entirely dependent on an American OS to use it.
Why would a private company deciding to release a Linux version of their product signal a government's follow-through? As far as I can tell, there is no current connection between Solidworks and the French government.
Solidworks is produced by a company that is owned by the Dassault Group.
There is always a connection between the military industrial complex of a nation and the state.
If France feels that it is an existential threat they will not let the design and maintence of their weapons be dependent on an operating system produced by a company based out of a country that has threatened them.
I'm not saying that this will happen. I'm saying that should this happen you know France is serious about eliminating dependencies on unreliable and threatening countries.
EU have access to Windows source code. Presumably if the shit really hit the fan we'd have a European build without all the spy/crapware added? Not much of a consolation given we'd have to be on the brink of WW3 for it to happen...
Well I would definitely prefer to use globally popular established solutions like Zoom and Teams and the English language and America as a reliable democracy.
Weather or not they get Greenland, Trump and his supporters in the US administration have changed the world. Guy should definitely get Nobel prize for pushing decentralization.
Completely confused about which parts are sarcasm. Pretty sure the last sentence is and by this the rest must be as well. But oh boy in what kind of world do we live where you seriously can't tell easily anymore.
Looking through the resources you've linked is one of the most hopeful and awesome software experiences I have had in a while.
There's a chance to unlock tremendous value for society here.
Imagine if you could fix all the awful bugs making video conferencing software shitty for you! It's perhaps the most bug-plagued software out there in the world, with the highest number of complaints I have ever seen.
We've had a large detour away from open-source running the core of the internet, at least outside of web pages, but this sort of software feels like we're getting back to the 90's and earlier.
Vive la France!
Zoom isn't buggy I wouldn't say. It's really good.
That's been my personal experience, but colleagues on Linux are continually fighting it.
I gave up on the native Zoom client on Linux right away, it was completely broken. It worked well enough on a browser to get through the project though.
Same with Teams, the video calls work fine on a browser. You just can't use any background pictures or effects.
This one made me laugh , thanks ! I wish there was some kind of slashdot like ´funny’ tag
I like how they go to digital sovereignty on office. And then immediately turn around an host on Github.
Gotta give them props for all the English. I know that can't have been easy.
Now they just need to change the name so it's not so obviously French, and invite collaboration from the other large EU countries. I wonder how many Dutch or German will think of "La Suite Numerique" as an EU-wide office suite.
That website is specifically to explain it to French audiences.
German version is here, but unlike France they're mostly boosting already-existing German open source software (like Nextcloud and Open Xchange): https://opencode.de/en/home
I don't know how the Netherlands really fits into all of this, but I know they're one of the biggest funders of open source projects in general via NLnet. Seriously, their list of projects they've given money to is ridiculously comprehensive, you're going to struggle naming some that are not listed here: https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html
> Gotta give them props for all the English. I know that can't have been easy.
Why not? Plenty of French people speak English at a native level.
0% chance of working out
> Used each month by more than 500 000 staff, in 15 ministries and many administrations.
Right. Just like edge is used on 100% of windows
Okay fine, I'll take the bait. How do you define "working out" to conclude that there's 0% chance of it?
Makes sense. This software dependency that Europe has on the USA is very, very bad - no just with regards to Zoom, but literally anything. The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government, and the current US government will remain hostile as long as it is in charge; but even afterwards it is quite logical to assume that any follow-up government will prioritize US interests over European interests. So it makes no sense to pay for outsiders who would work against you.
France does a few things right; scandinavian countries too (I include The Netherlands here, though they are not really scandiavians but in their decision-making, they are often a bit like a hybrid between France and Denmark or Sweden). Spain and Italy lag behind but sometimes, surprisingly, also do the right thing. The real troublemaker is ... Germany. For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does, but only ... half-hearted. Naturally, "the economy" is one reason (export centric country so it is readily blackmailable by the USA here) but even then you have to ask why german politicians have absolutely no pride at all. France has pride - that's good and bad but good in this context. (UK is more an US colony really after Brexit anyway, with Farage probably going to win - and cause more damage. Brits just don't learn from this.)
>For a reason nobody understands, Germany is like an US satellite in everything it does
I don’t see what’s surprising about this. In the post-war period, most of Europe was hostile to German empowerment, from initial opposition to West Germany’s inclusion in NATO to later resistance to German reunification. The presence of tens of thousands of US troops in Germany also required more diplomatic communication and alignment to maintain status of forces agreements.
The status quo has only really changed in the last twenty years.
Since WW2, German national pride is something that is not very well received, added to that the old east/west divide, and the generally strong identification with ones own state/region. It is a complex affair.
> This software dependency that Europe has on the USA is very, very bad - no just with regards to Zoom, but literally anything.
More to this point, the article points out that one of the drivers of all this is when Microsoft killed one of the emails an ICC prosecutor's email because the US administration sanctioned them:
> A decisive moment came last year when the Trump administration sanctioned the International Criminal Court’s top prosecutor after the tribunal, based in The Hague, Netherlands, issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an ally of President Donald Trump.
> The sanctions led Microsoft to cancel Khan’s ICC email, a move that was first reported by The Associated Press and sparked fears of a “kill switch” that Big Tech companies can use to turn off service at will.
You're basically saying Western European countries' relationships with the US haven't changed much since the Cold War.
France does everything right except produce much software. I'm sure it can copycat things pioneered by the US, and 20 years later, but that's not exactly difficult.
Doesn't really matter if copycat or not in this case. I'd argue it's even better to be a copycat in order to move faster.
To me this is the point right? Everything that's spent enough time in the oven and has been commodified should be eventually launched as a public service. If we lived in a reasonable world this would be how things are done instead of installing permanent toll booths on everything and letting it get shittier and more expensive.
> The US corporations are forced by law to always prioritize whoever represents the current US government
Where do you get your information from? This is just plainly false. Heck, it runs afoul of the Constitution, so even if the government were to try something, it'd be smacked down real fast.
I don't know if you're joking, but if not you need to start paying attention to what has been happening in US courts recently.
Refreshing. No more Teams? Sounds like a dream... Of all the crapware I am forced to work with, Teams really pushes the envelope in every single negative way conceivable. I think I have more love for SharePoint than Teams, and that is a massive concession.
Heh, now that our team has standardized on Teams rather than Zulip (so that we suffer/connect with the rest of the org whom are stuck in MS land) - and I've been given the chance to use Teams for a while - it really is worse than I initially thought.
Which means it's time to look for alternative clients. I ws hoping for something like WeeSlack:
https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack
But all I found was:
https://github.com/btp/teams-cli
https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams
Are there really no good Teams clients? Doesn't have to plug in to WeeChat or be a TUI... But something?
You'd understand why there's no even half-decent clients for Teams if you ever tried to write a bot in Teams.
That's just a pure lesson in pain.
Webhooks work, but proper bots are borderline impossible; at least without giving you the feeling that you'd rather pull your own teeth out with pliers.
Sorry to hear. Pulling teeth with pliers on-premise has been out of support for a while. Please contact our sales team if you haven't tried our Pliers Copilot 365 For Teams and Dentists offering yet. It solves any problems you might currently experience.
I actually had a look. Now you can get messages and stuff from MS Graph. The situation is better than a few years ago when only very useless Teams APIs were available.
But the available APIs still suck. For example there is none to just get all recent notifications. I don't know if teams itself has access to more and better apis? If not that would explain a lot.
I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't. The number of times I've heard the notification sound, gotten a toast while in the middle of something, and then been unable to find what the hell that notification was for, because some other device I'm logged in on has helpfully marked it read.
Then begins the hunt through chats, meeting chats, group chats, channel chats and the notification pane (which doesn't show every type of notification!?) to find what it was.
Absolutely maddening.
I'm in the same boat and I am this close to just torching the mainsail
Even authenticating to Teams is a herculean task. Microsoft's official APIs seem purpose-built to prevent people from writing proper Teams interfaces, and attempting to replicate their proprietary SSO flow is extremely painful. (In theory, you could hook into it by starting a fresh web browser at the appropriate login page, waiting for the appropriate redirects, and then harvesting the relevant cookies, but that's a really ugly solution, and it already represents a lot of invested work.)
The Zen of Teams is that Teams is so clunky it cannot be Slack.
Without threads, there is no breach of thread-etiquette.
When "channels" are so awkward, nobody uses them. Then there is no constant deluge of middle-age folks creating a Facebook out of work, needing to be reminded that the photos channel is for business-photos, not pictures of their kids.
When emoji support is limited, nobody has to police people pushing the boundaries of what emojis are appropriate.
The software is baffling. But I like it that way.
Teams is the bane of my existence. Oh well, one of them at least and am forced to use it for the time being. Europeans may get lucky with some sane software or get something even worse than Teams. It remains to be seen how they do. If their software is starting to get better, perhaps US software will get better too because they can no longer justify the junk they're pumping out on us.
> get something even worse than Teams
I'm not sure that's actually possible, you know...
I hope for the best for Europeans but until I see results I'm not sure what they're capable of.
I guess we could concoct something made out of PHP4/5 and jQuery and use Xampp stack, to get something worse. Or wait, I have it! We build it on top of MS Excel!
I've had to start using Teams more lately and it is indeed as terrible as I'd heard. The other day I needed to copy a number of items from an ongoing chat. Seems like an extremely simple and normal thing, but every time I hover over a message a popup jumps up with emoji reactions that partially covers the text I'm trying to copy. Trying to move quickly, I kept accidentally "reacting" to messages instead of double clicking the text. To make matters worse there's no way to disable this "feature"! Why?!
Teams is supposed to be a professional workplace tool from one of the biggest software companies in the world, but it feels like something a high schooler coded up for fun. Weirdly Discord, a platform explicitly meant for gamers, is a more useful chat tool. I don't like Discord at all, but it's better than Teams.
I have to admit, I have almost no problems with Teams. The one big issue I had was performance when screen sharing. But I got a new laptop and this problem went away. Seems so odd that so many people have major problems with it, while I feel like within my workgroup there are almost no problems to speak of.
This was discussed before: if your Windows computer doesn't have a valid HEVC license installed, then Teams falls back to software encoding and performs horrible. Most manufacturers include the license, but not all. It's also only 99 cents on the Microsoft store (which might be unavailable on enterprise managed devices)
That: and microsoft routes all calls through their servers.
Fine if you live near a datacenter.
In Sweden though, you go through France.
Not ideal.
How extensively do you use it? When my team was just using it for meetings and the attached chats, it did actually work completely fine. When broader orgs started pushing more communications through it (the "teams" in teams, and all the weird chat room/forums that entails) all of the rough edges became very apparent. All of that is just a shockingly disorganized mess.
One day they will discover threaded conversions.
And then we will get rid of them again, because some suits are telling us that we don't actually want them, that they are "complicated", we must trust them and that recursive data types are too hard to get right. Let's all write SMS again. Or better yet, send fax.
Some engineers will facepalm super hard but won't be listened to, as usual, and we will enter the next cosmic age of self-inflicted suffering.
What’s so bad about Teams that makes it so hated? I used it lately and often to work with a customer and I don’t find anything terrible about it, other than some minor usability annoyances like phantom chat notifications once in a while. But overall it does what it’s supposed to do, get on a video call, share your screen and share files over channels. The transcript feature seems to work well too. I’m not amazed by it, but I don’t see anything to hate either. I guess it is one of those tools I don’t have a strong opinion about.
"I don't have an issue with it" tells me you've never used anything else. Have you tried Slack? Zulip? Mattermost? Fucking... IRC from 1988?
Teams isn't just mediocre, it's aggressively hostile to basic usability. The camera bar sits at the top of the window, directly blocking where you're supposed to position your camera for eye contact. Chat organisation is broken: you get duplicate groups because the order people were added matters somehow. Notifications phantom in and out. Reactions are buried in an activity feed. Search is useless. You can't reliably paste text without major formatting issues. The mobile app logs you out randomly and doesn’t tell you unless you manually check it. Desktop notifications don't sync with read state. Files uploaded to chat don't appear in the Files tab. The "new Teams" broke half the features that worked in classic Teams. Presence status is a coin flip. Audio settings reset themselves between calls. Screen sharing has a 50/50 chance of sharing the wrong window. The difference between a chat and a channel is arbitrary and confusing. You can't edit messages older than a few hours. Threading is bolted on and barely works.
Performance is inexcusable. Multiple gigabytes of RAM to display text messages and lag constantly on modern hardware. How do you make a chat application lag? It's rendering text, not computing fluid dynamics. Opening the application takes 30 seconds on an SSD. Switching between chats stutters. Typing has input delay.
The real problem isn't that Teams is terrible. It's that "it technically functions" has become an acceptable standard. When you've never experienced better, "it works" seems fine. But Teams is what happens when a monopoly position means you don't have to care about quality. Microsoft has unlimited resources and still ships this.
Even Skype for Business was more stable, and in Skype for Business you couldn't reliably select text. That's how low the bar is.
I have used at least Skype, Meet/Chat, Slack, Teams and Discord, plus some other niche apps I can’t remember. In Discord, I like the ability to share user screens concurrently and the way you can just jump on a channel and have an impromptu meeting without much ceremony. But I have seen only one case of Discord in a corporate environment. My use cases are simple, video calls, screen sharing, file sharing and chat with mentions and code snippets, once in a while a survey to pick a place for lunch. I have been using Teams daily since last October. No issues. If it was consistently bad, it would have been replaced already. People I work with value their time. Also last week I was in a 2K+ people presentation with Q&A, no issues. I’m just genuinely curious about what other people are doing with Teams that it sucks so much at, to the point of making them so unhappy. What do these people do for work? Full time development with heavy integrations and automation, maybe?
> and lag constantly on modern hardware
This. Opening a chat for the first time in the morning consistently takes 5-10 seconds. Opening subsequent ones takes 2-3 seconds. That is, if they contain plain text. If not, UI keps reflowing and jumping while thumbnails and silly gifs are loaded async, so you cannot even reliably click.
Out of all the things you listed (and I'd have a couple more), copy-paste is really what drives me insane, because it's completely cursed!
Sometimes, text copied from teams includes `[Sender Name, 2026-01-03, 21:51]` as a prefix—other times not. Sometimes you paste formatted text and it ends up pasted as formatted but inconsistent HTML, including (of course) text color of all things, rendering it black even with the dark theme, and thus unreadable. Other times you copy code, and there's two blank lines between each line when you paste elsewhere. It makes you cry, really.
Let's not forget how stupid the client on GNU/Linux was regarding audio devices. Every other app I had installed, that has anything to do with microphone (OBS, Audacity, Discord, Discord in Browser, Signal, ...) recognized my mic, which was connected via jack. Not MS Te-eams!!! Tada! Had to buy another headset with USB plug for Teams to get it.
> Typing has input delay.
Everything in Windows has input delay, ever since at Windows XP, it makes it infuriating to use.
It has a very large number of bugs.
My favourite one ( still happens ) is having to mute then unmute at the beginning of the conversation otherwise nobody can hear me. It was so common, with people fiddling with their headset, calling again etc that I eventually asked everyone exhibiting audio issues to start with this
Another interesting one is that if you’re not connected properly , you send messages , but never get notified that they never left, and are never notified that you’re not connected.
It’s also a resource hog and will eat your machine for breakfast.
The list goes on and on, it’s very surprising.
Notifying you about messages you've already seen. You have to change chats and to back for it to dismiss it. Kills me.
Likes to open new windows if you click a notification.
It is slow.
The search is not good at showing multiple results from the one chat. Why does it search all the other chats anyway...
Switching accounts constantly is a pain in the arse - I unfortunately have to use four accounts and one sub-account (member of some other org's team or something).
I don't love it, but I don't have many of the problems other people seem to have. And I've used everything from IRC in the 80s to Slack more recently. The only thing I can think of is that I don't run it on Windows, but rather a fairly new MacBook Pro M4. Maybe in this case it actually runs better on Mac, which is kind of ironic.
It's a resource hog, crashes, it's constantly littering files all over SharePoint which becomes even more than a garbage bin than it already is.
And the UI is terrible, huge balloons around everything. I want density but even at the densest setting it sucks.
Oh and it also fails to update online status. Often I click on a colleague who seems green and only then it updates and it turns out they've been away for 3 hours. Grrr
Another one for the pile. You can choose to open office documents in Teams directly, the browser, or in the native desktop app, but you can only set it to open by default in either Teams or browser. Why?
Wrote up a few of my gripes on here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45933952
Teams feels as though it were vibe-coded, but dates back well before there was such a thing. It works, basically, but isn't something I'd feel good about shipping myself.
The risk is of course that the new thing might be worse than Teams somehow.
The only possibility is if you get it from Oracle instead.
Well no, there's always the European Oracle: SAP.
It's a good thing in this context that they are on the other side of the border.
It will surely be worse, at least at the beginning. But there is a significant chance that with time they will improve it, and one can hope that one year after the first release the product will actually be better than Teams, given that the developers will improve it based on their own experience.
They just shot Slack and moved to Teams only here.
The company is falling apart so quickly they are going to have to pay up again before the end of the month.
Because slack startet to extort their customers. I guess many moved away, to be prepared if slack decides to push their prices even further.
Though, if your choice is between Salesforce licensing and Microsoft licensing, at least it’s possible to understand Salesforce licensing.
A lot of companies already have Teams included in their existing licenses.
But yeah, Microsoft licensing is impossible to understand.
I don't have a lot of complaints with the current version of teams. Messaging and video calls work without major issues. It's bloated, and all those plugins are usually bad, but the basics work well for me.
The new Outlook app is horrible though.
Every Teams team is backed by SharePoint, unfortunately.
Teams, Sharepoint, Exchange, and OneDrive seem to be connected by a maze of dark twisty integration passages which no single human has mapped fully.
Somewhere, in the deepest bowels, Skype still lives. I'm sure of it.
It actually does or at least did, until at least a few years ago. When you opened the audio mixer (alsamixer or pulse audio control?) on XFCE, you could still see MS Teams labeled as Skype there. Not sure how it would be now, because I only ever use MS Teams isolated in a separate Ungoogled Chromium browser now, and have given up on the client for GNU/Linux.
Lync is still there, lurking. With Communicator blocking every contact with the outside world. But eventually some message will pass through!
And every private channel as well. And if you rename the Team, the SharePoint will become out-of-sync and all URLs will still use the old Team name.
Oh, this is useful info... Another tool in the box of making other people realize how much it sucks.
I knew I could smell a poo in the room, I didn't know what or who was responsible but it all makes sense now.
You kids have it easy.
Once I worked in a company with two brands after a fusion, and all of us had to use both Exchange and Lotus Notes. And I was almost forgetting SharePoint.
> No more Teams? Sounds like a dream.
No more Words? Introducing a worse software than Words...
As bad and evil as MS Teams may be, I recently got invited to a Zoom meeting, and you simply can't use it in the browser! They just force you to download their shitty app to join. Naturally, I did not install crapware and closed the tab, as fortunately it was no mandatory event for me. At least in MS Teams I can isolate it into its separate ungoogled Chromium installation and treat that as a shitty app, without having to install crap onto my system.
Zoom calls work fine in the browser. They first make it look like you need the native client, but there's some dance you need to make to get the web link. Reload, wait, spin in your chair, something like that.
Of course I would never choose Zoom or Teams if I had the power, but Chromium does work with both when those are the tools your client uses.
It makes you download it but then a button appears saying join in browser. I have tons of zoom binary copies
I couldn't agree more with this. Teams somehow managed to supercede my other microphone preferences when I'm not even using teams (took me a while to figure out). It might be one of the apps I detest the most. There is very little satisfaction with it and much annoyance.
Somehow, Teams overrides the volume controls on my Android phone. It's physically user-hostile.
By default, Teams never releases your audio input channel, even when you close it.
Why would they do that? So annoying.
2 theories:
(1) They couldn't imagine anyone ever closing their gloriously developed MS Teams.
(2) Since everyone knows MS Teams and sitting in meetings all day is the one most important thing to get stuff done, they went ahead and made MS Teams a "priority". F using anything else! Maybe if it doesn't release the audio input, it will be 50ms faster next call! That ought to be enough for you!
It's not that bad. It's well integrated into Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office, and does the job. I've used both Slack and Teams and if you're using MS365, then Teams is absolutely the better option.
As someone who has gone from 100% Slack in startups to all-in Teams in big corpo, I disagree. Teams won't even display all office file formats without you having to open the dedicated app. And if it does it's usually a half-baked browser mess. And don't even get me started on the UX or meeting options or mobile support or the complete lack of a dedicated Linux client. I don't need one app to do everything half-assed, I need one app that does exactly what it's meant for well. Preferably on every platform.
> I don't need one app to do everything half-assed
That's primarily why it sucks, and that seems to be Microsoft's standard operating procedure. Everything they put out is in the category of "does everything, but half-assed with a web of fragile "integrations" that break if you look at it funny."
Worse, it's all SharePoint all the way down. Every team (and private channel!) is a SharePoint site, every user's OneDrive in the same tenant is a personal SharePoint Site. Every M365 Group gets its own SharePoint site (and mailbox). Creating a Team also creates an M365 group, but not vice versa.
Heaven forbid you rename something in the stack or you are in for a world of pain.
It's also by design that way. SharePoint storage is expensive, and boy what a disaster it is to ever try and get your data out of it.
Yet, for some reason, companies keep buying it and keep using it, letting Microsoft suck them in and hold them there for eternity.
If you're starting a new company, never, ever, buy anything Microsoft. Just don't go down that road. It's not worth it.
It’s not why your big corp chooses teams and the msft suite. From a corp perspective they don’t care about your edge case. There’s only - is it good for 90% of my use cases across the enterprise? And - do I get a bundle discount? Last but not the least - do I need to expend developer resources on it vs anything else?
Yeah, there is half assed stuff. But it’s not what most of the big corp uses anyway. So your little dev specific use case isn’t going to get much traction.
Teams does one thing well. It can do group chats and team calls. That’s most of what people use it for. And your corp gets a discount bundle.
Our CEO Decided to use his own phone, use zoom instead of the corporate Teams, and uses ChatGPT where the rest of us are stuck with MS copilot test licenses. I guess its good to be at the top!
Reminds me when at my previous company, management got themselves top macbooks for filing excel sheets and replying to emails, while rank and file engineers got the budget Lenovos with 8GB RAM
Depends on company size and how much influence legal, security and asset protection have.
Usually at big corp I haven’t seen a ceo actually schedule their own calls or deal with day to day bullshit. They have a whole team of staff for that.
If you don’t want a half assed simulacra version, shouldn’t you prefer Teams open the native application?
For many of us, you are describing a black hole of integrated nightmare software
Sharepoint... the only webapp I have to use that feels worse than Teams. I swear when I open the intranet landing page, the loading, reloading, resizing, rereloading, re-whatever takes at least 10 seconds to settle. How can engineers build something be so inefficient?
The children who write Teams cannot reliably deliver notifications on my mac without me restarting Teams every morning.
I've spent a full day attempting to send a webhook in. Teams used to work like slack (a channel admin can create an endpoint; you post to it.) Microsoft deprecated that because it worked. It's now a maze of permissions and it silently fails with no error messages at all.
Scrollback regularly fails and also requires app restart.
I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop, but I can paste them by opening them in preview, copying the image, and cmd+v into the channel. I wasted 4 hours w/ support trying to figure out why I can't drag images into the shared channel before giving up. This is typical of the Teams experience.
I could go on. Besides facebook's tools, it is the worst piece of software I've used and a demonstration of monopoly power to distribute total garbage. Slack has issues, but it does reliably do the core thing.
> I cannot insert images into a channel w/ a customer via drag and drop
Yup, we struggle with this. Seems to have to do with needing to pay for seats in order to have file-sharing allowed (but you can still paste Sharepoint/Onedrive links). Can't share files if there's even a single external person in the chat/channel. Forced us to buy another seat subscription. It's great!
That kinda makes sense (and thank you!), but I think the comprehensive incompetence is thus:
1 - fails 2 - w/ no useful feedback to user; 3 - I couldn't get support to tell me why (fine, small account), but the customer with 900 licensed seats couldn't either
Fortunately, said customer has come to the realization of how very bad it is and is hopefully migrating to Slack.
Teams not being able to do threaded conversations consistently or reliably is a massive pain for me. I hate it. Corporate IT is just hell for users.
Okay and what exactly does this integration bring?
- opening Sharepoint pages in Teams' half-baked browser;
- opening Word or Excel in Teams' own half-baked editor;
- Exchange integration is the calendar, period. Nothing else. The only thing actually usable.
Am I missing anything?
There seems to be a huge business opportunity in Europe right now, to sell support and customization of open source software to government players. Has anyone heard about a European company that’s been successful in this area?
Sure. Nextcloud GmbH seems to be one of the winners. It sells a customized version aimed at government agencies.
If what they sell is the open source Nextcloud, it is a horrendous product.
Its architecture is weird, with a proxy inside you can harden only by editing data inside a container that is volatyile by design (and has to be). There are numerous issues opened on that topic, Nextcloud response is "live with it".
Matrix has done a bunch of work with the French government in the past. Hopefully they can capitalize on this sentiment.
More information here:
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366633894/European-gover...
(0ct 2025)
Interestingly, there is also a NATO-Matrix app:
Just goes to show how many structural problems there are to starting tech companies in Europe.
Yes, the problem is capital. US has loads of it and Europe does not. So a lot of European startups have 3 options: remain niche, get bought out buy US investors, move the corporate seat/brain trust to the US.
There are many small European startups who do not have infrastructure to take on large European multinationals as clients. A lot of EU labor laws have hard requirements at 50 and 100 employees so startups stay below those lines and remain tech lifestyle companies.
Well the other large advantage is that the US is one single market with one common language (English) and while there are variations by state, pretty much one set of rules. So by starting a company in the United States you of course have access to incredibly deep capital markets, but you also have access to 350 million people mostly operating under one set of rules with one common language and largely one common culture. It's the same market advantage that China has, by and large.
It's one of the big ironies of the EU - every time it gets larger (good! increases market size) it also gets more fragmented in terms of languages, retained local rules etc. (bad, obviously).
Now up to 24 official languages and still potentially growing in the future (although this is a bit of an overcount because some of them are mutually intelligible to various degrees, it's still a lot).
It's interesting to think that at the time of original ECSC treaty there were only four languages (French, German, Dutch and Italian). That's just about manageable, now it is a bit of an issue
Also culture. I had a friend try with several German companies, but she said the leadership would default to "no", and every decision would need too much review. She even worked with some that opened offices in SF hoping to learn to move fast, but even those were way too cautious to succeed. Lots of premature optimization, and trying to establish structures and systems before any proof of concepts could be made. Obviously, this is just anecdotal but she had a real desire to have European growth in SF communities.
I kind of wonder, capital wise. the GDP isn't too far off US and there's def companies/families w/ insane amount of capital esp in luxury goods etc. Unless they're just hoarding it like Smaug and not investing it back into the economy, in which case the problem isn't capital but business culture.
It could be similar to when China kicked out a lot of non-domestic players. They even had a nickname for it. From the link below.
Fengkou fēng kǒu 风口
n. wind tunnel; an area or sector where, for a period of time, all investors want to invest in. Everyone stands a chance to fly when there is favorable wind blowing from behind.
https://www.newconceptmandarin.com/learn-chinese-blog/chines...
I had an occasion to speak to some of the wire.com people a couple years ago. They seemed to be really dedicated to security and privacy.
> to sell support and customization of open source software to government players
Time to start a Drupal consulting firm again.
Yeah, this is a win/win opportunity and could drive more sponsorship of those projects as there'd be more interests invested in seeing them thrive.
Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions.
Each one of these actions is a stepping stone the world is taking as a direct consequence of U.S. political negligence. And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.
Shame that so many EU citizens do not see the ramifications of theirs.
EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies. They have elected leaders who were until very recently heavily dependent on Russian energy.
As a result, EU dependence on US tech is near-total. I remember hearing a few months ago that companies in the EU still have to use Dun & Bradstreet (a US company) for routine government filings!
Some minor headlines about civil servants stopping their usage of office sound impressive but isn't really making a dent in Microsoft's bottom line. If and when Microsoft's revenues from the EU start dropping by double digits or more, I am sure they will contribute large amounts of money to make the US government more civil and normal than it's being today.
> And however difficult it was to render this consequence, it will be tenfold, or hundredfold, as difficult to reverse course.
As a software consumer, if this takes off, I don't see any reason I would want the course to be reversed. More adoption and support of open software and standards is beneficial for consumers. It might even get Microsoft and the rest of US Big Tech to actively compete for a change rather than relying on their near-total monopoly.
leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies
Remarkable how it is the politicans who should have been doing this when it doesn't get done, and how everyone is quick to complain if politicians meddle in what the private sector should have been doing. This is a recurring theme in a lot of debates. And I think it has to do with our need to blame someone but ourselves.
Yes, one could solve this through procurement rules that favor domestic or regional products. And there are sometimes procurement rules that state that domestic vendors should be preferred. But I have seen that in practice and it doesn't actually work. One one project I worked on decades ago the military was sourcing a system for "local administration". A company that was effectively bankrupt, had the weirdest OS I have ever used, and the worst office support systems I've had the misfortune of trying to use, was the only domestic candidate. Yes, it did check the boxes in the procurement process, but everyone knew it was never going to happen.
Interoperability, product maturity, familiarity, feature completeness, quality etc tends to win out.
I think we have to realize that this has almost nothing to do with our political leaders and everything to do with our inability to create software businesses in Europe. We need to figure that bit out. And perhaps this is the kick in the behind we needed to get our act together.
I don't think anybody expected EU politicians to create the software companies
When we speak of the failure of EU politicians, it has been in removing the barriers in their own market to even develop successful technology companies given all the highly educated local talent (they have a larger population than the US!).
The lack of a single capital market, no single regulatory market, no single language market, hilariously wide variance in taxation/labor/corporate law, etc. is why the EU can never compete in each tech wave (from the transistor to mainframes to the PC to the internet to ecommerce to social media to smartphones to AI etc. etc.)
Trillions in tax revenue is missing from the successful companies that were never built and the income tax from high-paid employees that don't exist. The last 60 years of growth in the digital realm could be funding the EU's various rotting social welfare systems and instead be providing countries across the region with a higher standard of living. Instead they are stuck living off the tax receipts thrown off by dying industrial-age giants. Which China will soon kill.
This is absolutely a policy failure, and regardless of the historical reasons why we ended up here, to paint it as anything other than a policy failure is to not live in reality.
I have nothing to add other than that you put my argument perfectly, much better than I could. Policy and regulation are the failures.
agreed, but as long as Europe is divided, no politician will solve this.
That is the fundamental flaw of the EU model - a lack of leadership and authority at the top level.
They will have to change that. There were some small steps during Covid to create EU level funding mechanisms.
I'm not saying they have to grow a monstrous bureaucracy at the EU level - in fact they could probably do it less. But they definitely need more regulation to promote self-grown technology.
> EU citizens have elected ineffective leaders for decades -- leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies.
It's not like there are people out there on the campaign trail every election saying "if I'm elected, I'll ensure we build homegrown cloud alternatives". Nobody campaigns on issues like that. The reality is you have to choose between people who want to kick the immigrants out and people who don't, people who want to enact green policies and people who don't. People who want a European army and people who don't. These big issues are what people vote on, even if we care that there should be a homegrown cloud industry. I really do care, but it's not something I can do anything about at the ballot box
Yup. Culturally, the EU has favored more regulations over supporting more tech growth to an absurd degree.
Not that I disagree in principle with most of the tech regulations; it does make sense to protect privacy and combat monopolistic abuses and so on.
But you also need to support your own tech industry at the same time, and the efforts there have been like quarter-assed at most.
If you prevent monopolies, and your neighbour doesn't, and your neighbour bullies you when you try to prevent their monopolies... it's not an easy situation.
That's really not the issue. EU tech companies aren't getting big enough to the point where "potentially a monopoly" is even a problem, other than maybe Spotify.
They are not, but EU tech companies have to compete against US monopolies. And there are laws that prevent them from doing that.
This blog post starts off with a long-winded, meandering rant. Do you have something more succinct and less rant-y to back up your assertion of
> And there are laws that prevent them from doing that.
?
> I remember hearing a few months ago that companies in the EU still have to use Dun & Bradstreet (a US company) for routine government filings!
Could you name which European nation this was?
I would genuinely be interested in knowing.
Europe's main strategy these days seems to be blaming others instead of looking at themselves.
For example, they blame America for their own issue of lacking tech companies, despite Europe taking credit for having fewer work hours, more 'equitable' societies, etc.
They blame China for their own issue of lacking domestic manufacturing, despite their pride at having strong unions, supposedly good labor protections, and vacations.
They blame India for the bogey of 'buying Russian oil', instead of blaming themselves for being the LARGEST purchaser of refined oil products from India. As if India, one of the hottest countries on the planet, actually needs heating oil.
At this point, which country / region does Europe not blame? It's always someone else's fault. No one even thinks to look inside themselves.
You are framing this as moral blame. It isn't about that. It is about strategic risk.
Why would we blame the US for our own inability to build a viable software industry? Europe has been painfully aware for years that this is self-inflicted.
The reason there is now serious talk about reducing dependence on the US is not resentment, it is risk. Dependence used to be a convenience. It is increasingly a liability. Trust in long-term stability, rule continuity, and alignment of interests is no longer something we can assume. That changes the calculus, regardless of who is "at fault".
From the perspective of someone who works in software, I’m glad this conversation is finally happening. It’s not about assigning blame. It is about taking responsibility for capabilities we should never have outsourced so completely in the first place.
If this looks like blame from the outside, that’s a misunderstanding of what self-correction looks like.
There's plenty of chatter these days that Europe needs to be more independent from other powers, needs to be more competitive and so on.
What's not clear is if Europeans are actually willing to federalize/centralize power enough to make that happen. E.g. in foreign policy, a Europe with twenty different strategies and twenty different militaries will never be able to swing its weight around the same as the US*, even if the collective level of power is the same on paper. But Europeans are still focused so much on "my country wants to do X" that it seems like they'd rather be separate than strong.
* A strong military is almost always an important component of foreign policy, even when it's not actually used to do anything...because of the implication.
> They blame India for the bogey of 'buying Russian oil', instead of blaming themselves for being the LARGEST purchaser of refined oil products from India. As if India, one of the hottest countries on the planet, actually needs heating oil
India and the EU have managed to work as adults and find a way to sign an FTA [0] and Defense Pact [1] last week. The adults in the room found a way to compromise and turn a zero sum game into a stag hunt and anyone repeating tired tropes like above is either extremely uninformed or a bot.
[0] - https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-cou...
[1] - https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/security-and-defence-eu-and-...
I am French. When I look at the EU I see great potentials but the effect is a huge bureaucratic mess that is advantageous for everyone involved.
About 25% of EU parliament parties are against EU. Theyt are paid by the EU to tell how much they hate this institution.
There are no two countries in the EU who are aligned. Some of them are not completely out of synch (mostly the Nordics), some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) where they eat most of the EU funds (relatively and in absolute terms) but hate it.
With such an institution, there is no real hope of having a strong position backed by competent people. Just look at ENISA and the disgrace this organization is in the era of cybersecurity.
We also had a EU-wide referendum about daylight saving. 5 M peopel responsed (a few percent of the population). It was the largest response in the history of the EU. And then it was trashed.
The mountains of EUR we burn is insane.
> Theyt are paid by the EU to tell how much they hate this institution.
Correction: They're paid by the EU taxpayers. And as politicians, there's a chance their vociferation of hate towards the EU is just parroting the opinion their voters have towards the EU, which means they're doing their job as politicians, whether you like their opinions or not.
>some are in schizophrenia mode (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia mostly) [...] but hate it
Why is the EU treated like a sacred cow that people shouldn't be allowed to hate?
People's happiness with the EU is directly tied to their QoL and purchasing power and you don't need to be a scientist to see that the poorest people in the EU have been hit hardest by the energy price hikes caused by Germany's stupid anti-nuclear pro-Ruski gas decisions, the inflation caused by the ECB's excessive COVID money printing, the support of mass migration, and the EU's response to the war in Ukraine, leading to a massive decline in QoL and purchasing power, so of course they're not gonna be happy with the EU when their decisions negatively affected them.
The problem with the EU is that it pushes for blanket policies and solutions across the hugely diverse union, while different members get negatively impacted differently by each policy, some more some less, but the point is there cannot be a one size fits all solution that favors all EU members at the same time, leading to EU picking winners and losers with a widening inequality. So of course those drawing the short straw are gonna hate it.
Worth remembering that Hungary, Slovakia, et-al have loved the EU for many, many years after joining. It's not like they suddenly decided to hate the EU for absolutely no reason. So then let's examine and talk about those reasons, instead of calling them schizophrenic which doesn't solve anything and just breeds more animosity and extremism.
> they're doing their job as politicians
Yes I completely agree with you. The EU is enabling spending its citizens' money to criticize itself. If this is not a sick situation, I do not know what this is.
To be clear, I am all for a union of European countries *that all participate in the effort. We need this to stand against the US or the BRICS block, without a union we are a set of insignificant countries that have fought for the last two millennia.
If a country wants to participate, it means it will pay for everyone (with a net zero for everyone) and buy EU products. Otherwise thsi is sabotage.
> Why is the EU treated like a sacred cow that people shouldn't be allowed to hate?
It is not a sacred cow, it is currently almost useless when it comes to hard decisions. So it should change. But if a country is in, it is in - and not pump in monety and complains about the organization.
We can have rich's problems when we are rich. In times of crisis we need to be a hard barrier. Which we are not.
> you don't need to be a scientist to see that the poorest people in the EU
You count Poland as a poor country? With its economic growth that will overtake UK?
> So then let's examine and talk about those reasons, instead of calling them schizophrenic which doesn't solve anything and just breeds more animosity and extremism.
Who is "we"? If you are from the EU you can vote for your country to be represented by the correct people (who care about the region as a whole). Or vote for those who want to dramatically change it so that it fits to its role not only when everything is fine, but also in hard times.
> Worth remembering that Hungary, Slovakia, et-al have loved the EU for many, many years after joining. It's not like they suddenly decided to hate the EU for absolutely no reason. So then let's examine and talk about those reasons, instead of calling them schizophrenic which doesn't solve anything and just breeds more animosity and extremism.
Please do so.
All 3 countries benefit massively from being in the EU, particularly Poland, who is on track to become one of the largest EU economies.
In fact, every country in the bloc benefits immensely from being in the bloc. The UK is a good reminder that leaving only brings stagnation.
European countries are relatively small in the world stage. Think that Germany has the popularity of Chinese provinces. In trade negotiations the EU gets to play much tougher than any individual country would ever dream of, and free access to the whole bloc is a massive benefit.
Is it perfect? Obviously not. But more often than not, the downsides and inefficiencies come from the fact that individual countries still hold too much power, and have too many redundant bureaucracies with the bloc itself.
ehm,
Poland has a steady grow and might leap the UK in the nearby future. UK does not have grow per Capita since Brexit. Hungary is poor because Orban is corrupt and corruption is bad for economy.
>>> Such a shame that so many U.S. citizens do not see the ramifications of their political decisions.
Most US Citizens are not voting on what you think they're voting on. Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.
I live and breathe tech everyday. I see the dangers of it all around me. Day in and day out. You try and talk to people about how dangerous some of this stuff is. Unless people feel it somehow like having their identity stolen and they spend three years trying to fix it all? Nothing will ever change.
People are 100% immune to this stuff now. Its the old frog in boiler water analogy.
Well, that's the problem, these people are wildly uneducated and unsophisticated. They are voting their feelings. Prices levels do not come down without a depression, even if inflation slows. Their only solution is wages going up. Do they have a mechanism to push wages up? Taxes must go up, they have been too low for too long and the debt has accumulated (~$38T in US treasuries alone) and will need to be paid back or defaulted on. Insurance costs continue to rise due to rapidly increasing costs of materials and labor, as well as climate change (the US is currently spending ~$1B/year on climate driven events). Growth is over because the US population is not growing (tangentially, total fertility rate is below replacement rate in more than half of countries in the world, and this trend will continue). 401ks predicated on the S&P500 are held up by AI investment (which is outpacing consumer spending, the primary driver of the US economy, over the last year to the tune of ~$400B) and the Mag 7. When this stalls, everyone is going to be sad and not feel as wealthy as they did previously (“wealth effect”).
Happiness is reality minus expectations, and the future is not going to be as good as the past, based on available data, evidence, and trends Everything is downstream of that. The vibes might be bad, but they ain't gonna get better.
Financial Times: The consumer sentiment puzzle deepens - https://www.ft.com/content/f3edc83f-1fd0-4d65-b773-89bec9043... | https://archive.today/nFlfY - February 3rd, 2026
(some component of price increases has been predatory monopoly gouging covered extensively by Matt Stoller on his newsletter https://www.thebignewsletter.com/, but for our purposes, we can assume this admin isn't going to impair that component of price levels and inflation with regulation for the next 3 years)
> Well, that's the problem, these people are wildly uneducated and unsophisticated. They are voting their feelings.
This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.
Politics is completely driven by uncritical "just so" narratives. The people pushing the discourse never check or justify their assumptions with actual data. This is the real issue.
> This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.
Which begs the question: does democracy still work when voters are so easily misled? I don’t believe that the current generation is fundamentally more or less intelligent than the previous ones. Is technology to blame for disseminating misinformation too rapidly for us to cope?
The early American system was never designed to function as a pure democracy. The founders were openly skeptical of direct rule by popular will, fearing volatility, mob psychology, and the tendency for short-term emotional reactions to override long-term stability. Instead, they constructed a layered federal republic intended to filter public opinion through successive levels of deliberation.
In the original structure, the public directly elected members of the House of Representatives. This chamber was meant to serve as the immediate voice of the population — responsive, numerous, and frequently subject to elections. It represented popular sentiment but was intentionally balanced by slower, more insulated institutions.
The Senate originally functioned as that stabilizing counterweight. Senators were selected by state legislatures rather than direct vote. This meant they were accountable primarily to the governments of sovereign states rather than transient public passions. The Senate therefore protected state interests, ensured continuity of policy, and acted as a brake on sudden shifts in national mood. The 17th Amendment, which later established direct election of senators, fundamentally altered this federal balance by shifting the Senate toward popular representation rather than state representation.
The presidency was also designed to be buffered from direct democratic selection. The Electoral College was not merely a ceremonial intermediary. Electors were expected to exercise independent judgment and represent state-level deliberation. The system assumed electors would be politically informed individuals capable of evaluating candidates beyond campaign popularity or mass persuasion. In theory, this created a safeguard against demagogues or candidates elevated purely through public excitement.
The vice presidency was structured differently from modern expectations. Originally, the candidate receiving the second highest number of electoral votes became vice president. This design forced cooperation between rival factions and ensured that dissenting political voices remained inside executive governance rather than entirely excluded from power. Although this sometimes created tension, it reflected a belief that competing perspectives strengthened stability.
Underlying these mechanisms was a broader philosophy: governance should incorporate public input while filtering it through layers of institutional judgment. The founders feared what they called “tyranny of the majority,” where temporary popular consensus could override minority rights, long-term national interests, or constitutional boundaries.
Advocates of restoring earlier structural features often argue that modern reforms unintentionally removed stabilizing mechanisms. They contend that direct election of senators nationalized political incentives, encouraging senators to prioritize national party platforms over state-specific interests. Similarly, modern expectations that presidential electors must follow popular vote outcomes arguably transformed the Electoral College from a deliberative body into a procedural formality.
From this viewpoint, reintroducing intermediary decision makers could theoretically slow political volatility, encourage more qualified candidate evaluation, and strengthen federalism by returning power to state governments. However, proponents of such reforms often acknowledge that intermediary systems would require strong transparency, accountability standards, and anti-corruption safeguards. Without those protections, layered elector systems could risk elite capture or reduced public legitimacy.
Critics of restoring these structures typically argue that expanded direct voting increased democratic legitimacy, voter participation, and political equality. They often contend that intermediary systems historically enabled exclusion and reduced accountability to the general population.
The debate therefore centers on a classic governance tradeoff: stability and deliberation versus direct popular sovereignty. The original American constitutional framework leaned toward stability through representation filters, while modern reforms have leaned toward expanding direct electoral influence.
> This is what people who "vote their feelings" would assert. Most people think they are "sophisticated" and "educated" on these issues, both Democrats and Republicans. There is ample evidence that this is not the case for either.
~130M American adults have low literacy skills with 54% of people 16-74 below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. And they vote in some amount. Many may not be functional enough to be self aware about their level of education and sophistication, based on the data.
https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy
https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFou...
> Most are worried about things that affect their day-to-day life like cost of eggs, the cost of gas, taxes going up, my 401K going in the dumpster.
Are they? It seems to me like they’re worried about things like women having access to too much healthcare, too many non white people, and too many women leaders. They voted for a guy that wants to make the most expensive purchase of most people’s lives even more expensive:
Not to mention the enormous tax increases by way of getting rid of the expanded ACA premium credits.
Talk to actual Trump voters and you'll see they support his tariffs and immigration crackdowns because they believe it will lead to economic prosperity and good jobs returning to their community. They believe the current system is fundamentally unfair to them. Even though that's totally backwards, and Trump is just making everything worse, that's what they believe.
Framing immigration reform as "racists think there are too many non white people" is what costs Democrats elections.
> because they believe it will lead to economic prosperity and good jobs returning to their community.
Maybe they say that but it's justification for their racist believes, which they still don't want to talk openly about. It just sounds better when someone invents some "benefits" of it. Like wild claims in an ad is helping the buyer justify their impulse shopping.
70 million Americans voted for him. His biggest demographic win compared to the last election was non-white men.
Immediately dismissing this as racism isn't going to help you understand it, or help the Democrats beat the Republicans.
To the contrary! They were tricked to believe that they were part of society. They aren't. By voting for Trump they reassured themselves that it won't happen to them. Often times racism against the newest group of immigrants coming from the group of immigrants before them is seen by the latter as a rite of passage to be accepted into US society.
The Irish used to be in a similar position like the people from South America today. Now they are seen as white but before WWI they weren't seen as white by the WASPs. And it's totally normal for some of the second or third generation immigrants to become racist against new immigrants. Rite of passage.
> The Irish used to be in a similar position like the people from South America today
To your earlier point: Boston racism is now legendary (see Celtics fans)
It's zero-sum thinking, "the pie isn't big enough and can't get bigger and I'm afraid, so I'm going to hurt other people so that I don't get hurt".
Yes. And they still remember where they are coming from and they fear that they might again lose their piece of the pie to the groups that are considered more "American", so they feel the need to prove their place in society by cheering the leader who is preaching that the pie is getting smaller and that someone has to leave the table. This fear is handed down over generations and for some families or communities it transforms into hatred. This mechanism is very often played by amoral populists because it works so well.
Many of the most disgusting and radical Democracy hating people in Trumps inner circle are Catholics by the way. Go figure.
Notable and recent: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clym85ev64lo
> When one-time Democrat Sam Negron headed to the polls to cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2024, he did so with one thing on his mind above all - the economy.
> "I didn't like paying $7 for eggs," said Negron, a Pennsylvania state constable in the majority-Latino city of Allentown. "But basically it was all his talking points… making the US a strong country again."
...
> One poll, from Pew, suggested that 93% of Latinos who cast their votes for Trump rated the economy as their primary issue, with violent crime and immigration trailing far behind.
> Data from the new CBS poll shows that a significant majority of Latinos - 61% - disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy, while 69% disapprove of his handling of inflation. The vast majority said they judge the performance of the US economy through prices.
> When one-time Democrat Sam Negron headed to the polls to cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2024
Did he just wake up from a coma?
The dems are just as corrupt, just wiith a nicer smile. Eu citizen, here - all politicians are bent. Anecdata: Anyone who votes for a politician should stfu, stop complaining and live with it. Why should i suffer alone? Disenfranchised? Not me - idgaf. I just hope the eu gets its act together and actually does something, but it will be difficult; language alone, being one of them, and "my pie", another.
>"They believe the current system is fundamentally unfair to them"
Well it fucking is. But thinking that current king can fix it is a lunacy
What was the alternative? More of the previous administration?
People should have spoken up in town hall meetings and protest on the streets years ago. Now it's a bit too late, but better late than never. Americans rather sit on the couch, watch TV or be absorbed by their smartphone than to go out to their representatives and demand accountability. Instead they "shit" on every institution and person who seems to fight for justice and liberty. You get what you deserve guys. You can't vote with your wallet. You have to try to get to those people in power IN PERSON and pressure them. That's the only thing they understand.
You know what the most effective instrument of power is? Distance. The rich and powerful distance themselves physically from the people, so the demands, worries, accusations, questions etc can't reach them.
Well the one now is definitely worse. Not that I like the one before. Something better is needed
The reality in 2024 was that yes, the alternative was more of the previous administration.
Maybe that was never a way to whatever ideal solution or policies might be possible in the future. But the only possible benefit of the current administration is that people's eyes get opened to the lunacy that's possible, resulting in a sort of mini-revolution that enacts changes that prevent the collusion and grift that are happening now.
The Trump administration doesn't have any real government improvements in mind. They're only play is to destabilize the current status of whatever's in their sights, blame Democrats or whoever else is convenient for the mess, and profit from the confusion. Example: The Republican party has always had financial conservatism as a main goal. When was the last time the national debt or deficit improved under Republican leadership? Another, healthcare: For all of the complaining that Republicans have done about Obamacare, why haven't they replaced it with something better yet since they've had full control of the government? They've shown that they don't actually care about good government.
What we got in the current administration wasn't any kind of secret before the 2024 election. People voted for it anyway because they're susceptible to the kinds of misinformation they were being fed. Trump's latest comments on his lack of commitment to peace, the cost of housing, and the well-being of the general population (just to name a few) make it clear that he doesn't consider them important; and Republican's fealty to him show the same of them.
I prefer to live by the adage of actions speak louder than words. I’m capable of lying to present a facade, and I have to assume others are too.
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Voting for a traitorous convicted felon is why I can't stand federal level Republican voters.
What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?
For the record, I abhor my non federal level Democrat leaders, and vote Republican on the state and local level (because they are less crazy than the Democrats at this level).
> What is the point in changing the messaging when racism and sexism are at the root of the problem?
Because it is in fact the messaging which is the problem, not racism or sexism. Why on God's green earth would you expect people to vote for a political class that openly hates them, as indeed posters here are kindly demonstrating? I can tell you from personal experience that there are a great many Trump voters who aren't racist or sexist in any way. They are friendly and helpful to all whom they encounter in life. But they believed (rightly or wrongly) that Trump would best represent their interests, so they voted for him. Excoriating them as Bad People (TM) is only going to convince them that they were right to vote for Trump, because they can observe that Trump's opposition hates them.
If your goal is to reduce support for Trump (or at this point his successor, since he can't be president again), then your #1 priority should be to work on messaging. It is the messaging of the Democrats that pushed so many people into Trump's arms, and unless that is changed it will do so again. Painting with the broad brush of "they're just racist" is not only intellectually lazy and untrue, it is actively harmful to the Trump opposition's cause.
> Because it is in fact the messaging which is the problem, not racism or sexism
Yes, of course, the reason Republican voters embrace the concept of deplorable is because the Dems are mean to them. That totally makes them noble and not in fact deplorable.
> It is the messaging of the Democrats that pushed so many people into Trump's arms
He got less than 50% of the vote, if the Dems are pushing so many people to Trump they are doing a crappy job of it.
Though I do agree that the Dems suck on messaging, it is not because they villainize Republican voters. It's because they don't focus their efforts on bread-and-button progressive priorities like labor and healthcare. They blew their wad on trans rights, which just isn't a great strategy to move a lot of voters to the polls.