France only has a trade balance deficit since 2005 because 75% of tech spending goes to foreign countries. Global trading and negotiations work better for a country if it has something to offer that other don't. If you import more than you export, it means that you don't have that much exclusivity to offer. France main exports are vine and LVMH, and both don't trade well in a war economy. On the other hand, France doesn't have strong enough Cloud capacities to negotiate with the USA: the whole French market was impacted when Broadcom raised VMWare prices. Monopoly isn't good for the end user. The entirety of your value production chain shouldn't operate through a single vendor. Everyone had forgotten that tech is the industrialization of intellectual services until LLM took off. France has been postponing catching the next tech wave for a whole tide. The Cloud isn't an infrastructure but a way to sell software. The attempt to build French Clouds called Project Andromède that happened 15 years ago failed because investments went to incumbent infrastructure companies instead of medium-sized pure players. Don't expect managers to solve technical problems, even at an industry scale, and let engineers be CEO instead of putting MBA graduates at this position. In order for the French lifestyle to continue, France must continue to innovate in its own way. AWS genius economic move was making customers pay per byte sent over the network instead of a fixed bandwidth. French Cloud infrastructures are very good but the software isn't. French businesses don't cooperate the way USA businesses do, like Apple and Google even though they are competitors. USA DARPA risky moonshot projects culture is missing in France. The French public market buys too much of USA Cloud because their lobbying is so good, because the law is to chose the cheapest option, and because sometimes the call for tenders is already tailored with a specific Cloud provider in mind. USA's soft power fucked French people's perception on technology. The French state should produce software, but without competing with existing French companies nor trying to re-invent the wheel. France state-backed tech investments amount to millions of euros while its budget errors amount to billions. French engineers make the right observations first but are so underfunded that the objective is reached too late. Alain Aspect, Nobel Price winner and quantum genius, has to spend 40% doing bureaucracy. France doesn't finance the right people at the right time. It would be acceptable if this was a one-time event, but it is a chain of events that reduced France's velocity and destroyed its economy. The way for France to reverse the trend is to progressively give workloads to French providers and help them improve then grow. You are forced to buy outside what you can't make inside.
Quentin AdamFrance sensitive data should be used by AI in a sovereign way. France is a creative country, good at math, and invented the word entrepreneur. France is so critical of failure it forgets failing is mandatory to innovate, and is also reluctant to novelty. France is Europe's tech leader thanks to companies lile Alan, Doctolib, and Mistral. Having investments matters more than their sources. France relies on foreign tech investors, even though it is Europe's leading financial market, because France doesn't have capitalistic pension funds handling large amount of money. France attracts investors because it is stable and capped capital gain taxes to 30% in 2018 with the PFU flax tax. People go, invest, and innovate in places where they are taxed less. In the USA, the market finances innovation through asset managers. In France, banks and insurances finance innovation using people's savings. Because the EU added restrictions to banks and insurances investments through Basel and Solvency regulations, innovation decreased. The EU is a single market with 27 capital markets instead of one, which make circulation of capital harder. EU incumbents should be patriotic and partner with EU startups if they can to help EU grow as a whole. Tech is made of many categories and, while France missed the Cloud wave, it has decent semiconductor capabilities thanks to STMicroelectronics and is an energy powerhouse thanks to low-carbon nuclear power plants. France is betting on its strengths, energy and people, to attract investments to improve its weaknesses. France can't impose Cloud services providers to French companies for patriotic purposes because there is no good enough offerings yet. Public orders must be patriotic to help local business grow, hence the need for EU to chose ArianeGroup over SpaceX for space launches. Europe isn't a market, it is a power. When the challenge for innovators is to grow a large customer base, local states and incumbents should help. You can't complain about a lack of sovereign solutions if you don't finance and consume locally. The Cloud problem is that France strategy isn't followed by other EU countries. The two ways France is currently trying to help startups is by helping them raise more money thanks to the Tibi initiatives and by reducing complexity so that Europe becomes the default domestic market instead of just France. Almost all USA founders have an advanced technical education while only a few French founders do and most EU incumbents are old with a manager for CEO. To be good at AI, you must be good at math, but previous PISA rankings point out that France is getting worse overall due to increasing school dropouts. To reverse the trend, France will try to revamp the way it teaches math and seeks inspiration in the way high-performing countries like Singapore educate their population. Teachers will undergo a better training and pupil tutoring, that was previously only affordable for rich families, will be more accessible and democratized thanks to AI. AI will create more jobs than it will destroy. AI is dangerous for people without critical thinking which makes it vital for modern survival. The "USA innovates, EU regulates" is false and France will prove it.
Emmanuel Macron