I say. I understand that they are supposedly cutting edge tech, but at the same time, we're hosting intelligence on an another country's soil. Especially now, there are quite a lot of alternatives that we could use, and improve, locally:
Can't find where I read this, but in context of [packet switching] and the French variant, it was claimed Valéry Giscard d'Estaing put an end to the French variant, due to US pressure. (I think it was the Louis Pouzin interview in Oral History.)
France should be kicking ass in software & computing. The mystery is why it isn't competing with Google, Facebook, etc.
[update]
An Interview with Louis Pouzin, conducted by Andrew L. Russell, Paris, France, 2012
But on the other hand, the French délégation à l’informatique were powerful. Fortunately for them, President Pompidou died. And then we had a new president called Giscard d’Estaing. And Giscard d’Estaing was not in the same mentality; Pompidou was still a follower of De Gaulle’s policy. De Gaulle’s policy
was to be independent from the American. And CII in building a network was in a way a continuation of the same policy – become independent. But Giscard absolutely had no technology vision. He was interested in politics, but not in technical things. He had advisors who had no technical training. They were people from Ecole nationale d’administration, and people who make rectangles, and put arrows between rectangles, and they think it’s going to work. <laughter> So they dissolved the délégation à l’informatique. Finished. Disbanded. <laughter> And as a result, our funding was cut.
And they also joined together CII and Honeywell-Bull and made CII-Honeywell-Bull, a new company. And this new company which had not much experience in networking, they said they would take our technology and develop it in their own system. The guy who was at that time heading Bull was an engineer. He had been at IBM before, and he was a guy who understood very well strategy and technology. So I think he was pretty convinced that it was a good deal to get what we had developed. But he had been put in place by the technical group, which was also a partner in CII, and this group was Thomson. Thomson was typically a company that was making electro-mechanical devices, but also working for the army, for the military, for the aerospace and so on.
And here you had CG, which was a huge group – all kinds of electrical things – and téléphonie. CG had apparently put a lot of money into supporting Giscard’s election everywhere. You know, the lobbyists finance the elections. And why did they finance the elections? It’s because they didn’t like the government policy with Thomson, because Thomson had decided to go into téléphonie. And that was extremely displeasing for General Electric, for CG, because they were not the monopoly but the dominant provider in France. There were other ones, but they were the big one. And to them, introducing another competitor in téléphonie was not very attractive.
In addition to that, the délégation à l’informatique had put up an industrial group called Unidata. And Unidata was CII, Siemens, Plessey in the U.K., Olivetti in Italy, and Phillips in the Netherlands.
So this Unidata group had a strategy to develop a product series by sharing engineering, sharing development, and having each one a particular specialty. And they had decided, for example, that Siemens... Siemens also was in computing, but they were not very dominant. And so they had decided that Siemens would close down the computing subsidiary they had in France. And on the other hand, the French would close their computing subsidiary in Germany. So each one would have its own clean territory. And that means that for Compagnie générale d’electricité in France that Siemens was becoming a partner of a big French company and, therefore, it certainly would be detrimental to their market for the téléphonie. The delegate from the informatique told me that. They wanted to scatter Thomson’s enterprises in téléphonie, and financing Giscard was probably a way to push them to that direction. And once Giscard was elected, so they disbanded Unidata.
Siemens was furious about that because it was really treason for them. <laughter>
Why should France be kicking ass at SW dev? The only French SW I considered was Didomi. Their product was alright, but their sales cycle was a pain in the ass.
They should be. (Starting with Joseph-Marie Jacquard, the French were there from the beginning.)
My opinion: The have the intellectual, philosophical, technical, industrial, academic, and human resources for it. But apparently they lack political will to make it happen as a matter of national policy (like US and SV-MIC matrix), and of course the past 2 decades there has been something of a brain drain as well.
Don't know about Europe but there are TONS of french coders in Montreal nowadays. They kick ass and they're super cool to hang out with. Just don't challenge them at the baby foot table.
Search pulled up this which contains this list: { US, Germany, Australia, UK, Canada, Switzerland } with emphasis on greater preference for countries with francophone cities (CA, CH), which makes sense.
