Wasn't sure if April fools or not. German companies have launched so many of those "rivals" to AWS by now, all of them require you to call someone/send a letter/FAX to create a VM. I wonder if they understand that the success of cloud, SaaS and generally majority of modern, scalable businesses comes from the fact that it _can_ be self-served.
Hetzner requested a copy of my UK passport though.
An image of a passport proves nothing btw, especially since Hetzner is not a UK Govt Agency, that I am aware of, and has zero methods of authenticating such 'evidence' of ID.
The usefulness depends on whether it's an external or an internal requirement. For something Hetzner need themselves it's quite useless. If there's an external requirement to verify the identity of the customer (say to shield them in case of people renting servers for criminal purposes or whatever) then an image of your passport proves that Hetzner tried to verify your identity and that you forged a government document to trick them.
Of course today we have better methods, but Hetzner was founded in the dot.com bubble and since then focused their innovation on providing cheap and reliable servers, not on changing business processes that work (or making pretty interfaces).
generally when I've been asked for my passport details from a Iaas / PaaS / SaaS provider it has been for AML /KYC purposes; so it is like you say, they don't need to know the details per se, just that they've forwarded it on to an external body / company and that it has been checked.
It may prove a fraudster have basic Web searching skills. [1]
If someone is willing to do something wrong, why these companies imagine they wouldn't provide a fake document ID?
Imagine one is spinning up a Hertzner VM to hack and steal something or run a DDoS attack. The minute they see: "upload your passport ID", who thinks they'll go "oh no, we're busted, let's work honestly instead".
It's almost childish how ridiculous online KYC (know your customer) processes are.
Assuming you're being genuine here, OCR on the passport photo plus a string comparison on the card details provided. This is why the criteria for ID scans is so strict, and also why these verifications can take "up to 24 hours".
I just signed up over the weekend for a simple storage box. Today I realized after contacting their support that order was paused pending identity verification, they use something calles idenfy.
Plenty providers have verification only when something seems "off" in some way. Amazon has both lots of experience and data for payment verification and the margin to absorb fraud costs that do go through, smaller providers not so much.
I opened two accounts (different emails, credit cards, billing address) in the span over two years from Colombia. First one worked perfectly fine, but for the second one they wanted me to provide id before spinning up anything. So not sure if this was introduced recently or if they have some system that flags accounts under certain conditions to provide additional info that I tripped the second time.
Hetzner: Excuse us Mr. S. Pamking from Armenia, paying with a credit card of an elderly french lady, could you please send us some id? After that we will gladly spin up your 100 VPS Mail-Servers.
> Excuse us Mr. S. Pamking from Armenia, paying with a credit card of an elderly french lady, could you please send us some id?
Amazon's cool with it. I guess they don't care as much? I do wonder where the fraud prevention requirements come from. It's an interesting question if they are even for fraud prevention.
I assume it happened while the UK was in the EU. You can verify a passport electronically via the identifiers via the EU border control network, AFAIK.
Hetzner aren't aiming to prove your identity. They're most likely aiming to reduce their fraud risk by requiring you to have a relatively-hard-to-fake document which matches your payment details.
In my case they just wanted a copy of my company registration certificate.
I recommended Hetzner to a client as I always heard good things on HN about it, but the experience was pretty bad, their (managed) platform is outdated, they are slow to respond to support tickets and respond like they didn't even read it and they are pretty strict and not willing to enable specific features on your dedicated machine.
I still think their performance/pricing is good, but sales/customer experience was really poor.
It was a hyperbole - surely some of those companies let you work with them in a more convenient way than using FAX, but they all have very limited offering and bizarre onboarding processes.
Hetzner had me wait one billing cycle (as a new account) before they allowed me to request restriction to port 25, or vm, load balancers, etc limits to be lifted.
I tried to sign up for a private account with Hetzner some 4 or 5 years ago, and they requested a scanned copy of my ID card or passport to proceed. I can understand it as they get legally entangled in any eventual abuse that may occur on their systems, but also, I can't understand it. Additionally, scanning and digitally sharing personal identification documents is illegal in some European countries under anti-forgery laws concerning important documents and banknotes etc.
Strange, I never had to send a single FAX in my life in germany. Especially not for any cloud offerings located in EU/germany. I would LOVE to see proof for that.
"...Two-thirds of German companies regularly use faxes, whereas only half of them use video conferencing technologies, and just one-third use messaging services or online collaboration tools..."
86% of German companies employ 10 or fewer people [1]. I'm not why we would expect them to use online collaboration tools or video conferencing pre-pandemic?
Fax still being common is true though, it's mostly used as a quicker alternative to mail with established legal standing and more convenient than rolling out electronic signature schemes. You can still live and work without a fax in Germany, you will just be sending more letters. I've never sent a fax or letter to a German cloud provider though (despite using several of them)
This time is different: This is not backed by the govt or german telecom but by the richest German alive (> 50B net worth). I think (hope), the chances are much higher that he's in for the long run with an appropriate amount of ressources.
I think, the long-run is much more important than whatever the specific feature set it rn. (Also, actually talking to people might be more of a feature than a bug, after all?)
This may be due to unions. In one of my previous jobs we were providing a software for digital subscriptions to their news site. The plan was to also integrate with their SAP for offline subscriptions. We offered to do the integration in a way where a user would buy online and it would get inserted into their SAP via an API. This was a no go, since before they've had a couple of people doing this manually and they couldn't fire them due to unions so they decided we would be sending the orders for offline subscriptions to them and they'll physically enter it into SAP. I wish I was joking.
Strictly speaking, this is not Lidl (chain of grocery stores). Lidl is owned by the same parent company - Schwarz Gruppe, which has a pretty big digital branch with several companies focusing on different products (e-commerce, cloud infrastructure etc). StackIt is one of those companies.
It is good to see one more local competitor to AWS backed by the largest retailer in Europe, who also uses those solutions for their own e-commerce projects.
What percentage of cloud service costs as paid for by customers is electricity cost?
BTW what you're showing here is small consumer electricity rates. Large consumers of electricity in Germany have significant fee exemptions. It's one of the reasons why small consumers have it more expensive: in Germany, lots of the costs are offloaded away from the industrial users.
"...The energy cost to power a single server rack in a data center in the US can be as high as almost $30,000 a year, depending on its configuration. In a data center with 100 cabinets, the cost to power those racks each year can be over $3 million. Data center professionals need to ensure that they are correctly monitoring energy consumption and efficiently managing capacity..."
I was not talking about costs to the data center operator. I was talking about what the cloud customers pay. If you're insinuating that 40% of cloud service pricing is electricity, surely that must be a cloud service operating at a major loss because only a small fraction of a cloud service cost is the data center cost.
I am not insinuating that. I am arguing that a major part of a data center costs is electricity, and that an important percentage of what cloud customers pay comes from that data center cost. My comment was clear that was not the only cost for cloud providers.
The thing is, price tags for cloud services are so much higher than what data center costs would be for hosting an equivalent service yourself that I doubt that the electricity rate difference would make a cloud service in Germany outright uncompetitive. What is 40% in data center cost may very well be <10% in cloud service pricing.
Just like anyone else having datacenters in Germany. AWS and Hetzner come to mind. Even though end customer electricity prices are among the highest not just globally but especially within Europe electricity prices for businesses with high demand are generally much lower and even ignoring that electricity prices won't have much of an effect on product prices.
I don't know the answer to this question, but living in Germany and interacting with their products, I'd say they are pretty good at what they do -- for consumers. I don't use Amazon since years, but recently had to and was shocked that it's basically impossible to find anything, just hundreds of products and no way to filter through anything. Their competition is way ahead of them. So I don't know if this translates to IT / cloud / etc, but it's not like they are completely clueless.
And as others have noted it's not just Lidl, this group owns also Kaufland which also swallowed up another chain (Real) recently. So they are huge.
That's true. But Covid tracking in Germany is done by the Gesundheitsamt (health office), which is the government institution (like everything ending with -amt).
Maybe I'm missing something, but the prices look bad for what is offered. Why would you use them over say a managed server, for example from Hetzner [0] or Netcup [1]?
So, that's what Schwarz IT has been so actively recruiting for. I got contacted 3+ time, however each time it was a rather low tech position, right under some technically illiterate MBA chap, so I did not even bother submitting a resume.
I have serious doubt they would be able to mount a serious challenge to AWS. These German companies - DB, DHL, SAP just don't have cultures meritocratic enough to be competitive with the new boys. Not everything in the world is a post office or a rebar manufacture line.
I was an employee of the Kaufland IT back then, which then was integrated to the Schwarz IT some years ago. Only a small team worked on StackIt back then - it probably grew the last years, but most will not work on this.
I also don't think they will be a serious contendor to the current companies
Those Schwarz digital branches have the culture and structure that is not different from Berlin startups, only a bit more mature. I think they are capable.
Very German. Tech companies here don't like open signups. I have absolutely no idea why. Not a single SaaS startup I've worked for or have worked with here has had open signups.
I think that's because there is no real "open signup" for starting a company here, either. It's not like people here are legally allowed to try out a business before officially starting it - that would be highly illegal. In the US, you can spin up and spin down businesses the way you would an AWS VM.
That, and Germans value contracts/stability over many other things - including the customers themselves.
I've started companies in both countries - the burden and costs of starting and running one in Germany is far higher.
In the US, I can start selling muffins, wooden furniture, whatever to my friends, family, and neighbors without doing anything. I can walk into a local grocery store and convince the owner to carry my products. I can test out markets and use Stripe, Paypal, Patreon: any payment service I want without doing a single thing. At most, I just have to pay my taxes at the very end of the year. I can do all that while working 1, even 2 jobs if I want. I can pick up a shift at Uber, then work on my business. You can't just start an Etsy store here.
None of those things are possible here and are all underlined by ones appetite for risk.
Handling VAT is a literal nightmare. Monthly invoices, dealing with the Finanzamt on a monthly basis for the first year or two. Everything comes with stipulations/exceptions and requires a careful reading of the law - which of course, is impossible for anyone to understand, so you're forced to hire a lawyer.
It costs like 20 bucks to dissolve an LLC. How much does it cost to dissolve an UG?
I wasn't trying to insinuate that one country is better than another. With the burdens comes stability. My company is rock solid here. There will basically never be a competitor for me, because the burden is too high for anyone to stomach.
The contact form mentions that they're only looking to serve enterprise customers right now, they probably want to prevent small accounts from swamping the system while they're working on expanding their availability.
I think they'll have a hard time finding people to staff that, Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their personnel and maybe they think that if Amazon can get away with that that they qualify at some level but datacenter employees are not going to like being dealt with like that. Lidl as an employer has a trackrecord that would cause me to think twice about hosting with them, no matter what the price.
That said, being part of the same 'group' there might be enough insulation to avoid this link damaging the company, but since the Lidl connection is proudly mentioned on each page in the footer. I think that they either don't realize that it might be a risk to declare that so openly or they don't care in the same way that scammers don't care about you figuring out they are scammers, if you are offended by that then they probably don't want to hire you because you just might be aware of your market value.
For some more information about Lidl employer-employee relationships:
Lidl are a big employer and I'm sure they're not perfect: I don't like the "others are worse" metric for arguing but unfortunately Lidl are consistently one of the better chains so it's hard to buy this.
It's also true that Amazon is consistently the worst employer in all areas including their AWS staff, where they are worried about (and I quote) "Burning through all competent human capital"[0] in certain parts of the world.
With those two factors (Lidl being above the baseline, amazon being below): your comment seems like FUD.
And your comment reads as though 'AWS is worse' is a defense of Lidl. It should be possible to do right by your employees, not to see who can get away with the most harm without being outright liable.
'Little' things like asking your female employees that are on their period to wear colored headbands to be allowed toilet privileges or employees committing suicide due to work pressure does not fall in 'not perfect', that's outright hostile.
The "problem" here is that it's being positioned as a dichotomy between the status quo (Amazon) and an entrant (Lidl) and your claims that Lidl are "bad and I won't use them" implies that you would use Amazon. Since that's what is in the topic.
Not saying they're perfect, as mentioned, all I know is that they're a big employer and externally: they pay better than the competition and have a much higher employee satisfaction rating (where I can see it) than for instance ASDA, Walmart or Swedish chains like Coop and Netto.
I won't use Amazon either. The title references this as an AWS competitor and if you read my comment carefully you would probably realize that I did not exactly glorify them, rather the opposite.
Well you seem to desire attacking Lidl no matter the facts or experiences, so don't be surprised at other's reactions.
Lidl is generally cheap store (there are exceptions when they provide above above-average quality for little price), but where I come from, people are generally happy to work there and they sure pay above average within business.
Well you seem to desire attacking Lidl no matter the facts or experiences, so don't be surprised at other's reactions.
Lidl is generally cheap store (but there are exceptions when they provide above above-average q, but where I come from, people are generally happy to work there and they sure pay above average within business.
That was mostly because they couldn't recruit staff, the free market at work. But when faced with the option to squeeze people and push them beyond human endurance Lidl will do it every time. Employees have killed themselves because of the work pressure there.
I seem to remember one person in France (?) but it could be Renault or some other French company, so I might remember wrongly. Are there others?
[Edit] After some googling, yes there was one in France for Lidl, and three for Renault, and three for France Télécom (and more). Is it that other countries do not relate suicides to work (but they exist) or is there something special about France?
(never worked for Lidl, or in France and only shop at Lidl if needed, I don't like their products very much)
"Blackmail, pressure, favouritism, bullying, sequestration in an office, incitement to suicide and intimidation: the accusations made are edifying, the testimonies surprising. The management of another time."
Witness the number of people that 'didn't get it' and realize that I am not at all surprised that some people would write something like that and mean it, superfluous punctuation or not.
Yeah I was also a bit confused about that, like few months ago 2 employee had to die during a storm just because Jeff Pesos couldn't afford to keep a fulfillment center closed and people still work at AWS without conscience issues?
No idea what you are talking about. Here in Germany Corporate Lidl is paying fair, retail management on entry level is being paid way above average and even the retail employees are paid above competition (on the same level of Aldi).
Those traditional companies will never be able to compete with absurd FAANG salaries (that are obscene in my opinion anyway, but that is not the topic) due to the nature of the business. If this thing scales, however, then salaries could be higher.
Finally, I am living in Germany, I have worked for German companies. Many of us dont like the US, we dont like those American services, too. If there was a German alternative, even with a premium, we would pay that. It has to be competetive in functionality, but not necassarily in price.
Really? This is contrary to what I've heard from friends who've worked at Lidl. Admittedly my sample size is just 3 and all local to Finland, but over here Lidl seems to be regarded as a good employer, and when you factor in the various bonuses, they pay well above market rate.
> he is on some personal vendetta against that company
I'm on a personal vendetta against any company that abuses its employees. Lidl, Amazon, and others besides, consider me an 'equal opportunity employer' when it comes to abusive employers.
Also, your comment is well outside the HN guidelines.
Over here in Romania Lidl pays some of the best salaries in the retail market, the worst are the likes of Carrefour, Cora and I think Auchan, too. They also have an IT division in here, not sure what their relative pay is.
A close friend of mine works for the local Lidl division, she is part of the team that does internal communication and as such she has been directly involved in "marketing" compensation-related stuff and related perks to the company's employees and such. To me it does seem that Lidl, the company, tries to treat its employees as humanly as possible, which is saying something when it comes to the retail market.
You are correct. Lidl pays their staff more than any other UK supermarket. But this might not be the case in other countries, plus doesn't mean they don't abuse their staff in other ways.
Source: friend who was a market researcher for Tesco
> I think they'll have a hard time finding people to staff that, Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their personn
Not sure what branch you are refering to, but that's definitely not the case with their IT department. Their pay and benefits are well above market rate.
Pay is ok, working hours are not ok. In 2019 I was offered a 42h contract (Überstunden abgeholten) which I of course declined. Almost 0 mobile working possibilities back then. That changed with Corona, but it tells a good picture imo.
Funny you say that and pick up Amazon as an example. Lidl is known for not treating retail workers the best, but still orders of magnitude better than Amazon treats their retail workers.
That being said, both are irrelevant, since it won't be the first company that treats retails workers like shit, while handling the IT workers like spoiled rock stars.
They've had a whole series of scandals, it is one of the worst employers in Europe and some of the stuff they do is just incredible. Some of them are more pressworthy than others but Lidl never really stopped.
Sorry, but those are all “accusations” or “claims”, and almost all refer to misconduct of management in one particular warehouse or shop. Not comparable to the spying scandal from a decade ago.
Of course misconduct of management would happen 'in one particular warehouse or shop', where else would it happen? Lidl consists of corporate, warehouses and shops. Most opportunities for abuse will be present in the latter two.
As for the spying scandal: the same board that condoned that still runs the company today, they conveniently scape-goated one individual and threw him under the bus but just like other scandals involving multi-nationals the real perps typically stay out of the firing line.
Lidl paid a 1.5 million euro fine, which is a pittance and their exec a nice golden parachute, who by the way now has a nice little thing going as a high flying consultant:
> I think they'll have a hard time finding people to staff that, Lidl has a long history of underpaying and abusing their personnel
Their store staff yes indeed, but they won't be able to get away with that for IT staff. The situation is similar to Amazon... those who are essentially disposable cogs get treated as such as far as the law allows (and in some cases even worse), the ones who can't be replaced get paid really well.
AWS is a direct competitor in retail market it's common for big companies not to chose AWS if they are in same business, with Microsoft Azure it's a bit different story as they are the IT company not like Amazon.
Anything that hosts anything is seen as a "competitor to AWS" since some people are able to boil down AWS to a "cloud host". Admittedly they've grown to do much much more specific things, but one could argue that's the center of their offering.
Anything that hosts anything competes with AWS in some way. AWS will certainly do more things than any competitor, but it doesn't mean it's not competing.
Yes. If I remember right Schwarz Group doesn't use AWS because they don't want to give money and data to a big competitor, but that doesn't make their hosting setup an "AWS competitor". And as far as I can see the site also doesn't claim anything like that, so this is a clear case of "don't editorizalize titles!"
Well you have a kubernetes cluser + various dbs and message brokers. This is what 99% of clients actually use in AWS. It makes sense that exactly this is part of the minimum viable product.
To be honest it took some scrolling but it does seem to offer some cloud services like managed databases, elasticsearch, rabbitmq, redis, k8s - this is not just barebone VM host.
Failures and problems with SAP integration are incredibly common, I would not be placing blame so hard on LIDL themselves. The root cause is usually that SAP goes for any new product / addon to whoever they feel the market leader is in the respective area, models their processes (usually without questioning them too much) and then packages this as a new product or addon.
New customers then have to either adapt their processes to the process of the "market leader" (no matter if they are fit or not for the purpose or are actually efficient) or they have to adapt the SAP workflows - and that is where it gets hairy as fuck and where the problems arise:
- ABAP programmers are low in supply and high in demand (as the role requires both DBA and general coding skills as well as a ton of SAP-specific knowledge and the patience to deal with the bullshit that is the SAP UI)
- add to that that most people buy SAP skills from third party consultants with all the bullshit that comes with that (inadequate oversight, juniors being sold as seniors, near- and offshoring with timezone and language differences as well as cultural differences)
- the further you deviate from the SAP-prepackaged process the harder any patch or heaven forbid major update becomes. If you fuck it up badly enough you are just finished with releasing the last patch and then you already are in crunch mode again for the next patch.
In my opinion and experience SAP is only relevant these days because of lock-in and "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" effect and because they are relatively quick at implementing law changes as code, not because the people who actually have to use it want to use it - quite to the contrary. And, speaking as a German, the fact that this company is just about the only major IT company that Germany has is both extremely sad and exemplary for German IT importance in general at the same time.
Failed is not the correct description, more like top management began to realize the longterm effects such a big SAP-integration would have on their processes, changed their mind against it and reversed their direction. Don't blame them for acting and axing such a huge project
Without speaking to their likelihood of success (enough posters have already spoken on this), one thing I think is interesting is Stack-it have limited scope to compute/storage/security and network orchestration resources.
It's almost like AWS before they expanded to having a mind numbing number of service offerings. Who can keep up with all these? Who, other than people training for cloud architect certifications?
I worry that AWS has lost focus on its core services and instead is trying to market every shiny new thing under the sun... I work in finance, my corp is in us-east region. I think we had like 3 AWS related incidents that caused serious production outages last year... All from use of core AWS services. Now we are looking to support cross-region fault tolerance to defend against this. Supporting such a strategy sounds like it's going to be quite expensive, and technically complex.
> STACKIT services are currently offered to the Group’s internal
> customers and are continuously optimised according to their
> requirements. In the future, it is also planned to offer the
> services on the external market.
"You need scalable enterprise cloud solutions for digital business processes while maintaining complete data integrity?"
Nitpicking here, but my god, can German companies/universities/organizations please start paying for native English speakers to do their copy-writing and STOP translating directly from German?
It's "Do you need". Not "You need..."
This is the typical translation of the German marketing "Du brauchst <blah>?" or "Du bist ein <blah>? Dann...". I see pattern this allthetime, such as "You are a student who wants to work on innovating projects? Then apply...".
This may sound like a rant, but I genuinely think these little details would go a long way to actually showing that the German economy does have some sort of international mindset. This persistence in sticking to these wrong ways just makes me think that 'OK this is another conservative old-school minded German company trying to play unicorn'. If there's no attention to detail or care for the little things on your front-page marketing website - your first contact with your customer - it just leaves me with a bad feeling about the parts I don't see.
I don't know why it frustrates me enough to write a comment in the middle of the day, I guess I really can't understand how global German corporations still, as a rule all make this same error, which I suspect is just the tip of the iceberg of a larger symptom of not wanting to think outside/beyond the DACH bubble. And I feel a sense of sadness that such a country with great prospects just drags its feet lazily into the the future.
Edit: I also see this all the time in Email correspondence, you can immediately tell if a person is a native German speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an English email after "Dear X, we are writing <blah>" (which would be 100% correct in German, but somehow no one teaches this in English classes in Germany that in English it is capitalized). For a country that loves rules, this drives me mad.
Edit2: This is definitely a rant and it triggered me emotionally for some odd reason. I concede that my interpretation is quite exaggerated, so please do excuse me! I'll leave the comment however because I'm curious to know whether any others feel the same way.
Edit3: I will also say that translating between German and English is hard as there are some fundamental differences in their structure. There are very colloquial ways to say or not say certain things. That is why native speakers are essential for such things.
Edit4: Please take this comment with a pinch of salt. This is the rant of an fatigued expat who decided to blow some off steam about the oddities of their host country that drive them bananas. For posterity, I will say there at least 10 amazing wonderful things about German culture that I love, for each odd cultural thing. But you know, at some point when you see something for the umpteenth time, something snaps inside of you and it all comes out, especially on a mid-week day like a Wednesday.
You are probably right, but on the other hand, correct English or not, anyone who cares will read "blah, blah, blah, skip, skip, skip, where are the actual specs?".
Yeah, that was my issue as well. Grammar aside, that sentence is so full of corporate-speak as to be virtually meaningless. It might as well just be in German.
Yes! The usual corporate websites are worthless and don't present information. Every non-profit, club, or community provides a humble but clear website with the required information and menu!
Look at that bloated visual rich websites:
www.ibm.com
www.siemens.de
www.salesforce.com
What is wrong? The "About" must be at the top, the things you provide must be linked with some words at the top or left. They put their images, much Java-Script, and useless stuff across the homepage.
The English wording? A minor problem. I'm thankful that Andrew explains what is wrong and how to fix it! As a German, I'm annoyed by Germans who use every chance to tell other people that their English is much better (than mine).
This goes beyond a nitpick into reactionaryism, in my opinion.
I am a native English speaker who has lived and worked in many countries around the world. In some of those countries English was the primary language, in others it was formalized in the workplace as the business language, in others it was just a lingua franca used by immigrants and expats of many different backgrounds to communicate with one another. One of the best things about English is that it easily adapts to all these roles. It's a flexible language, and there are many different ways to express the same thing. I believe that's one of the reasons why it is so popular as a second language.
English as it is spoken in the professional sphere in Germany is different to the English as it is spoken in the professional sphere in the US or Canada or England or Australia, and that's fine. Ditto India, Singapore, Philippines, South Africa... Unlike Spanish, French, Chinese etc there is no central regulator that defines how the English language is supposed to be used. Grammar can change depending on where you are. English speakers all over the world essentially understand one another, despite using different structures and idioms.
While it is true that completely bastardized grammar can become more difficult to understand, and may result in the language being spoken getting classified more as a pidgin or creole, I don't think it's especially helpful to "nitpick" over this particular issue - a sentence structure that is easily understandable by anyone in the world who can speak English. If "do" gets dropped by English language speakers in the context of questions, what's the big deal? Especially in written language where we use a question mark anyway. Who cares?
I really recommend "Oxford English: a guide to the language" by Ian Dear. It is/was published by Oxford University Press but if you look around on eBay, Abebooks, amazon secondhand etc., you can often find a very cheap "IBM Edition" -- they co-published it along with a dictionary of quotations (presumably they helped compile the latter).
It's a really fantastic volume that goes into such detail about Indian Standard English, for example, that it will make you love English even more.
The international mindset is to be tolerant with non-native speakers. I find it perfectly ok when a German company uses expressions that hint at their origin. Similarly, I'm not bothered when a British company uses British words or a Texas company uses expressions that are typical for their region.
What triggers me, however, is when people misspell expressions in ways that reveal that they have no clue about where the expression comes from. For example, if someone tries to sound smart by using the latin expression "per se" but actually spells it "per say", that reveals to me that they are probably not as educated as they want to appear.
> if someone tries to sound smart by using the latin expression "per se" but actually spells it "per say", that reveals to me that they are probably not as educated as they want to appear.
As a student of both German and English, this mistake looks weird to me, as you are supposed to start the question with the verb in German (Brauchst du ...?), and this acts as a pretty good reminder to translate the question with the do in English.
Agreed, as a poor student of German, I'd say "Brauchst du...?" is correct and your German 101 teacher will mark you down for anything else. "Du brauchst...?" is informal, and OK in advertising copy, but "You need...?" in English is an even lower, more informal register than that.
I understand where you're coming from - that companies of this size should be able to afford native English translators, especially if they're internationally facing.
But I think that most people (in the international business community) don't notice the details your talking about, so in the end, it really doesn't make sense to pay for a translator. I live in Germany, and even my most brilliant German friends (with basically native English skills) cannot grasp the subtle differences of when to use "this", "that", or "it" (as in, "this one time at band camp" vs "that one time at band camp", "it's awesome" vs "that's awesome" vs "this is awesome"). It's a dead give away, but almost nobody would ever know except native speakers.
> Edit: I also see this all the time in Email correspondence, you can immediately tell if a person is a native German speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an English email after "Dear X, we are writing <blah>"
I don’t get it, which part is supposed to be capitalized, “dear” or “we”? As a native English speaker the sentence looks correct as it’s written. Or maybe I have bad attention to detail.
Both. The greeting is a separate entity and despite ending in a comma or semicolon is not part of the first sentence of the body of the email. This is inherited from English standards for writing letters on actual paper. Unless it's being graded for a class in school, is part of some official communication, or is going to a copy editor, though, it probably doesn't actually bother anyone if this convention is flouted.
But if you write it on one line, the capitalization of We is definitely wrong.
However you can always tell your correspondent is German by their capitalization of second-person pronouns! Also the awkward use of "kind regards" because they can sense that "with friendly greetings" doesn't sound right.
"Dear Ms. Smith, we would like to inform You that Your cloud subscription will soon be expiring. Please send Your payment by registered letter to..... Kind Regards, Dieter" ;-)
Thanks. I haven't been taught this rule but my brain seems to associate the capitalization requirement with the newline rather than the salutation itself.
My logic/rationalization is that even though there's no period after the "Dear,\n", the newline makes it a separate paragraph and therefore a separate sentence.
> I also see this all the time in Email correspondence, you can immediately tell if a person is a native German speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an English email after "Dear X, we are writing <blah>" (which would be 100% correct in German, but somehow no one teaches this in English classes in Germany that in English it is capitalized).
TIL thanks.
Sadly once you are in the professional world, nobody correct you anymore, so you can't improve/fix your English easily.
What you say is write and I am guilty of that too. I would feel very rude or out of place telling a colleague of mine to capitalize the first letter after Dear X. Even if I wanted to. So I just write my reply correctly and hope they notice :)
You are talking up an 'international mindset', but what you are writing here goes against that. They are not writing native english. They are writing ESL. A true international mindset is accepting that the english the people of the world write to each other is not the same english as british people speak.
Would you also have corrected it if had been text written by Nigerians or others that use a creole or dialect of english?
There's also the cookie prompt (yes, headline in capitals)
> BEFORE GOING ANY FURTHER: BRIEFLY ABOUT THE PROCESSING OF YOUR DATA
But... that said, as someone who's only done a bit of German on Duolingo, I don't mind, especially for early-stage services. It says to me more work needs to be done around l10n and copywriting, but as long as they keep improving the core product, it's okay.
In fact what annoys me more than awkward English are teams that download and use generic English-language website templates, resulting in super-generic product pages.
Is this an option in German business culture? Are Germans open to conveying the (mere) gist of a sentence?
Ages ago, we translated our manufacturing software to German. Our German team were an absolute joy to work with. They were so thorough, they'd correct our English, and then translate to German. In other words, our German translators caught mistakes missed by our own technical writers. So awesome.
I'm not sure the reverse is even possible, culturally. Can a German marketing and PR firm accept a localized version of their message? Off the top of my head, I can't think of a German lifestyle product or consumer brand. And the German brands I do know -- BMW, Mercedes, Kraftwerk -- don't much use words for marketing. They don't need to.
Bullshit is hard to translate. Culturally, German branding may have comparatively less bullshit. And therefore less compulsion to translate nuance. Just describe what the product does.
Amazon recruiting will say stuff like "code ninjas needed to invent future!" Versus "get beaten like a rented mule for two years, to make Bezos even more rich, then fall over dead". (How would one translate either version?)
This LIDL/Schwartz pitch, perfectly normal for America, comes off kinda weird, like maybe satire, from a German company.
No, you did the right thing by ranting. You both shared some knowledge about contemporary German commerce with us and gave the company some constructive feedback for its marketing website. You're on to something here.
What if customers that are extremely sensitive to grammar rules end up being very expensive customers to keep happy? Filtering them out on the front end might be a great business move.
I imagine something like
"Our customer support is being overworked by completely banal minutiae, what can we do?" We compare different intake funnels, and customers that were presented with a badly translated homepage never reach to support with such issues. Let's make sure to always run that page from now on, those customers aren't worth the hassle. Make sure they stick with AWS and bleed them dry.
Nothing odd about it. You pointed out a lack of attention to detail. I’m guessing one will find other areas of their product that show a similar lack of detail and attention.
I absolutely loved this comment. I feel total empathy not specifically with the topic, but for how you feel.
I moved back to my home country (not DE) after 10years abroad and oh man, those thoughts are constantly with me. I'm doing an effort to readapt and hope it works well.
This is the comment I was waiting for :) It's strange isn't it, to suddenly be negatively receptive to something that you never noticed bothered you in the past.
This doesn't bother me at all, especially at an individual level.
I want to make clear - it's not the language issue per se. I think native English speakers are incredibly privileged to have their language as one of if not the international language, so I could never fault a person for not speaking a foreign language well (I'm sure I butcher the German language in ways that would make Goethe himself cry out in anguish).
It's the fact that this is an international company launching a product in a professional setting. Again, I don't quite know why this bothers me so much, but I feel its within the context of other cultural things I experience.
I feel like the other way around it's also pretty bad, if not worse.
Technical things written in, or translated to, German sound so boring and stiff that you want to immediately run away.
> This may sound like a rant, but I genuinely think these little details would go a long way to actually showing that the German economy does have some sort of international mindset.
They can be defined, but nobody does so explicitly. Consider the classic example of the order of adjectives.
You can have a big brown bag, but if you have a brown big bag, something sounds wrong. You can have an excellent blueberry muffin, but not a blueberry excellent muffin. You can meet your 27-year-old Ukrainian friend, but not your Ukrainian 27-year-old friend.
Unless you majored in linguistics or learned English as a second language, you probably never once even thought about the rules of adjective order in English (and in other languages the rules are often different!). But you know them, follow them, and people who don't follow them don't sound right to native English speakers.
I knew you were gonna mention this one and I don't think it really qualifies as it's not really an unspoken rule, it's the pretty well known and strictly defined adjective ranking order.
It is perfectly valid indeed. This person's main complaint is that Germans, who have enough English in their society that that one might even expect dialects to form, are not putting enough effort into disguising themselves as native English speakers. I'd call it 50/50 that the people who built this product speak English at work.
This is like ranting about Microsoft's website using American spelling when clearly they're selling to British people as well, only worse. This is pretty short-sighted. To OC, please keep thoughts like this to yourself. I hope you're not doing this for all the different stylistic usages of English out there, otherwise things are not looking good for literally any Australian business.
This sort of "feels wrong" non-native yet grammatically correct use of language is precisely the kind of thing that would be fine on an internal doc where comprehension is the name of the game, but falls flat on its face on external communications where a more fuzzy "trust" is trying to be engendered.
Or to put it more abruptly - if the release marketing is so low effort they haven't even bothered to get a professional translation, it suggests the same care and attention may have been lavished on the product.
Having worked with them, I can assure you, it's gonna be a disaster.
I've been called into a project as a consultant, and it took them over 3 months to even get any credentials for VPN, let alone repositories.
I just can't see this working out in any shape or form.
I also worked with people from Schwarz and some smaller company who manages some business data. It's going to be a disaster. I'm not even surprised that you need to 'Get in touch'. They do pretty many things manually and simply wrong. Client is processing large Excel file for 4 days? Somebody simply kills the job and the whole process starts again. Big words, cheap execution.
i mean right now one can't even sign up properly. but obviously since they want to compete on a platform level as opposed to whatever you were doing for them, surely "not being able to create an account" isn't gonna draw users away from gcp/aws.
This is some first-class Denglish here to begin with, but because of the wrap on the hyphenation it took me a while to realize they were not suggesting we "proof IT" nor stealing the grammar from Fridays For Future.
> Start your journey into digital transformation with our powerful cloud and colocation solutions.
Maybe their target market is companies that are not yet using computers?
Also, I love that one of their references is... Schwarz Group. And another one is owned by... wait for it... Schwarz Group. Which leaves one consulting company that I vaguely suspect might have some non-STACKIT relationship with Schwarz Group. References, check! /s
..and when you are a customer there you know that you are core business and not just on some service that might be ended any day due to some strategic coin flip. I have no idea how these sidecar business ever establish themselves in terms of trust (same certainly applies to early years AWS)
The only companies that have justifiable merit of saying they have launched a rival to AWS are either government backed entities, Snowflake or IBM and/or a joint venture of server manufacturers.
I have no clue why IBM cloud has such a poor market position considering how dominant of a business it was. But there is still hope. A combined forces attempt could be a viable strategy.
Snowflake has changed cloud service providers several times to my knowledge. In my opinion their offering and business philosophy is unique to allow themselves to venture into this business.
For government backed cloud you have Alibaba cloud as an example. Regional cloud service peovider with government funding or active monitoring is an evetuality in my opinion. The Ukraine situation proves my point. Keep an eye out on India for this. I feel like the govt is gonna give it a shot before 2030. The reason behind this deserves its own article.
Most of these AWS alternatives seem to be based on OpenStack, and there are many hosters around the world who offer the AWS services most people use. EC2+S3+EBS+load balancing is all most businesses probably need. Add some mid-2000s style hosted databases and you're probably set up. Truthfully, most businesses don't even need all that, but modern development practices tend not to care too much about efficiency.
All you really need to start competing with AWS is a data center and a shiny dashboard. They already had the data center for their own use, so extending it to provide IT services is quite a logical next step.
Granted, STACKIT isn't as complete an offering like Open Telekom Cloud, but it's close enough to matter.
That is a very good point. After I made that comment I kept wondering what is the real difference of traditional private data centers and big cloud. Like they do 99% of what the cloud companies provide. It is all about the buzzword.
I tell interviewers that I don't use AWS or GCP because I don't need to use it. I use my RPI where I can use docker/virtual environment, SSH/SFTP, use it as a NAS but it is always a hard sell. In the last 5 years the term "Linux Experience" has been switched to "AWS Experience" yet they require exact same skill set! The only issue is that billing dashboard. But beyond that I wonder, has things really changed.
I don't know what the status is now, but back when I was working for IBM, their Bluemix offering demonstrated a complete lack of commitment to operational excellence with seemingly routine downtime, with an undercurrent of "It's 1700, time to sod off for the day" regardless of the state of their service.
It also didn't help that they seemed intent on paying 35+% less than other competing tech companies.
I am big on B2B businesses. I think the higher bureaucracy the better moat! But I think, IBM really tested this philosophy to its breaking point.
My sentiment is that IBM Cloud should be broken down to smaller distinct ventures and hiring visionary leaders at each ventures. Like government, enterprise, Small Business+Startup+Open Source etc.
I have this vision that all the products will be "similar" but just different enough from the originals to avoid a lawsuit, just like the stores. So, Radshift, S2+1 storage, Appflower, DynomiteDB, etc.
Wonder how long until we get our first request to add support for this to infracost https://github.com/infracost/infracost? At least the price list looks a lot simpler than AWS / Azure / GCP - more like UpCloud! Though honestly, if it starts to work, I'm sure the number of prices/services will grow exponentially.
I wonder how secure AWS really is. Most people need some VPCs, some VMs, maybe k8s and a database all with global redundancy. Skills and training is almost the biggest barrier but with Terraform and/or some standardized APIs I'd think most mid level firms could switch in a month or two.
Cloud Hosting, in the Center Aisle of Lidl, next to the other random items for sale.
In all fairness, this move makes sense to monetize any surplus they have in DC capacity. In terms of competition, their offering competes more with Equinix and the like than with AWS.
How would I know this is Lidl? It's not in the references, which are underwhelming. From the site, this is no different from dozens of other consultancy-oriented cloud providers.
> The Schwarz Group covers the entire value chain of the food trade like no other trading company, from production to sales to materials management. Digitalization and its pressure to change are noticeable in all business areas. To continue to successfully serve rising customer needs, new digital business models must be iterated even faster – and this while the data and system infrastructure becomes increasingly complex. As the number 1 in the European retail business, the Schwarz Group knows that those who do not digitize will lose market share in the long term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarz_Gruppe is the parent of Lidl. And the Schwarz IT business group runs StackIT. There is also Schwarz Mobility for fleet management of company cars. I don't think it's meant to be associated with the Lidl brand.
"STACKIT is the digital brand of Schwarz IT and therefore part of the IT organisation of one of the world’s largest retail groups.
The Schwarz Group consists of the well-known brands Lidl and Kaufland, as well as Schwarz Produktion and waste and recycling management companies."
I think this cloud is specific to grocery and retail, which makes sense. I worked with a large medical insurance chain that attempted to do the same thing, but for other insurers.
I'm not familiar with large European companies, but is this kind of like Aldi offering AWS-like services? Clancy's Cloud Compute, and Casa Mamita's Message Queues?
If you discount the title, which is a bit click-baity and not actually featured on the website, this makes a bit more sense.
This is one of several companies in Germany reluctant to host with the existing US based cloud providers. So, they decided to use off the shelf software (openstack probably) and stick it on computers in data centers that they own. That's of course not an alternative to AWS other than that it is a self-hosted cloud and as such an alternative to not self-hosting it. Nothing wrong with self hosting stuff. Lots of companies do that for all sorts of reasons. White labeling it and selling your self hosted cloud to others is also not that uncommon. There's an enormous long tail of data centers that do exactly that. Lidl is big enough that they probably could justify spending a little extra on hardware and doing a little side business with like minded German companies.
It's a weird side effect of a lot of relatively large companies in Germany that are effectively family owned businesses that just became very large over time that don't like the idea of not being in control of their own assets and infrastructure. They are old fashioned, don't like change, and not very flexible.
The added dimension here in Germany is that a lot of these companies have yet to modernize their IT and are relatively clueless on that front. Lidl would be a good example of such a company. And not for a lack of trying. They are the same company that botched their deal with SAP after spending half a billion on them by insisting on so many customizations that the project just never shipped and they pulled the plug. They want custom everything and they ask for stuff they think they need without understanding their own needs. It's a combination of stubbornness, arrogance and corporate stupidity. That same reflex is driving them to do this. They could probably have saved quite a bit of money by just using existing cloud services.
I actually have to deal with this sentiment as we are based in Germany with our company. A lot of Germans are mildly psychotic/irrational about things in the cloud. I've met Germans that insist that financial service can't be hosted in AWS. Horse shit of course, many banks in Germany do exactly that and Amazon has a nice data center in Frankfurt for that. It's one of their main sites in Europe as it is a big market and they'll comply with whatever to keep that business going.
Google Cloud is currently what we host on because it is good, cheap, and easy to use. But we have customers that don't like that at all and we are looking into dedicated setups for these customers on various German providers. They'll get the same stuff at a great premium that we will charge them for without any shame. These services are typically more expensive, harder to use, less reliable, and more poorly supported. There is no upside other than the "hosted in Germany" thing. Pay more for way less. Their choice but a huge PITA for our operations.
My bad, I took the title from this thread¹ from 2 years ago which mentions that Lidl is planning to launch AWS competitor.
You are correct about German companies distrusting mainstream cloud providers. I guess the target audience for Stackit is mostly those German Mittelstands. I work with German corps and they would definitely have a mainstream provider with someone reliable like Lidl as a backer. In once case we found out the Google Analytics is storing the data in US centers by default and that made a lot of people deeply unhappy. I do have doubts that they might fall short of delivering their goal, but it is indeed an interesting development.
With GDPR, it is seemingly illegal to host anything in the US, though (or anything with PII) - so that is one (forced) upside to these types of services.
Yes, that's why Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have data centers in Europe that are used by European customers to target the European market with services that comply with all sorts of European rules and legislation. Including the GDPR.
1) AWS has very serious regulatory capture in Europe - e.g. for banking, government, possibly else it is the only one approved solution.
2) Those pension-fund owned German enterprises are legendary bad at IT. The best way you could describe the culture there is anti-agile & anti-meritocratic.
While the ambitious European cloud project "Gaia X" is unlikely to produce tangible results for some time, the Schwarz Group has created an offering under the STACKIT brand that promises scalable cloud solutions from the DACH region with maximum data sovereignty. The STACKIT cloud is still in the BETA phase, but the cloud service should be available soon.
So, when I buy a $5 bag of potatoes from lidl, how much of that money is going to pay for these servers?
I would hope that for a retail business like Lidl, far less than 1% of the revenue goes into IT staffing and systems costs. I worry that the number is closer to 10%.
Lately I would consider myself lucky to find a bag of potatoes at Lidl. In the US at least they seem to be struggling to keep shelves stocked. I have 2 Lidl locations within 15 minutes of me and for the last few months the shelves have been pretty bare at both. To fill them up they have started stocking many more name brands which are not priced competitively with other grocery stores.
I understand there are currently supply issues but the Aldi across the street from one of the Lidl locations isn't having this severe of an issue. The traditional grocery store chains in the area also don't seem to be having anywhere near the same level of supply issues even for their store brands.
