People believe the line will always go up, and maybe it will, but it's still at least possible for it to be on a quite painfully downward trend for over 12 years at a time.
I'd argue it's also not at all irrational to worry that we may be on the precipice of a similar situation right now, or perhaps even on the precipice of the situation at the end of the 1920s, where it would have taken more than 35 years for the S&P 500 to recover from its previous highs.
Your colleague is probably more risk-adverse than is rational (and I would say more risk-averse than most Austrians or Germans), but I would also argue that a lot of people blindly throwing all their retirement money at the S&P 500 might not realize just how much risk they are exposing themselves to.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...
So it's either put everything in a Sparkonto, where it gets eaten by inflation or buy housing.
European banks play very negative role because they aggressively upsell their investment funds and schemes so for many people stock exchange means investment fund with management fee which oftentimes losses yet the growth, if happens, never catches up with the market growth.
In DACH you often need both to get public contracts.
I also noticed that costumers are weary of American cloud solutions and SaaS solutions.
Most are aware that they already are one White-House-decision away from being non operational and do not want to make things worse.
They might not pay a 10x premium, but a 2x premium definitely. Even written guarantees from established American firms are nowadays seen as a bit lacking in credibility.
"Dachsprache" (roof-language) is actually a term used by some linguists (sometimes translated to umbrella-language) to refer to a dialect that becomes the standard language of a large region with a varied dialect continuum. E.g. the dialect of Florence became the "dachsprache" of all of Italy.
Germany had “D” Austria “A” Switzerland “CH”
Sidenote, I always thought Dachli was an especially great extension. 'Li' for Liechtenstein here plays the double-role of also being the diminutive form in Swiss German and some south German dialects that you can stick on the end of a word to make it sound small and cute. Hund -> Hündli, Sack -> Sackli, Nest -> Nestli (yes this is the origin of the Nestlé's name)
Maybe this is confusing due to the Brotli compression algorithm. In that case, it should also be Brötli but was probably a pragmatic choice to change the ö to an o.
Europe, even the UK, prices tech startup significantly lower than the US (a colleague once said that in the US you get funding to turn an idea into execution, in Europe you get funding to turn your execution into money), plus we were tech/retail, so our valuation was just never the same as a pure-tech (or SaaS) business.
Because of this, we had numerous SaaS pricing discussions where the sales rep didn't seem to understand that their pricing was just a non-starter for us. "Why wouldn't you pay $15k a month to save half an engineer's worth of work?"... because our engineers don't cost that much, and we don't have that money.
So much of SaaS pricing is predicated on customers being B2B, pure-tech, VC-funded, plenty of funding, with exceptionally high engineering costs. Essentially: cost is not a concern. Most of the world is not going to pay another $30/m subscription for every employee.
Why not show your pricing like any other provider does?
Contact UK sales team? They don't believe we could even use their product because we're not a BigCo with thousands of employees. After weeks of back and forth calls, they ask us to pay $100k to get "certified" for API access, with further details on pricing available afterwards. Endless warnings about multiple customers purchasing the API product but lacking the technical ability to implement it.
Contact US sales team? Contract signed and account set up within 2 days, $3k a month. Same company, same product.
Oh, wow, salesdrone. Sell me harder on what a good interface you’re selling.
What else, do we have occasional non-reproducible behaviour? Frequent stability and scaling issues? … … non-standard error codes, dare I hope?
Don’t tell me, the excitement is in finding out the hard way, just take our credit cards.
I chuckled on this one. I mean arent these the, like, "the bare minimum" rather then "even extra mile" thing. Using local language and pitched to local business you want to sell to kind of sounds like a basic?
Overall article is fine, really. but that sentence was funny.
I was a bit shocked when I talked to an Austrian colleague once and they told me they wanted to get into investing, but losing any money at any time was completely unacceptable. They had looked at investing in S&P 500 ETFs etc., but felt they must have misunderstood something, as they didn't understand why anyone would invest in anything that might go down, even temporarily.
So the thesis of the article definitely feels plausible to me.