@Em0nM4stodon If you could ride it out, it would probably be the start of the end of the US economy - everyone would suffer, but the US stock market would lose an astounding amount of value.

I'd be far more worried overall that one or more of the cloud providers is irreparably damaged by a hostile actor, and nobody, for want of anything, can bring it back up.

@Em0nM4stodon I would be very Happy is US does that, at least my people will learn some software technology

@Em0nM4stodon my employer is an MSP that's does work for public and private sector across Australia. I'm confident that if just access to m365 was withdrawn that my local state would implode.

Oh and I'd not be able to submit my timesheets (because Entra id auth).

@Em0nM4stodon I think more concerning would be the cut-off from VISA etc. I doubt that non-US banks will be able to provide an alternative in due time if that happened.

I personally wouldn't have problems being cut off from these software companies. There are many alternatives out there.
Except for Windows itself i don't intentionally use any services of said companies. I would guess that many companies would be in serious trouble because they have no exit strategy from these cloud providers.

@Em0nM4stodon thankfully the brains trust put a lot of thought and hard work into this and made the hard call to stick with the full stack of US vendors.

... we just pay extra money to microsoft/aws/salesforce to use instances hosted in australia.

* problem solved *

:\

@Em0nM4stodon My company steadfastly refuses (so far) to use hyperscalers for our core business. This is not to say we don't have some important things in AWS - but it would be more of a "grit teeth and deal with it" issue than the end of the business.

But that's the Core. Like practically every other business here we're O365 and the way MS shoves OneDrive down your damn throat in such a way as to make every other storage location practically unusable means that a looooooot of documentation exists solely there.

We'd still be mostly on the air but probably cut off from a lot of our own documentation.

@Em0nM4stodon Fully? No. Partially? Yes. My work would do fine though.

@Em0nM4stodon Don't forget to include Starlink in your list.

@Em0nM4stodon
Actually, it's more than just a Windows and Google thing - it's about AI. If Artificial Intelligence starts getting out of control and starts heading down Terminator Road, one of the first defenses would be to shut down the internet world-wide.
Alternatively, if AI goes rogue one of its first actions against humanity would be to shut down the internet.
Either way, it doesn't look good . . .

@Em0nM4stodon
My adopted country (Philippines) would die on its arse. Google is everywhere in large companies, Facebook is everywhere in small companies. Microsoft probably less of a problem because almost every copy of Windows and Office is almost certainly pirated.

@Em0nM4stodon

Maybe this would be a good thing, to give people the push they need to stop using those and move to better alternatives.

In my personal life, I don't depend on any of those. But I would be impacted as my employer depend on those. At the same time, I see more job opportunities outside the US if this ever happens.

@Em0nM4stodon My workplace would fall apart completely if either Google or Microsoft went away. Billion-dollar corporation in Australia.

@Em0nM4stodon What will happen (long term) is that trumpista arrogance will marginalize the U.S., which has historically received significant benefits for being viewed as a stable and trustworthy country with respect to finances, etc. This won't happen overnight but I imagine that everyone is nervous and are planning how to limit any dependency on the U.S. You'll probably see a migration from Windows or MacOS to Linux, just to limit exposure.

@Em0nM4stodon successfully migrated our UK based workers' co-op from Google Workspace to Infomaniak's ksuite (Swiss based) earlier this year and we're much happier (plus our bill is waaay lower). The ksuite also replaces Slack and Zoom, so more services for less money and all encrypted.
Our website is hosted independently in the UK. Newsletter is with EmailOctopus, a UK company.
Won't be sad if we lose Instagram tbh.
I guess we might be impacted indirectly if payment processors like PayPal and Stripe go down but we could find a work around.
Of course, these are all small business solutions and should be separated from personal or activist ones.

@Em0nM4stodon no. my country would be *fucked*. NZ exists entirely on O365, AWS, and Google apps. Why? Because NZ is terrified, legitimately fearful in some ways, of the idea of running servers onsite