“From Geek to Star” #5 - Which Tech in a Fragmented World?

If you missed the previous episodes, you can access them online here.

🗓️ This Week – Chapter 4, Part 1: how do we design for today's world?

This week, we will shift gear and go from concept to application. In last week's newsletter when I introduced the concept of the “T++ Engineer", one strength I mentioned was Nurturing curiosity in tech and beyond, exploring ethics, systems, geopolitics, sustainability, etc… thus allowing you to bring global perspectives on the table in your work. 

In this Sunday's newsletter, I would like to share with you some global perspectives as food for thought and raise questions. And then suggest a collaborative exercise we will do online together during the week. Ready? Read-on! 

🌎🌍🌏 From One Global world to Fragmented Regions

Since the end of World War II and the creation of the first general purpose computer (the ENIAC, which was filling a room!) in 1945, from a digital technology perspective, I would sum up the dynamic of its evolution linked to geopolitics in the following rough phases:

• 1945 - 1999: One Global world from a digital technologies perspective, dominated by the West and more precisely by the USA. In the East, what developed most were scientific and theoretical contributions as well as strong STEM of talents pools in various countries.

• 1999 - 2018: Western (and mostly US) technologies / tech stacks continue to develop across most of the world: Amazon, AWS, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc… but in China, some big giants also rise (Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei…) and China starts to become less and less just the “factory of the world” but also independent on tech stacks. However, a global world order is put in place in terms of trade and economy, ensuring easy flow of capital, goods and services across countries.

• 2018 - 2025: accumulated tensions between the West and China (the West reproaching to China for unfairly closing easy access to their market while having mandated transfer of Intellectual Property and technologies, China reproaching to the West of having benefited of cheap labours for years) lead to a decoupling of the West and China on multiple economical aspects. 

• 2025 - ?: As the new Trump administration takes power, we witness an unprecedented shift in the “Western” World. The US have been breaking away since the beginning of this year the united Western front that has been put in place since World War II, as well as breaking away the international trade mechanisms, making many other countries and non US companies realise they may not be safe from using so many US technologies.

From a tech stack perspective, if you are a US company you may still go fully for US tech stack. If you are a Chinese company, you could go for a fully Chinese tech stack. But what about a US company operating in China or vice-versa? Which tech stack to choose there? And if you are a European, a South East Asian, a Middle East, etc… company? Which tech stacks to use now in which region?  

🤐 No more travel for Sensitive Data?

Another phenomenon we have been seeing growing more and more for the past years is that more and more countries are asking for sensitive data such as personal data information of their citizens to be geographically localized in their own country. China has indeed passed many digital security laws for the past few years. Europe has been passing different digital laws to protect European consumers that US are pushing back on. The shift of dynamic in the US is also raising questions on how personal data may be handled tomorrow by US authorities. 

To give an idea, a list of countries that have data localization laws which are more or less strict, sometimes across all industries, sometimes for certain industries: China, Russia, Vietnam, Brunei, Indonesia, Nigeria, Australia, Korea, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, India, Brazil… It is to be expected that as the world becomes more fragmented, more countries will tighten their data localization laws. 

This raises a question: what does it mean regarding how we architect our systems? With the advent of the cloud, we did not have to care about where the data were stored, just looking at data replication across regions for the sake of performance if the market to address was global. But with these growing regulations on data, are we losing the benefits of the cloud?

💲 The Tariffs war

The current tariffs war on goods and services may spill over on technology stacks as well. Why? For example, between the US and Europe, the US are threatening Europe with raising tariffs on goods and services imported into the US from Europe. Europe on its side is realizing that a lot of its trade deficit is on the digital economy. If the tariff war escalates, Europe may decide to increase taxes on the use of US softwares: AWS, GCP, Azure, Snowflake, Oracle, etc… That would have as a consequence an increase of costs to use these technologies for European companies using these technologies - meaning almost any European company. 

In this example, if you are a European company, should you re-think about your tech stack? What would be the alternatives? 

🧠 Preserving cultures, languages, regional specificities in an AI world

As GenAI is being used more and more across the world in society and in the economy, it is important to remember that LLMs are trained on certain sets of data and verified by human people with a certain culture. That's why you don't get the same information, points of view if you are using an application with a LLM of OpenAI (US) or of Deepseek (China). Truth can therefore become relative but without people realising it:

• If you ask a US LLM to bring you up information on hotels Paris, France, it may bring up hotels owned by US companies more than French companies even if there are more hotels of the latter

• If you ask a US LLM or a Chinese LLM information about a Vietnamese poet, it may bring you partial information on this poet as it would not rely on sources of information in Vietnamese

• LLMs may not treat the nuances of local languages and oversimplify how they interact in these languages with human users.

When designing systems for different countries, will you therefore make it simple at the risk of oversimplification or even distorted outcomes or will you integrate the different specificities at the risk of complexity of your systems?  

These are four examples of topics making the news currently which may not seem at first glance related to Tech. But as you can see, they do raise questions even on the Tech side. As you get in the habit of asking yourself these questions looking at what is happening in the world, you can then discuss with colleagues in other functions (business, compliance, operations, etc…) in regards to the business of your company, and share your thoughts on how this may impact tech choices. That will make them realise that you are able to bring global perspectives on the table and link that to your field of expertise. 

🙏 I’d Love to Hear From You:

During the coming week, I will post the above in a Linkedin post and ask for ideas on how experts or tech leaders would design their tech stack in these situations.. If you want to, you can react to my Linkedin post by sharing in the Comment section your thoughts on how you would design your systems and solutions taking into account these global perspectives. That will start at a small scale a bit of interactions between all of us.

And feel free to follow me on LinkedIn for short-form reflections and updates between newsletters.

✨ Stay curious, stay connected!

From Geek to Star by Khang | The Way Forward