The recent COVID-App is a prime example of that. SAP plus German Telekom, neither of which is known for innovation, grab a 60M plus deal to develop a single app. In Italy a startup took over the job for 1/50 of the price and with at least as good or better job. Is the above play a problem for Germany? No. Do you they even understand an problem? I don't think so.
You are comparing costs of bakery which made an apple pie with the price of apple. 60M budget included much more than just an app, which is basically a frontend to a sophisticated government operation. If you want to make a point about inefficiency of German corporations, find the right figures first. Upd: I previously wrote, that Italian app shares the source code with German one, which was probably not correct. In…
In my understanding the Italian app was developed from scratch, definitely no idea why you think that the two app share code.
The recent COVID-App is a prime example of that. SAP plus German Telekom, neither of which is known for innovation, grab a 60M plus deal to develop a single app. In Italy a startup took over the job for 1/50 of the price and with at least as good or better job. Is the above play a problem for Germany? No. Do you they even understand an problem? I don't think so.
The German federal government had past bad experiences with the company contracted to collect car/truck tolls on federal roadways. The product launch was delayed due to the contractor and thus the government lost lots of revenue from tolls. A 15 year long fight with the owners of the company ensued. Maybe they wanted to avoid that by just putting a large pile of cash onto the table, ensuring that SAP+DTG put their be…
I am not a big fan of bending spoon, but calling them a random startup is quite misslleading.
They are a rather small company by headcount but with great success in the app consumer market and with a lot of experience in the sector.
Not everything need to be huge to be good and successfully, especially in technology.
Apologies for the stupid question, as I feel like I’m missing something obvious: why is that? Is it the regulatory environment?
Would investors want to risk investing in a anti-tech part of the world who will blame them for everything? The EU is populist in trying to blame tech companies for all of society's ills.
No, the EU blames FAANG for skipping taxes and monopolistic behaviour. They might just prefer to punish US companies rather than domestic ones.
What I don't like as an EU citizen is that our network infra is ridden with Huawei equipment. I'd much rather have US equipment and services if domestic companies aren't capable delivering it rather than One Belt, One Road. Just take a look at Kyrgyzstan and how it's going to become a Chinese colony.
Yes. I want that. This would lead to a local tech scene, actually REALLY localised products (where you dont have to wait till google decides to roll out features in Germany after 7 years) and best of all: JOBS. This would lead to millions of jobs. It would make Europe super interesting for high skilled labor and bring a nice twist into the migration problem we are facing now. Yes, this would hurt America, but yeah...…
So.... Internet censorship.
It is called protectionism.
Calling the ban or taxing of uber "internet censorship" is too funny... lol
As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the private sector in europe is currently unable to produce GAFA-sized companies in the IT sector. My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings. EDIT…
The EU just needs an investor climate similar to the US.
The only problem is that investors like the idea of cornering markets, which, due to regulation, is harder in the EU.
So existing companies well versed in getting EU funds will make new companies and move some people over. They always have a way around and have enough influence to make sure there is anway around it. EU investments like these always go to the same pockets. It is a broken system but it makes the insiders lots of money. Lots of companies exist for the sole reason to get EU money and have absolutely zero interest in mak…
There must be ways to specify that the companies cannot be subsidiaries, and that creating spinoffs for the purpose of collecting money will result in massive fines (eg. 100x what was collected). From what you're saying, the problem is not the fundamental idea of having the government fund tech companies, its political corruption inevitably preventing a sound execution of said idea.
Political corruption is everywhere. A good idea in theory that is unimplementable in reality is not a good idea.
This smells a bit Soviet. Instead of allowing small businesses to breathe more freely, take more risk and grow to US size companies (in 3x larger internal market!) they try to build a top down copy using an army of grant and procurement funds eaters.. despicable.
Which market is 3x larger? The US and EU are comparable markets in size; minus Britain the EU is economically moderately smaller than the US (by 20%-25%) however still a solid direct comparison.
The estimates for 2020 so far by the IMF have the US at $20.8 trillion, China at $15.2 trillion, and the EU at $14.9 trillion (this will be the first year since the EU's inception that China will have a larger economy than the EU).
As a european, i still think those kind of measures are trying to cure the symptoms by throwing huge pile of cash, rather that fix the core issue : that the private sector in europe is currently unable to produce GAFA-sized companies in the IT sector. My intuition is that once again the money will be grabbed by existing big companies that proved unable to innovate, but are the best at capturing public fundings. EDIT…
Europe doesn't need to create these companies. If Europe used this money to create the infrastructure for smaller companies to work together horizontally and vertically to form similar offerings they could end up with something better, at lower cost. This is a model that worked extremely well in Japan in the latter half of the 20ths century, and was mostly responsible for its economic miracle: https://en.wikipedia.or…
TB approach with „national champions“ can work too and may work better in a situation where there’s competitive market with few dominant players with unlimited resources. Look at Russia: they have achieved very high digitalization of government and society on locally built infrastructure. There are some state actors involved, e.g. Rostech, but large private companies did the majority of work, quite often not being directly affiliated with oligarchs or officials. The only thing they needed was to direct SOE to buy from local players and close the market for services hosted abroad. Technologically and CX-wise local platforms are strong enough now to expand abroad, but due to political climate this won’t happen soon. Europe can learn some lessons from this and try to do better.
Whenever I think of the EU I can't think of a single tech giant from there, countries that come to mind for me are the US, China, Japan and Taiwan. The only things I know about the EU when it comes to tech is it trying to push massive global regulations around tech. For reference I'm a 23 year old from the US. Nothing I have is made in Europe and I don't deal with any EU companies. Even my bike computer was made by a…
> Nothing I have is made in Europe
Sure, but don't forget about B2B markets. Consumer tech does not make up the entire tech industry. There have been some successful B2B tech companies from Europe like SAP and, more recently, Celonis:
Whenever I think of the EU I can't think of a single tech giant from there, countries that come to mind for me are the US, China, Japan and Taiwan. The only things I know about the EU when it comes to tech is it trying to push massive global regulations around tech. For reference I'm a 23 year old from the US. Nothing I have is made in Europe and I don't deal with any EU companies. Even my bike computer was made by a…
Spotify, Booking.com, Adyen, Takeaway.com, ASML are a couple I'm aware of - with a bias to the country I happen to be from. Also note that the EU is not always trying to push for global regulations - it's trying to push for EU-wide regulations which, by virtue of being strictest and a superset of global regulations, often end up as global regulations.
Spotify and Shopify figured out the same thing: use the large, homogenous US market to springboard and hyper scale globally, before some US company does it first. Spotify got so big thanks to Facebook providing it an artifical shot in the arm, courtesy of Sean Parker's inside position in both companies (the spam method Spotify used to promote itself via Facebook was then promptly limited not long afterward).