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Earlier quoted context omitted.
What the frack are you counting as tech industry that you managed to Russia have more than Germany?
Yandex and Mail.ru IPOs I would guess.
Hang on a second... so Europe's technical founders are disadvantaged by being able to serve particular niches?
I get that being able to sell to hundreds of millions of people gives you a great market by numbers. What I don't understand is why targeting by culture, language etc., is viewed disfavourably.
As a US consumer, you are used to a being part of a massive and hugely uniform market that also happens to speak the language of international business. As such, nearly every successful innovation company will try to enter that market.
Don't be fooled, however, into thinking that everything you use is American, simply because it is in English. I am sure most would not think of Distimo, eBuddy, MobyPicture and Skylines as European, yet they are all from the tiny country of The Netherlands. And Europe does not just sprout small tech startups either. TomTom (NL), Siemens (DE) and Philips (NL) are all huge players in their fields.
Yes, making a lot of money with innovation is easier in the American market and the conditions for founding a startup are still best in The Valley, but saying that innovation in Europe sucks really makes no sense. Perhaps most the innovation is of a different nature and scale, but it is certainly there. It is a shame that this article does not attempt to uncover these things, but instead tries to score some cheap points with one liners.
P.S. Did you know Python and Vim are both Dutch as well?
P.P.S. Did you know that most European countries hardly produce any wine? Europe is more than France, Spain and Italy.
Small markets doesn't seem to explain it. Germany alone has the world's fourth-largest GDP, which sounds like a pie worth slicing. Despite this, Russia, whose GDP is less than half as large, has a bigger (iirc) tech industry than Germany. I think the latter explanation -- market restrictions -- is more likely, and research spending probably contributes as well.
What the frack are you counting as tech industry that you managed to Russia have more than Germany?
I'm wondering this as well. Surely the computing power behind Frankfurt must be quite substantial...
But I have to agree with other commenters that regulations and laws play a huge part. Americans are definitely better at that. So, you might have all sort of labor protection, multi-week vacations, free healthcare and benefits in Europe, these laws are usually a burden on small businesses (where most innovation takes place).
Also Europe isn't causing massive bubbles every other year that throw half of the world into a depression. Just wondering if this is related, not trying to start a flame-war or whatever.
But more to the point, I don't think technical innovation has much to do with bubbles, any more than building technology caused the real estate bubble.
Why is Europe so bad at technology development? Heterogeneity, among other things. Hang on a second... so Europe's technical founders are disadvantaged by being able to serve particular niches? I get that being able to sell to hundreds of millions of people gives you a great market by numbers. What I don't understand is why targeting by culture, language etc., is viewed disfavourably.
1. Harder to expand quickly because of legal barriers.
2. Network effect/expansion is harder. Say you start hitting a network effect in Germany with some new social app... You can't necessarily leverage that in Portugal where the same simply isn't true in the US market.
3. When you serve a niche market you can't necessarily apply the economies of scale.
As a "European" from The Netherlands, I feel I need to say something about the inflammatory title of this article. Europe does not "suck" at technological innovation, there is simply no such thing as "Europe" at this scale. Like the article says: Europe is still 27 very different markets. As a US consumer, you are used to a being part of a massive and hugely uniform market that also happens to speak the language of i…
Because we invented the web and since then ... Farmville.