Why does Europe suck at technological innovation? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why does Europe suck at technological innovation?

#21

Post by carsongross » Thu, Jun 09, 2011, 7:34 PM UTC

Europe is great at technological innovation.

Why do Americans make more money in software?

* Pure inertia from the early cowboy days of Silicon Valley, which gave us great universities and lots of private investment capital looking for returns. (Contrast with academic grants.)

* A more straight-forward focus on technology-for-moneys-sake (really anything-for-moneys-sake) and marketing

* The U.S. development culture, to Dijkstra's eternal chagrin, is much more "Worse Is Better" so we tend to ship early, often and win the market, even though our stuff kind of sucks.

Re: Why does Europe suck at technological innovation?

#22

Post by dhs » Thu, Jun 09, 2011, 7:37 PM UTC

People, please... don't feed the trolls.

Re: Why does Europe suck at technological innovation?

#23

Post by tintin » Thu, Jun 09, 2011, 7:40 PM UTC

European Innovation Scoreboard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Innovation_Scoreboard

It show the gap is getting smaller with US innovations. But the article is stupid. They do not suck at innovation.

Re: Why does Europe suck at technological innovation?

#24

Post by chl » Thu, Jun 09, 2011, 7:40 PM UTC

adnam wrote: post #20

chl wrote: post #19

Because we invented the web and since then ... Farmville.

Who is "we"? Tim Berners-Lee is British.

According to the most recent information on hand, even the British are considered Europeans.

(More seriously, I wish people wouldn't submit interesting articles and then sullen them with dumbed-down, incendiary headlines.)

Re: Why does Europe suck at technological innovation?

#25

Post by endtime » Thu, Jun 09, 2011, 7:44 PM UTC

Surprised that `ctrl-F incent` yields no results in the article or the comments. Sounds like a simple matter of incentivization to me. When you live in a relatively socialist country that puts discouraging penalties on rewards, why take a risk?

Re: Why does Europe suck at technological innovation?

#26

Post by jarek » Thu, Jun 09, 2011, 7:45 PM UTC

synx508 wrote: post #9

ARM Holdings was the first company that popped into my head when I read the headline. Without ARM there would be no Facebook/Twitter because inexpensive mobile computing probably wouldn't have been invented yet.

Nokia anyone? Massive innovation in terms of creating cheap, portable tiny computers that we now derisively call "dumb phones" early on, when no one else was doing anything like it. Other smartphone players just came in and skimmed off the top ;)

Re: Why does Europe suck at technological innovation?

#27

Post by jarek » Thu, Jun 09, 2011, 7:48 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #2

An interesting data point. Look at the top 5 languages in the TIOBE index. Of them C++, C# and PHP were all created by Europeans. (In fact all 3 are Danes by birth.) To the best of my knowledge their founders live in Texas, Washington and California respectively. This is not a small problem for Europe.

Except Rasmus was born on Greenland and was in university in Ontario when he created PHP. Claim Ontario or Canada as a capitalist paradise at your own risk :).

Re: Why does Europe suck at technological innovation?

#28

Post by scythe » Thu, Jun 09, 2011, 7:50 PM UTC

JanezStupar wrote: post #7

scythe wrote: post #3

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 thinking of qip.ru, mail.ru and Yandex.

Re: Why does Europe suck at technological innovation?

#29

Post by paganel » Thu, Jun 09, 2011, 7:53 PM UTC

I'd rather have my car powered by a German engine (well, it's manufactured in "lazy" Spain by a German company, but it's European all the same). It consumes way less gasoline compared to US cars, and it's also a lot more reliable.

Some of you could say that reliable, low-consuming car engines do not count as "technological innovation", that we should give more praise to technological "innovators" like Facebook and Zynga. Then again, having FB or FarmVille down doesn't cause any wars, while being able to drive cars that consume less gasoline might avoid a war or two.

Re: Why does Europe suck at technological innovation?

#30

Post by laut » Thu, Jun 09, 2011, 7:59 PM UTC

While the US has brought the world many great technological innovations, "Europe" on the whole doesn't suck at it. And Europe is not France, it's a continent with many different countries.

If we are talking about the internet, these things were made by Europeans: The World Wide Web, Skype, C++, PHP, MySQL, Rails. Just to name a few things.

The car industry is also pretty high tech and the European car companies are doing well while the government run car companies of the US suck. A few of the many car related innovations from Europe: the car itself, ABS, Electronic Stability Control.