31–40 of 43 posts
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?
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What the frack are you counting as tech industry that you managed to Russia have more than Germany?
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...
Guys were talking tech in country that built stealth planes in 40's. And that boosted US and SSSR into space.
Have you really not seen what krauts are up to for the last 50 years? Have you not seen those fine wagens they build. Or impressive industrial technology they poses and continue to evolve? Have you seen the tank they built?
SAP, Siemens, BASF, BOSCH, etc... Theres hardly a piece of modern technology built that doesn't rely on German tech.
The Germans may not be building the blingest widgets and the hipest social media experts. But in this gold rush they are selling a metric fuckton of shovels.
I live in Belgium, and in my opinion I've had plenty of opportunity to do interesting innovative work. 6 years ago I wrote an SVG renderer in actionscript, on top of a DXF-to-SVG convertor in PHP. 5 years ago I wrote my own rich web grid component, backed by a metaquery system that allows users to point-and-click together arbitrary filters. 3 years ago I switched to a web app architecture of javascript components over JSON-RPC services.
IMHO, that was interesting and innovative work, but you've never heard of the product it went into (myMCS), because the company I work for focuses on the european market and has decided to do that without seeking external financing. That's typical of european tech companies. They operate on a local market, and they take on less risk so they don't grow as aggressively. That doesn't mean there's less innovation, just that it's less visible.
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.
I'm only speculating, but these are my thoughts: 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.
Take netflix. Setting that in the 27 countries of the EU requires 27 different contract negotiations with the respective copyright organisations.
Another example would be the social web. Suppose a French and American facebook launch at the same date. Given the same growth rate (with the more or less exponential networking effect), the American can simply buy the French facebook after a small amount of time.
(Western) Europe is pretty good in technical niches, which seem to be mostly business to business. Just not quite as visible.
Yet, as a European (through and through I might add) I believe American innovation comes from some superbly creative and inquisitive minority. This: http://vimeo.com/19829560 we do not have in Europe.
Finally, do not forget that European population is shrinking and aging. That has a tremendous effect on all growth figures. Perhaps on innovation too, but that I doubt.
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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...
mail.ru?!?!? Frankfurt computing power!?!?!? Guys were talking tech in country that built stealth planes in 40's. And that boosted US and SSSR into space. Have you really not seen what krauts are up to for the last 50 years? Have you not seen those fine wagens they build. Or impressive industrial technology they poses and continue to evolve? Have you seen the tank they built? SAP, Siemens, BASF, BOSCH, etc... Theres…
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 d…
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Yandex and Mail.ru IPOs I would guess.
Selling US products in Germany – which was basically colonized by the US after 1945 – is bound to be easier than selling those same products in Russia or China.
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 :).
Furthermore I didn't make any claims about a "capitalist paradise", either explicitly or implicitly. In fact another of the three is Bjarne Stroustrup, a professor in academia. He may live in the USA, but he's an academic, and academia is generally not filled with rabid capitalists.
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.
Not entirely sure how you can look at the economic history of the past 3 years or so and think Europe doesn't have any bubbles or financial crises. 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.