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Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

economist.com

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Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#331

Post by sudosysgen »

nxc18 wrote: post #304
ativzzz wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very US mindset. I live in the US and I completely disagree with your outlook on life. Great food with friends, or a vacation with family provides so much more satisfaction to me than anything a job could provide. The only thing a job provides that those things can't is money. I'm not so egotistical to think that I'm special and not easily replaceable. I'm no Steve Jobs or Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. I'm just…

If you stopped working, society wouldn’t care. If everyone did, there would be a problem; no more good food or vacation accommodations. I’m frustrated in the lack of big picture thinking in this discussion generally. Imagine how much better off we’d all be if the people at Intel, Boeing, or Qualcomm took their jobs seriously. Imagine if there was (non-joke) US competition to DJI for drones. Imagine if there was an An…

Honestly, on the balance, I don't think any of the examples you mentioned would do that much to my general happiness. I care about the other things in life so much more than about processor performance.

If Google Maps hadn't come someone else would do it. They didn't invent digital maps.

I don't think society in general would be very different. If we lost basic things like safety, food, and so on, then yes that matters. But if we're being honest, big tech in the big picture of our daily lives is really just candy.

The thing that is of much bigger import than all of those put together for most people is healthcare, housing, and eventually climate change.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#332

Post by pelasaco »

I founded one company in Germany. We sold it to a big holding company. We developed network devices. We had a branch in US. If you are German and used to our bureaucracy, it was business as usual. It was quite ok to have 30 days holidays and see the office mostly empty in Summer. We used to have 10-20% of our engineering team as students, writing their degree thesis in our office, which used to bring a lot of innovation. We had some support from the State, when hiring people that were unemployed, where the State paid 50% of their salaries and we paid the rest. It was good specially to re-educate people without any job perspective. They got some basic training in facility management, QA and basic IT. Salaries are lower than in US, but people - specially in the software development branch, are kind of minimalistic, which is pretty different of our American colleagues, which almost all of them wanted expensive cars and their own House. Our devices used to compete with US and Chinese companies. We had our niche and our solution was considered more stable (but with less features) than the others. I think that's the main argument of buying something "made in Germany": Fair business conditions and stable product. Not the cheapest one. Not the one with more features. But rock solid, with long term support, etc.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#334

Post by JumpCrisscross »

satellite2 wrote: post #319

This article is truly bizarre. The main point it makes is that the top 500 US companies grew faster than the top 500 European ones in the last decade or so. But then it quickly mention, without any further analysis, that both their GDP actually grew at a similar pace. So the entire EU economy grew at the same speed than the US one but not its 500 bigger companies. So all else being equals it means that the smaller US…

> the entire EU economy grew at the same speed than the US one but not its 500 bigger companies

This is literally the article’s point. Europe and the U.S. grew similarly. The U.S. and China produced more large companies. (The Continent’s larger companies also being older than the other two’s.)

> supposedly more investment in R&D

Not supposedly, factually. The article explicitly states this. It’s the Economist; if you need a source, they’re available on Google Scholar.

> take the global innovation index, the number of Nobel price per 100'000 habitants, the number of registered patents per year or simply the size of the economy

Nobel prizes and patents are measures of innovation, albeit not commercial ones. Leading product centres are another. The article measure the latter.

Europe has constrained its big businesses and scale-oriented entrepreneurs. America and China have not. This is a tradeoff, and we’re seeing it play out. The Economist takes one side; it’s the side of iPhones, AWS, the Falcon 9, drones and other businesses with economies of scale. It’s against social sensibilities aligned against “big business.”

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#335

Post by JumpCrisscross »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #316
kortilla wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“No big companies” is a fine policy for things that don’t require a lot of money to innovate on. A small business will never be capable of producing anything like the iPhone for example. Pushing the envelope on tech is very expensive and this is where Europe’s current model doesn’t work. If it’s just companies reselling existing things or incremental tech (e.g. grocers, telecoms, utilities, airlines, etc), then small…

Europe had iPhone precursors before iPhones were a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator And don't forget ARM was initially a UK/EU design. Arduino and Pi still are. Also not doing so badly with fintech and entertainment. https://www.information-age.com/value-of-european-tech-compa...

> Europe had iPhone precursors before iPhones were a thing

That’s the point. Where are they? They couldn’t compete due to lack of scale. They couldn’t scale due to structural restrictions on scale.

The next iPhone isn’t going to come from Europe. It may be first developed there. But an American or Chinese copycat will rapidly advance upon them.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#336

Post by fifilura »

berkes wrote: post #289
thijsc wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to know where to start! Looking at the Netherlands, where I'm from: There are many fast-growing tech companies. Both big and small. Bigger examples are Adyen and Elastic. GitLab started out here. This is a pretty nice overview, which still misses a lot: https://www.notion.so/Dutch-SaaS-Landscape-89504403a57e43f58... There are many many tech companies with 10s of millions of revenue that aren't even on this list.…

... Just Eat Takaway. Booking.com are from the Netherlands too. Spotify is Swedish. As is Klarna and Mojang. SoundCloud is German. Mixcloud British. Several of the covid vaccines were develeoped in europe (albeit under the umbrella of US companies such as J&J). Volkwagen and Volvo are beating Tesla in sales numbers and in getting self driving to market hands down. There is lots of high tech in Europe. Just Because th…

It is not possible to argue that Volvo is European anymore unfortunately.

It was sold by the american company Ford to the chinese company Geely.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#337

Post by suction »

Europeans know all that, yet they don't see the US and the bigger is better mentality as a good example - more like a dystopia, especially since 2016. This has led to a state of mind in Europe which can be described as "let's do the opposite of whatever the US did, so we don't have to suffer through the same fate". The only company that is still somewhat of a shining example to Europeans is Apple. That's it. Facebook, Walmart, Starbucks, Tesla, and the others mentioned, are seen as dangerous trash. Apple is awesome though, and one company that wouldn't look out of place in Europe with its dedication to consumer privacy.

And China can't be compared to any Western-style democratic system anyway.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#338

Post by C19is20 »

thijsc wrote: post #143
238475235243 wrote: post #43

I've lived in a few different parts of the EU, and couldn't imagine a worse idea than starting a company there (which I did, once). Starting is hard enough without the general negative attitudes, the government insanities, the insane taxes, the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly). And I was in one of the two best EU countries, God only knows how bad it is in Spain or Italy or…

Reporting back: Your comment is utter nonsense. There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well! Reliable and cheap health care is a huge boon for small entrepreneurs. There’s little regulation to deal with as a software company. Child care and great schools are cheap or free. Yes firing people is much harder, that is a different context compared to the US you have to properly plan for. Which we do over…

Firing isn't 'harder', it just has to be done correctly.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#339

Post by potamic »

238475235243 wrote: post #43

I've lived in a few different parts of the EU, and couldn't imagine a worse idea than starting a company there (which I did, once). Starting is hard enough without the general negative attitudes, the government insanities, the insane taxes, the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly). And I was in one of the two best EU countries, God only knows how bad it is in Spain or Italy or…

If work ethic = employees working very hard, I don't think it is a good indicator of a business doing well. From my experience in software at least, Europeans tend to have an excellent work discipline with healthy work-life boundaries. When you look at aggregates, the productivity is pretty much on par if not better, and you have to question why other countries promote this culture of peer pressure where employees constantly feel the need to outcompete each other, while the business thinks it's extracting maximum value out of its resources.

Re: Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing?

#340

Post by [deleted] »

thow-01187 wrote: post #318
yoz-y wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major problem in EU is not really starting the companies. Most countries have ways to incorporate by filing a form and sending an email or two. The problem though is financing, French investors for example are really stingy and you won’t get somebody to just throw a few millions at you to see if you succeed. France has decided to build the “French Silicon Valley” multiple times by grouping schools and companies t…

> French investors for example are really stingy and you won’t get somebody to just throw a few millions at you to see if you succeed Isn't that...normal? Where did the attitude come from - that startups are somehow entitled to funding worth of several lifetime median incomes, for their half-baked business ideas that are unlikely to ever turn profit? That if the country doesn't shower the founders with angel investor…

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