Europe is now a corporate also-ran. Can it recover its footing? • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by j_wtf_all_taken » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:03 AM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #277

Barrin92 wrote: post #99

As usual the article is almost exclusively concerned with market capitalization as an indicator of economic success. Countries like Germany are dominated by small and middle-class, family owned business. 'Big corporate' is indeed more successful in the US or China but it's just one model to manage an economy and I don't think it's that great. One of the most important points is also buried at the end of the article >…

“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…

Yeah but doesn't Apple rely on European companies like Bosch for sensors and stuff? So, no iPhone without those crappy uninnovative European companies.

Oh and Linux and the WWW were developed in Europe, if I remember correctly?

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

#362

Post by bartread » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:04 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #335

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nokia? Lack of scale?

Nokia couldn't compete because they made a string of incredibly poor investment and management decisions, such as the N-Gage, until their mobile division was eventually bought out by Microsoft. Even with Microsoft's scale they couldn't turn things around.

The reality is that there were a number of mobile phone manufacturers making lots of really bad decisions whilst trying unsuccessfully to compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung. They aren't gone from the market because they lacked scale: they're gone because they were stupid.

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

#363

Post by satellite2 » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:04 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #334

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…

I think you make an interesting point, but your analysis suggest that what is most important for you is the wow factor of innovation, not innovation itself.

> Leading product centres are

I disagree, leading product centres measure marketing capabilities. Why do you think EU continue growing at this pace? Because we're also producing the innovation that goes into the iPhone and are making money of the composants that goes in. How many parts do you think Siemens built for the Falcon 9?

And since you like the wow factor, don't forget where neural nets where invented, big pharma (even Pfizer Covid vaccine was invented in Germany) and Spotify for instance.

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

#364

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:05 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #335

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#365

Post by baq » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:05 AM UTC

tasubotadas wrote: post #306

MperorM wrote: post #284

If you remove the bay from the equation, the US starts looking much more like the rest of the world. I now live in Copenhagen Denmark but still maintain a decent network in the bay. The difference of culture is astounding. More than anything else the bay created a culture of innovation and excellence that cannot be found anywhere in Europe. That it happened to be the bay area that became this hub and not eg. Copenhag…

>If the great minds of the bay collectively moved to Europe Why they don't move?

Weather.

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

#366

Post by j_wtf_all_taken » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:05 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #335

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They couldn’t compete due to structural restrictions on scale.

Mhm. Cause a working marked with healthy competition never did anything good.

Just one question, how did European car makers then become what they are? Even though its impossible?

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

#367

Post by ahartmetz » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:06 AM UTC

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…

The BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine was AFAIK developed entirely in Germany by BioNTech. Pfizer helped with regulatory affairs, logistics and mass production.

It is also interesting that three key people at BioNTech (founders and an original developer of mRNA medicine) are immigrants. That is an interesting similarity to SV. Soundcloud was also started by two Swedes in Berlin. That one is probably entirely due to the cultural capital of Berlin - from what I hear, Sweden is a good place for software businesses.

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

#368

Post by barry-cotter » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:06 AM UTC

tcoff91 wrote: post #246

bennybob wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also wages in tech in the EU are laughably bad compared to USA. I'm in the UK, same problem. Yet everyone seems to think that a couple weeks more holiday makes up for it.

Isn’t university for your children free in Germany? That’s like a 100-200 thousand dollar savings if you have two kids you want to put through college vs the USA.

The average college graduate in the US has $35,000 in debt. There are plenty of excellent, cheap public universities. If you don’t want to work in journalism, academia, management consulting or one of the other bastions of privilege and pedigree there’s little reason to pay the premium necessary to go to a top tier private university. And every single person who pays sticker price to go to a no name private college is wasting their money.

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

#369

Post by dmitriid » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:06 AM UTC

fifilura wrote: post #336

berkes wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

Volvo's R&D is in Sweden.

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

#370

Post by okareaman » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 8:08 AM UTC

berkes wrote: post #296

okareaman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the Apple mothership, Google, Facebook and Twitter headquarters just a few miles from my house, it's hard not to feel hometown pride and really, why should I? I'm aware of their problems but I have normal human emotions. Yet they moved their taxable entity to Mars, if I understand things correctly. I'm not sure what it means to say that they're an "Earth" company. And what do we actually gain from having compani…

Not trying to put you down, but isn't it weird to feel pride for something you contributed nothing to? Maybe you are very old, and built the infrastructure those successful companies now used, in which case I'm wrong and some pride is warranted. I also cannot understand nationalism for the same reason. Other than a marketing scam or massive delusion, that is.

I can't say if my code is still in use, but it had an impact on a lot of people for awhile