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

economist.com

731–740 of 905 posts

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

#731
post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The first identifiable ANN was proposed by McCulloch and Pitts in mid-1940s. First embodiments were made in the United States as well. > How many parts do you think Siemens built for the Falcon 9? Few if any Siemens parts in a rocket are irreplaceable; there's no other Falcon-9 maker though yet. It is also a separate question how would it play out for Siemens if were they starting up in Europe today.

By no other Falcon-9 maker, you're ignoring the equivalent but slightly more expensive Ariane 6. Difference is around 7 million USD per launch. Both can piggyback multiple cargo pieces. The one and only difference being that SpaceX launches more often and is a bit cheaper. Also looks cooler when the booster lands. The turnaround time is similar.

But Themis is coming and this advantage won't last forever. SpaceX better hope Starship stops exploding and is as cheap to operate as they hope it will be.

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

#732
post #473

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…

Fairphone is European and small. There's really interesting enineering under the hood. If anything, Apple is the counter example of being efficient at innovation. They mainly package and market existing ideas in a really efficient way, but having such a capitalisation actually create so little is a waste. The same money spent on a lot of smaller companies is much more likely to produce actual innovations

> They mainly package and market existing ideas in a really efficient way

This is completely erroneous. They do often take ideas originating from outside the company, either by acquihires, consuming open source, or simply just using unprotected ideas.

However the amount of resources they pour into refining and integrating those ideas into a platform that can be manufactured at scale and that consumers and developers can absorb is very large.

It’s fair to criticize Apple for not originating core technologies, but to suggest that they don’t invest much in developing them is just inaccurate.

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

#733
post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I people freely move from one service or product to another, usually it's because the new service is cheaper or better than the old service or product. That's direct value to the end user right there. Moving to AWS from running your own data centres is vastly more cost effective for most companies, you can build systems faster, you can scale them instantly, you can move resources between regions easily, you can focus…

> You cannot buy hardware like it anywhere else, at any price. Strange, I bought a PC with 2x the specs at the same price as a maxed out Mac…

You’re sidestepping GP’s point. Does your PC have an equivalent to Apple’s Secure Enclave, for example?

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

#734
post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I look at my own country we want the doctors and scientists but NOT the wretched refuse of teeming shores. Americans think it's racist but actually it is just business.

It is racist, and apart from that you definitely didn't try to get a job as a doctor being an immigrant in Europe (academia is less regulated, but is not a thriving job market by itself)

he says he doesn't want people who don't contribute

how is this racist?

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

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). I moved here from the US to start a company, and for anyone reading, listen to the above advice. (I'm not a US citizen, so non-trivial to do a startup).

Since we are piling up anecdotal evidence. I am in the NL and starting a company took, I don’t know, 30 minutes of my time? Filling in a form on a website and a 10 minute appointment at the Chamber of Commerce. Filing taxes is really straightforward. E.g., for VAT , the administration program that we use spits out quarterly numbers, a submit them through the tax office’s website. Having started a business twice, both…

Was this an eenmanszaak ( sole propietor ) or VOF ?

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

#736
Lots of cope here. Market cap isn't everything, being in business is stressful and it made me sad, there's more to life than money, etc. All true, just as long as you're ok with being gobbled up by Amazon. Amazon if you're lucky, otherwise some random inscrutable Chinese holding company. Then again, maybe not so much daylight between those in any case.

On the bright side, you'll have even more time to reflect on how there's more to life than money!

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

#737
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, very small-scale thinking that misses the forest for the trees. Yes, you don’t care about processor performance. Fine. What I care about is the people in my life not wasting time because of shitty Android phones. I care about things like being able to give my parents my old phones, which have years of productive life on them; Qualcomm is the reason that doesn’t work on Android. I care about the people who can’…

Google maps was developed by Where 2 Technologies in Sydney. Google bought it in late 2004, same sort of time OSM started (in the UK) Microsoft AutoRoute predated that by a decade - NextBase (A UK company) built it in 1988, I think Microsoft had bought it by the mid 90s. The US is great at taking other peoples inventions, buying them, marketing them, and claiming them for itself. The rest of the world innovates, the…

But also those US companies brought this tech they bought to the masses. To say they were built by others anyway reduced the role big tech played here same way a naive developer thinks a company’s success is just because of code he wrote.

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

#738

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…

So the entire EU economy grew at the same speed than the US one but not its 500 bigger companies. This is misleading. The article says the poorer (former communist) eastern European countries got richer, which brought up the average.

How is this "misleading"?

We want the poorer countries to get richer faster in order to close the gap. Accomplishing precisely this is a large part of EU policy. And it is working.

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

#739
post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It wasn't fascism,but nazism. That's not really the point, and I'm not sure the semantics matter. I'm also not doubting that Trump would take up any "ideal" that supports his ego and power. Or that, among Trump supporters, there are people who would in fact be ready to go so far as fascism or nazism. I just think that, in a thread about the quality of life in different economic cultures, "about to be ruled by a fas…

> to be ruled by a fascists" is kind of cheap rhetoric on the contrary being ruled by a fascist supporter and/or supported by fascist sympathizers has an enormous impact on the quality of life. That's true everywhere, in Europe as in USA, that's why everybody here in Europe is preoccupied by far right extremists especially in the former eastern Europe. > you would need to show that it actually is a major concern for…

> being ruled by a fascist supporter and/or supported by fascist sympathizers has an enormous impact on the quality of life

Of course. It's the "about to be ruled by" part that's the cheap-ish rhetoric, as it implies an unsubstantiated imminent threat, not just "some of these guys are really going in the wrong direction".

> having 10 times the chances of dying shot by a stranger makes it 10 times more probable that in US I would be dead instead of alive.

No, it absolutely certainly does not, unless that's the only way you could die. That's really, really basic statistics.

I don't even need to check the statistics to assert that you're much, much more likely to die of causes other than violence, both in (at least the majority of) Europe and in (at least the majority of) the U.S.

If you have a full watermelon, and then take a small slice of the watermelon and somehow multiply the slice by ten, you don't have ten watermelons as a result.

> Would you trade it for a better salary or a larger household, knowing that it's 10 times more probable that it could happen?

Depends on what it's 10 times probable than, and what my other circumstances were. I might not want to live in the most dangerous city, and certainly not in its most dangerous areas, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't want to live in the entire country. In any of those cases, I'd probably be much more likely to die of other causes than because of being shot; it's certainly that way outside of the most dangerous places. But what I want to do is not really the point.

> 366 of the deaths in the past seven years

I'm apparently past my paywall-free articles at nytimes.com, so I'll have to make some assumptions here. 366 deaths in seven years means ~50 deaths per year. That's, of course, an astoundingly large number for a modern western country, which typically see very few of these kinds of incidents. But if that's for the entire U.S. which has ~330 million people, that means an approximately one in a million chance of getting killed in a mass shooting per year.

[edit: and of course I botched the maths -- it's more like one in ten million per year -- but the point still stands]

The numbers would make me question what's going on. The risk of violence might also make me not want to live in the most dangerous areas. But a one in a million chance of dying would not stop me from wanting to live in a country if I otherwise so desired.

You can't really just argue with numbers without putting them in some kind of a context.

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

#740
post #533
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work is just a paycheque. If they stopped paying me, I'd stop showing up. I really doubt I'll greet the reaper with the regret of not spending more time at the office. I did cool stuff at work, but without work, I could do much cooler things.

I guess it depends on what you consider cool. I work in drug discovery and no, I couldn't do that without some deep pocketed investors.

You could still do it with 6 weeks vacation though, with the sort of balance Europeans have come to expect.
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