131–140 of 585 posts
I take offense at such massive overgeneralizations as "Europe lacks imagination." What it lacks is freely flowing funding such that risky enterprises can be funded even if 1 out of ten or 1 out of hundred actually are successful. This kills business models which cannot show any profit whatsoever, and a large portion of the remainder are killed by data regulations forbidding "alternate paths of monetization" (to put i…
Tech innovation, once it has resulted in sufficient financial advantage becomes a 'winner takes all' game, where the people that won the previous round have a better than average chance of winning all subsequent rounds as well until there is some outside imposed limit. They are either able to throw more resources at the same problem or they can afford to buy out the successes elsewhere and claim them as their own. Th…
I agree with this from a commenter below. In US you have so many more customers that speak your language and have your culture. You can move around and find common issues. One government. One law. So different from the EU.
I do not see a fix until government, law and language becomes unified to a common government, common law and the common language.
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It is one market for google, facebook, apple etc. They all succeeded and there's no reason a successful EU company wouldn't become european and essentially global. But for this to happen u have to have companies that grow
but google, facebook, apple...etc. already huge in US with vast amount of resources before they enter foreign market. a start up in US/China have one big market for them to grow domestically and gain enough resources before entering foreign market. lets say you are a small German start up. is German big enough to grow and gain enough resources before you enter say Estonia? edit: isn't Rocket Internet business model i…
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You don’t agree? A more substantial comment would be informative. Can you give us one example of a stellar open source UI you use daily?
Firefox is roughly as good as any other browser, which is to say it does some things better and some things worse, and many things roughly the same. Blender is one of the 2 or 3 dominant tools in its field. It's a niche field, so it's not for office work, but is nevertheless an incredible tool by any standard. For almost anyone's purposes, LibreOffice is better than any closed source equivalent tool (though some of t…
Living in EU. Can only say, the main reason is in my perspective regulatory and taxes. Some points - It is difficult to issue equity and get equity (tax) - Each EU country has different taxes. You are taxed lower in Netherlands than in Germany. - Each country has different regulation rules. If you do something exciting. Wow let's say a social network. You would be killed by regulation and data privacy rules. Autonomo…
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> In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people. The US has those things and it's turning into a "third world country with a Gucci belt" (as someone put it) for everyone except the 1% and the indispensable knowledge worker class that can't be automated away or juiced dry for all the productivity they are capa…
GP's phrasing is wrong but there is a point there - it is much easier to achieve success and then regulate and distribute its benefits than to go the other way round. I am not a fan of unbridled capitalism a la the USA and fully agree that more countries should strive to reach European levels of worker and civil rights... however, there is validity to the statement that Europe is currently coasting along on the spoil…
Well, apart from the whole WW2 business.
This is the trouble with generalisations across the continent, the closer you look the less well they fit. And if you look across a continent and back in time, the situation varies even further. Germany used to be "the sick man of Europe": https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.28.1.167
The overhang of colonial benefit is present in Britain; I'm not really sure about France (the disasters of trying to hold on to Vietnam and Algeria?). It's not present in Germany or Italy which had it taken off them. It may well be an issue to Portugal and Spain, which were dictatorships well after the war.
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> If Europe wants to have its citizens (and companies) rely significantly on European-operated software, it has no choice but to develop better software, Europe is at a permanent disadvantage with language. You either target your local market in your local language, or you do English first. If you do English first, your market isn't even in your home country. Even culturally England and the USA (and AUS/NZ) are a bit…
Skype. And really, i18n is a minor issue.
There's other things like GDPR, local taxation, many cross border laws, and by culture I mean a variety of things: you'll see university graduates flogging themselves to death in Silicon Valley, but a start up in London will be slightly more relaxed by comparison. In the US, "free VC money" means there's an incentive to get to market asap, monetize, and move on. That doesn't really exist in Europe.
> For one, we lack the imagination and vision to launch something without knowing how it might eventually make money I don't think there is lack of imagination. The biggest barrier for any person who wants to launch something is: paperwork around establishing a company. In some countries you have to pay every month some amount of money if you want to be a freelancer, in others you need to setup a sole proprietorship,…
Like, it definitely is a barrier for trivial hobby projects, if you whip something up in a single day and don't want to spend any more time on it, then this becomes a problem, but it's not a meaningful barrier for any actual project on which you're working every week that brings you some revenue.