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We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

mertbulan.com

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Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#171

Post by touwer »

pembrook wrote: post #145
TFYS wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if the customers are not willing to pay more, it sounds like they're actually happy with the current offering and that's not an area that your fellow humans would find useful for you to work on. People would need to have perfect information about all the products they buy in order to truly know if they're happy with them. If they knew and saw first hand all the effects that a product has (poor working condition…

If people would actually be happier with your solution that's simply a marketing problem, which is entirely solvable. But I think more often people delude themselves into thinking their thing is better (since it's their baby) when it actually is not, which no amount of marketing dollars can solve.

I'm sorry but your view on the economy and society is really naive. As if everything could be solved by markets. Monopolies don't exist. Powers other than supply and demand (political, societal, geological, etc) don't matter. It's not that simple. Read some books of (old) economists or philosophers

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#172

Post by [deleted] »

impossiblefork wrote: post #126
pembrook wrote: post #74

The authors examples of “Digital Mittelstand” companies are not businesses at all but tiny “creator economy” side projects. These do not scale to 30% of GDP in the same way high value B2B industrial equipment does (in manufacturing you happily pay $100,000 for a piece of machinery because it can turn inputs into more valuable outputs at scale). Instead of coming up with incorrect ideas about what the government shoul…

Yes, but what if the big-software type economy isn't actually that useful? Maybe you can grow it to 30% of GDP if you start doing a bunch of bad stuff, but if it can be replaced by open source local stuff-- if it's possible to simply kill facebook, Microsoft etc. and replace them with Linux together with a couple of not incredibly expensive software packages developed to provide a substitute, then why should we have…

[deleted]

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#173

Post by mytailorisrich »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #164
milesrout wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profitable and valuable are synonymous. If something is more valuable than the inputs used to make it, then it is profitable to make it. Things being clever, or righteous, or "fantastic" (whatever that means) doesn't mean that people actually value them. That isn't what value means. Something is more valuable if you would give up more to have it. It is less valuable if you would give up less to have it. Basically, no…

> Profitable and valuable are synonymous. So your police, firefighters, the military, health services (not in the US though) and various charities are not valuable? That is an interesting take.

They are valuable and they are also quite profitable (I am excluding "various charities" as that is too broad and fuzzy).

The fact that the state may provide the majority of these does not mean that they are not profitable as private ventures. Why are they profitable? Because they are deemed very valuable!

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#174

Post by meerita »

Can someone give me a reason why paying an engineer a yearly salary would ensure that they contribute a truly valuable piece of software that the market will use? Why should money be given based on years of experience? Is experience really a good indicator of ability? I know many engineers with 10+ years of experience who are mediocre.

What happens if that well-paid engineer decides they no longer enjoy software development? What if they need more than a year to deliver results? What if they produce something useless for the market?

This Keynesian approach is full of unknowns—it looks great on paper, but we've already run these experiments in the past, and they simply didn’t work.

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#175

Post by swores »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #173
BerislavLopac wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Profitable and valuable are synonymous. So your police, firefighters, the military, health services (not in the US though) and various charities are not valuable? That is an interesting take.

They are valuable and they are also quite profitable (I am excluding "various charities" as that is too broad and fuzzy). The fact that the state may provide the majority of these does not mean that they are not profitable as private ventures. Why are they profitable? Because they are deemed very valuable!

In some countries they are not profitable, because they are publicly owned organisations not for-profit private ones, and they are run purely for the benefit they provide to society.

Please re-read the comment you replied to with this context in mind (as their excluding the US was for this reason; though of course the US is not the only country foolish enough to allow profit motives to harm their healthcare, firefighting, etc. services) - the fact that some countries choose to allow profit extraction through these services does not mean that the non-profit versions have no value.

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#176

Post by lnsru »

h05sz487b wrote: post #158
lnsru wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The attitude isn’t changing, I can assure you. Few people see what’s happening for real in the country. The other ones are living in the delusional small nice Germany preparing for 1972 Olympics. If you ask about limiting uncontrolled immigration you’re already Hitler’s son. If you ask about basic product improvement, that makes production cheaper you shouldn’t rock the boat, because it was always done that way. Exam…

Sounds like an insurance driven decision.

Not really. It’s complicated in Germany. But normally a company has somebody named official electrician. It can be outsourced. And this electrician has a right to delegate some tasks to somebody else. So in this case trainee gets the right to do these automated tests this time or all the time in this location. I know this, because I am hardware developer in my day job and self employed electrician at night.

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#177

Post by notahacker »

pjc50 wrote: post #159
abc123abc123 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe is dying. It is an old socialist relic, with a completely outdated model of reality. The successes of the extreme left and right shows that the political nobility are done. Sadly europe never realized that low taxes, capitalism and liberty is what drives wealth. I wonder if, in a generation, when the best brains moved to the US, asia and argentina, the continent will finally awake from its socialist slumber? H…

HK was a special case of being an intermediary port city. Same with Singapore. The European equivalents are Luxembourg and Monaco.

Also HK and Singapore are intermediary port cities that made those general shifts by adopting policies inspired by Europe, in the former case whilst still being the territory of a European power...

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#178

Post by fweimer »

onli wrote: post #124
fweimer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bosch is a bit of an outlier due to its structure and age. But there are definitions that would include Meta as Mittelstand, like this one: https://www.ifm-bonn.org/en/definitions/mittelstand-definiti...

Not an accepted definition. The one used by the government (for projects) and the public includes revenue and amount of employees. Ownership by a family is not a factor at all.

I wouldn't say that. In the German media, family-owned businesses tend to be treated as Mittelstand regardless of size, and their owners' statements are sometimes portrayed as reflecting general “Mittelstand“ concerns even if the company in question is quite large.

But you are right that Germany's SME subsidiaries generally follow the EU definition: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

I don't know if there are loopholes and if SME subsidiaries end up benefiting large, established players in the end.

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#179

Post by flanked-evergl »

touwer wrote: post #166
flanked-evergl wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has a big-nothing economy right now. Compared to that, even a small-software economy is useful. Germany can't live on everyone else's money indefinitely, at some point everyone else is going to get fed up that they have to be paying more tax and higher energy prices because Germany can't sustain itself.

You should read up before making grandiose statements like that. Totally not true. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/01/30/c...

A theoretical recovery is not an actual recovery, and if history has any lessons, then it's quite unlikely that Germany could economically recover without more US money, which is not coming.

Re: We don't need startups, we need Digital-Mittelstand

#180

Post by flanked-evergl »

impossiblefork wrote: post #156
flanked-evergl wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has a big-nothing economy right now. Compared to that, even a small-software economy is useful. Germany can't live on everyone else's money indefinitely, at some point everyone else is going to get fed up that they have to be paying more tax and higher energy prices because Germany can't sustain itself.

What? They literally build machines that everybody needs to live. They make everything, all sorts of little of bits you need. If you need a special chemical reactor that resists some weird thing, it's probably from Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_economic_crisis_(2022%E...
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