As much as I partly agree with this article, I find it painful to read because it shoddily reengineers bits of Free (as in freedom) software discourse. Specifically that proprietary software subjugates users with malicious features to make money - the US is more creative at doing this than European ones. But yes I agree, the US is better at it, for better or for worse.
Europe's Software Problem
271–280 of 585 posts
Re: Europe's Software Problem
#272I'm a European, living in Europe, developing software. Lack of imagination is not our problem. It's so good that we supply our best talent to the US where it does extremely well revolutionizing AI, designing hardware for Apple, developing games, stream online music, etc. E.g. Amazon's CTO is Dutch. Basically the person that has been running AWS. The people and the education system are fine. Europe does have a few iss…
> raising similar amounts of money in Europe is super hard
This.
I am European but live and work in US. Simply put, US wins hands down because they:
- have resources, read $$$$
- take risk
- have the right entrepreneurial mindset
Europe? let's just say they are not even close.
Re: Europe's Software Problem
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the small country issue, a better comparison would be Israel. It has a thriving startup scene while only having 10 million people.
I'm working for a thriving startup in a European country of 11 million people. We had 100% growth per year until we had basically everybody in our own country and then it got massively harder. If we had started in the USA, we would have reached that point being 30x bigger, making billions of dollars, and much better prepared to conquer foreign markets. So maybe Israel is doing quite well, but I know from experience t…
Most of the super successful companies in Israel are either doing things for the state or working for American corporations (or the American government).
Re: Europe's Software Problem
#274I 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…
The reason the US has freely flowing funding is because the VC has an immense amount of cash from the previous generations of successful Unicorns. So why was it (and still is) easier to raise unicorns in the USA ? The thing that separate the internet economy with the traditional is the massive network effects that makes it a winner take all game. And at that game the USA has a massive home advantage with a huge cultu…
need to clear up the misconception here: China is not simply banning US companies.
With social media and internet content products, there is Chinese law "Measures on the Administration of Internet Information Services". Whether one agrees with the provisions in this law is another story. Lets just talk about purely from a commerce perspective. This law is applied equally to everyone, whether it is a Chinese company or US company. If Google, Facebook and anyone else, want to have a specific product operate in Chinese market, that product need to be compliant to local laws. They will be able to operate if they are in accordance to the law. And many US companies do comply with Chinese laws and have products present in China, such as Microsoft (office365, Azure, Bing, Linkedin etc), Amazon(AWS, Amazon.com, Kindle), Airbnb, Apple (Icloud, app store etc). This law concerns with Internet Information services. There are other digital products too. Database services are very much available in China, Oracle DBs has a dominating market share in China. Adobe, Autodesk, etc. Even for Facebook and Google, I believe they have business operations in China. I know Google have ad sales in China, and have significant revenue. By adhering to this law, the internet information product could have significant differences from the product operating in another country, resulting in companies make two versions of the product, one for international, one for china's market. So Bytedance having douying for China and tiktok for international, is not different from Microsoft having Linkedin China and Linkedin international, or Bing China, Bing international, or Amazon.com China or Amazon.com international. From a pure commerce standpoint, this law is non-discriminatory. Whether its company headquartered in China or foreign, anyone have to do the same thing according to the law. It does not provide any advantages for Chinese over foreign companies. Also how do you define what is Chinese/Foregin company? Bytedance is registered in Cayman Islands and 40% is owned by foreign investors. Maybe you could have Chinese nationals running a company in another country and tried to offer a product in China. For running a product in China, both cases is the same, comply to Chinese laws and regulation then the product can operate in China.
The appearance that Chinese companies have advantages over foreign companies comes from a combination of factors: local culture, understanding of the market, much much faster and fierce competition (If speed and competition in international market is 2, in China its 10. For example, Uber left China's market not because of regulatory, regulatory was equal to Didi and uber at the time, but Uber and Didi was locked into extremely heated competition at that time, both sides were pouring money down the drain. It was most likely a business decision. Alibaba's taobao vs Amazon.com, taobao was very competitive and played to the Chinese culture advantage very well. Taobao created 11/11 singles day in 2009 and hit a cord with Chinese people, even becoming a cultural phenomenon). But let say if Google/Facebook funded a team in China to create a targeted product for the Chinese market, they could have a a significant presence in the market.
Re: Europe's Software Problem
#275I 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…
> Rather, a problem is that once a European project becomes successful enough, it soon becomes an American project, either by acquisition or by moving to where the investment money is.
That's not a problem, that's the solution. There's some other problems causing the need for this solution.
Re: Europe's Software Problem
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The US is so far behind in banking and actual useful technology it's quite funny. I see this said, and it was true two decades ago, but I’m not aware of any way it’s true now. What banking can you do in Europe that you can’t do in the US?
Instant bank transfers over SEPA for one, without third party payment processor involved.
Right, that’s the only one I’ve ever heard, but what does ‘without third party payment processor involved’ bring in practice?
I have a European bank account and a US one, and I don’t experience any meaningful difference, indeed the third party processors in the US are generally far more feature rich than the bare bones European bank options.
Hardly: “The US is so far behind in banking and actual useful technology it's quite funny.”
More: An irrelevant implementation detail that doesn’t impact end users.
Re: Europe's Software Problem
#277Living 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…
Not to mention the VAT (Value Added Tax) that is a big weapon of market selfdestruction.
Re: Europe's Software Problem
#278I 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…
The reason the US has freely flowing funding is because the VC has an immense amount of cash from the previous generations of successful Unicorns. So why was it (and still is) easier to raise unicorns in the USA ? The thing that separate the internet economy with the traditional is the massive network effects that makes it a winner take all game. And at that game the USA has a massive home advantage with a huge cultu…
> The reason the US has freely flowing funding is because the VC has an immense amount of cash from the previous generations of successful Unicorns. So why was it (and still is) easier to raise unicorns in the USA ?
You're ignoring that all of this money initially came from massive investment by the Defense Advanced Projects Administration (DARPA) which funded the semiconductor industry in its infancy, which funded the creation of the Internet, which funded the creation of mainframes, which funded the creation of personal computers, and continues to provide massive funding to tech companies. Heck, their decision to choose Microsoft DOS over IBM OS/2 for the US DOD literally solidified its rise as the dominant operating system. It's requirement that all parts must be multi-source-able is why AMD and Via were created as additional manufacturers of x86 processors. But it also funded PowerPC and even provided significant funding to ARM.
Sure, we don't have much socialism here (USDA farm "subsidies" not included), but we do have very strong, protectionist-welfare capitalism.
So you had the combined might of the US government founding the creation of the computing industry. That let companies take massive risks which left tons of people making tons of money before private VC even really became interested. The IPOs of the original tech companies funded the creation of half of the current major VC funds.
Re: Europe's Software Problem
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I mean, saying LibreOffice is better than Microsoft Office is like saying eating toothpaste is better than eating soap. You'll never get a Michelin star for serving Colgate, so I'm not sure I'd call LibreOffice "stellar". But I don't think it's surprising that highly complex UI-driven applications aren't as plentiful in open source, where the sweet spot (from my perspective) has been smaller applications that scratch…
For most users MS Office is a nightmare program to learn and use. It's functionality is incredibly extensive, having accumulated the kitchen sink, stove and refridgerator over its long life. But this doesn't make it actually very usable for people coming to it at this point. LibreOffice, while certainly not matching the functionality of MS Office, is much closer to the subset of what most people need most of the time.
Re: Europe's Software Problem
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
As another comment pointed out, the small countries vs US Network effects excuse doesn't really fare well when you look at the successful startup environment of Israel. The USA is perfectly aware of this dynamic because faced with TikTok, their first reflex was to try to ban them. And this take is just hot garbage.
How many unicorns are from Israel, though? Israel should be lauded for managing to be an intensely vibrant and high-tech country, and European countries should try to learn from that, but even that is apparently not quite sufficient. So I think GP has a point.
None. But they have tons of startups that provide services to the military-industrial complex which is why they're so successful. They copied the USA's SBIR system but provide much bigger grants.