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

economist.com

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

#281

Post by Hamuko »

onion2k wrote: post #275
rsj_hn wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because societies that promote innovation have higher quality of life and bless the entire world with technological advancement, while their own population benefits from lower prices, more goods, productivity growth, more jobs, more opportunity, and more fairness. It's strange how quick people are to condemn monopolies and yet in the same breath insist that starting businesses is not a social good. Of course it's a s…

According to the World Happiness Report for 2020 (which is a well-regarded and well-researched report as far as I know), 9 of the top 10 countries in the world for people's quality of life and well-being are all in the EU. The USA comes in 18th. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#2020_re...

Switzerland, Norway and New Zealand most definitely are not in the EU.

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

#282

Post by sologoub »

SOMA_BOFH wrote: post #205
yoz-y wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article, most people here, and the reality disagrees with that. The point is that all the giants are elsewhere. Case in point as mentioned elsewhere: we actually have ISP competition here.

and as a result of this, you're more innovative how...?

So in ISP world, EU has better offerings than most of US, though US had a good 2020 when it comes to download speeds: https://fairinternetreport.com/research/usa-vs-europe-intern...

However, upload speeds are still a joke in the US - I can’t buy more than 35mbps up, period. That comes with 1gbps down (in reality that’s never stable, so more like 800-900mbps). At previous home I had options of two providers with one offering symmetrical 1gbps fiber - that’s fairly rare in US.

Costs are another issue - US ~$61 per month, OECD average is ~$37: https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/internet-costs-compared...

Now this is mostly services innovation, not telecom tech itself, but still has very tangible benefits to consumers and barriers to operating a business.

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

#284

Post by MperorM »

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. Copenhagen, while not a coincidence, is still somewhat arbitrary.

If the great minds of the bay collectively moved to Europe, I feel very certain they would be just as innovative in Copenhagen as they were in silicon valley. EU's most innovative and bright minds move elsewhere to be part of a culture where they feel at home. Until they decide to stay and help cultivate such a culture in Europe, there will be little innovation.

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

#285

Post by Hamuko »

davidgatti wrote: post #166
reader_mode wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well! Is there really ? I see attempts at copying the US tech scene, but a lot of it seems structured to suck money out of government funds and programs. I see very little private investment. Just recently I talked to a local VC, in a casual chat about how they started their fund I found out they pulled money out of a EU fund, they had to put up like 25% of t…

This description is UE startups in a nutshell :) Countries like Poland for example, get massive amount of money from the EU, and there are business that specialize only in getting grants for people, which then they use to make a "company" for a year or two, and when the money runs out they close it and reopen another one with the next grant. With no revenue stream idea what so ever. In this type of country's if you h…

>working a minimum of 16h a day, they look at you as a complete lunatic

As they should.

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

#286

Post by mattmanser »

davidgatti wrote: post #166
reader_mode wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a thriving tech scene in Europe and we do quite well! Is there really ? I see attempts at copying the US tech scene, but a lot of it seems structured to suck money out of government funds and programs. I see very little private investment. Just recently I talked to a local VC, in a casual chat about how they started their fund I found out they pulled money out of a EU fund, they had to put up like 25% of t…

This description is UE startups in a nutshell :) Countries like Poland for example, get massive amount of money from the EU, and there are business that specialize only in getting grants for people, which then they use to make a "company" for a year or two, and when the money runs out they close it and reopen another one with the next grant. With no revenue stream idea what so ever. In this type of country's if you h…

No offense, but that stuff's pocket change to the actual economies of the EU. It's a redistribution of wealth without having to admit that's what it really is, and if it scores a success, great.

It's very easy to forget that there are only 3 countries worth talking about in the EU economically, previously 4, but the UK leaving basically took 20% of the EU's GDP.

Now there's France, Germany and Italy, and everyone else is basically irrelevant, although you might just include Spain or Holland.

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

#287

Post by tluyben2 »

andruby wrote: post #257
rsj_hn wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because societies that promote innovation have higher quality of life and bless the entire world with technological advancement, while their own population benefits from lower prices, more goods, productivity growth, more jobs, more opportunity, and more fairness. It's strange how quick people are to condemn monopolies and yet in the same breath insist that starting businesses is not a social good. Of course it's a s…

> societies that promote innovation have higher quality of life Does the US have a higher quality of life than Germany, France or the Netherlands? I agree that innovation is important and societies should promote it, but -imho- not at the cost of consumer & employee protection.

I would like to see US answers to this but in the US your quality of life is fantastic if you are rich and then it degrades fast: in NL it is good to great for all. So I can pick bleeding hard work in a lottery to maybe be someone or I can do whatever I like and have most of those same perks. Where is the choice here?

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

#288

Post by bruce511 »

refurb wrote: post #253
jamil7 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This thread is full of people explaining that Europeans are lazy and unproductive workers lacking ambition based on anecdotes of completely normal occurrences like an employee taking a vacation.

Disagree. It’s the mentality, not the vacation. My job in the US gives 5 weeks vacation per year. You are expected to disconnect and it’s embarrassing if email/text while on leave - people think you’re nuts. But the work attitude is usually “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?” versus a work mentality of “i don’t think that will work” and “we’ll never get support for that id…

I think it's worth understanding that there are two categories of employee.

The first is a tiny sliver of people who make good money doing interesting, possibly even fulfiling work. Like say running their own business, or building great new tech.

The larger slice though don't have this. They work long ours doing meaningless boring tasks for long hours and low wages. Think amazon warehouse, and any service level job.

There's a middle ground for qualified trades - like say plumbers - but that's getting eroded.

So when comparing things like leave, ability to fire, heath insurance etc, it's worth understanding that your view in those things is relative to your job.

For the lucky few millionaires, the US is great - it's a very easy place to live if you are rich. But for the rest Europe with lots of vacation time, shorter working hours, free health and education is a lot more appealing.

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

#289

Post by berkes »

thijsc wrote: post #221
SOMA_BOFH wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is a thriving tech scene in Europe please explain

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 there are no redicoulous overvalued tech corps, does not mean we aren't creating solid, profitable tech here.

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

#290

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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