Europe's Software Problem

Nokia is a shade of past itself. Its telecom software divisions in EU are sweatshops.

Neither is Ericsson. In fact they are #2 and #3 when it comes to market share in networking equipment. Since Huawei is banned in many European countries now, I bet most sold networking equipment in Europe right now is European.

PG has a related essay: Why Startups Condense in America

http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html

He actually has several essays on how to try to create a Silicon Valley in other geographic areas, but this seemed the most relevant.

tldr:

1. The US Allows Immigration.

2. The US Is a Rich Country.

3. The US Is Not (Yet) a Police State.

4. American Universities Are Better.

5. You Can Fire People in America.

6. In America Work Is Less Identified with Employment.

7. America Is Not Too Fussy. (If there are any laws regulating businesses, you can assume larval startups will break most of them, because they don't know what the laws are and don't have time to find out.)

8. America Has a Large Domestic Market.

9. America Has Venture Funding.

10. America Has Dynamic Typing for Careers. (Compared to other industrialized countries the US is disorganized about routing people into careers. For example, in America people often don't decide to go to medical school till they've finished college. In Europe they generally decide in high school.)

11. Attitude (There's one item conspicuously missing from this list: American attitudes. Americans are said to be more entrepreneurial, and less afraid of risk. But America has no monopoly on this. Indians and Chinese seem plenty entrepreneurial, perhaps more than Americans. Some say Europeans are less energetic, but I don't believe it. I think the problem with Europe is not that they lack balls, but that they lack examples.)

While I'd appreciate such a law, I doubt it would work in practice.

First-party can turn it into a cat-and-mouse game where they'll introduce some minor changes that require third-party apps to be updated over and over again. We've seen this happen with some education related app / system in Sweden where people built a better third-party app / client.

Finding a decent, enforceable solution this way is certainly not trivial.

As a European, I do think he hits several marks correctly. But I don't at all understand point 10. If anything, it's been my experience that the US is more focused on people having "the right" education for the job. Could anyone elaborate on what he might possibly mean?

(Also, I think point 4 is very field-specific. While the US may have a few institutions that are universally recognized as excellent, there are also many European ones that are phenomenal within a given field. Having a truly exceptional group within field X does not give your a university the name recognition of Stanford, but it serves the same purpose when it comes to training people in field X.)