Can you name a single thing that you would consider innovative from Europe? I'm serious, I just can't think of anything. These are good people for making a slightly better Mercedes than last year's model, but they won't be cooking up the next iPhone anytime soon. The system there does not reward risk takers, the smart move is incremental updates to well established existing products.

Minecraft was Swedish. Nokia is Finnish. VLC is French. ARM is British. Sinclair was British. The entire demo scene is Nordic.

Israel is technically in Asia, but for most practical purposes (legal system, healthcare system, taxes, sport leagues, broadcast rights, dvd regions) it is considered to be in Europe. And it produced Checkpoint (firewalls...), Teva (largest generic drug manufacturer, but also original drugs like copaxon for MS), CAR-T for cancer treatment, and a couple of other things you’ve heard about.

> but they won't be cooking up the next iPhone anytime soon.

It's funny you say this since Nokia, who are a Finnish company, were the globally dominant mobile phone company for years before the iPhone due to their innovations e.g. doing camera phones well. The 3310 is one of the best selling mobile phones ever. Yes they ultimately fell from that position, but to suggest Europe is some desert of mediocrity seems foolish.

I think you misunderstand. I mean an innovation on par with the iPhone, where it basically changed how people live their lives. I'm quite sure Europeans can make a phone, the problem is they can't hit an innovative home run to save their lives.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

HN is a community and we want it to remain one. For that, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

You needn't use your real name, of course.

I misunderstand your vague handwavey definition then. What is the data or metric that you're basing your opinion off exactly? 7 of the top 10 best selling mobile devices of all time are made by Nokia [0]. How is that not changing how people live their lives?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_...

Your hyperbole is burying any realistic point you are trying to make, I think.

WWW had far bigger impact that iPhone, and is european innovation.

For that matter, the entire system of democratic capitalism and relatively free markets you are espousing was invented there. Fair to argue who's done the best job of "perfecting" it, but it's European ideas originally :)

I think it is very interesting to compare entrepreneurial approaches and success rates (to the degree it's meaningful) across jurisdictions, for what it's worth. But "Europe can't do this at all" is a silly line to draw.

But the iPhone was only commercially innovative really - as I understand there was prior art for all the critical parts of it including adding a touchscreen to a phone, going back quite a long way. American automotive engineering has until very recently been laughably backward; Tesla is an exception. Formula 1 is almost exclusively European (in fact largely British). Rolls-Royce are at the forefront of jet engine manufacturing. If you don't think these examples involve innovation, well...

The web and browsers were invented at CERN.