But at that time companies were still built for their home markets first and on that regard the USA is big and unified. Since software is mostly winner takes all it means that when the USA companies came to Europe they had already won the USA and could steamroll the local competition
There is for example no way a swedish mapping company could have competed with google maps , which had so much search monopoly money backing it up from the start
The only way Europe could have prevented this is to just ban foreign monopolies, wich is what china did, and why they are now succesfully ‘innovating’.
I read often on this website that europe cannot ‘take risks’ or ‘innovate’ and is ‘riding on american innovation for free’ and I find that a bit insulting, because I fell that as things are geopolitically it’s just not possible for Europeans to compete fairly with Americans
Further, I would like to add a few ideas:
- innovation in Europe can only scale if we achieve a higher degree of unity in Europe, including one common language, one common jurisdiction and law framework. Localization is just too expensive in Europe and hinders scaling.
- a certain degree of protectionism is good. I am a big fan of how China made it. They have a really fantastic digital landscape that is superior in so many areas compared to Europe (if you exclude the data privacy issue)
- reliance on the old economy is bad and this is a political decision.
- too many people are too scared of new technologies and want things "how they used to be". This is bad and is typical for many Europeans, especially here in Germany. Cultural change must happen but you cannot force it.
Obviously we already have English, nearly universally spoken as a second or third language in the EU. So I assume you mean English, or some other language as the first language.
Which I think means all other languages would after a few generations become nearly extinct. Like Latin these days.
But despite how much I wish we had more innovation, I don't think losing all languages is worth it.
Just look at foreign competitors of Amazon, Google, Facebook etc. Even Russia like country have major tech companies while being poorer than western European countries.
This is BS. There will always be a loss of brain power to the lingua franca nation(s), regardless what that language happens to be. The research opportunities will (almost?) always be better.
That said, many people stay in China or return to China because they like it there, even if they speak English at a high level and have the option to stay in an English-speaking country. This has been true in my circle of friends and professional acquaintances since the 90s.
It might be the case that China is large enough to create its own large opportunities, so emigrating from China to an English-speaking country may not be particularly compelling. That said, I think it’s an apple-and-oranges comparison — the opportunities largely seem to be simply different from where I sit.
Klashnikov (very indirectly)?
If you rely on a superpower, then that's your own damn fault :-))
English is my second language, and while I wouldn’t mind changing the official language of my country, I can’t see that ever happening, there’s just so much culture attached to the language, that would be forgotten together with our language.
On the other hand, economic suicide is assured by insisting on a high standard of living while doing everything possible to prevent innovation.
The same would happen if you managed to get the entire EU to agree to switch to one single language (remember, it's likely that it would be French or German instead of English). As a result of pushing adoption of the new first language, it would mean increased cultural output in that language, and a reduced output for the others. After a while, the differences will start showing.
I've lived in Denmark for quite a few years and I agree that people in Copenhagen and the other larger cities wouldn't notice that much of a difference to begin with, but remember that this would mean a cultural shift that will take multiple generations. Ask the German speakers in southern Jutland in another 24 years, and compare how their culture thrives compared to how they did before the war and you will probably have a pretty decent view on how the situation would be for many, many of EU's minorities 100 years after the switch to a single European first language.
Modern languages already have words for things like a mouse, a screen or the Big Bang, but it's all stupid stuff like an analogy to how a computer mouse looks like an animal because of its long cord-tail, a reference to the white screen a projector casts it's projection on, or a vulgar put-down of a theory being like God's orgasm.
If we take a dead language and start adding in vocabulary, we can quietly sweep that all under a rug before we encounter any alien species we have to explain ourselves to.
"You're the most pathetic people in the known universe."
If that were the cost, then it would not be worth the price. Fortunately, it is completely unnecessary. It suffices to look to when Europe was at her best.
Technology is mere instrument. What you describe is Procrustean cultural destruction to satisfy some metric. Technology is not the end, but a means that has its proper place. The destruction of the various cultures that make the world rich is a recipe for monoculture and thus lack of inspiration. A diverse and decentralized Europe permits the exchange of ideas to occur in an atmosphere of diverse cultures. "Scale" is about de facto standardization and standardization is a double edged sword, not an unalloyed good. If anything, scale is what makes monopolies possible.
The solution is not to create a bland mass of rootless "citizen consumers" crafted out of the corporate pop culture, though, to be honest, Europe is practically there already, wearily drifting along, preferring to keep warm. The solution is a fundamental awakening of Europeans to the deep roots of their civilization and what made it great. That's where the life force is. The EU is in practice a form of managed decline perpetrated by delusional ideologues, petty bureaucrats, and ignorant airheads. It is antithetical to a vibrant Europe so looking for a solution there is like asking a dictator of some banana republic what makes a vibrant country.
Can't overstate how important this is. India is slowly coming to terms with adopting English (instead of Hindi) as the lingua franca - it has been a reliable economic mobility driver for millions of people. More European states might do well by adopting a bilingual/trilingual approach to expand economic opportunities for the population. I think parts of Scandinavia already manage to do this quite well.
Interesting, I hadn't seen the term localisation used beyond language. IMO, the major hindrance to European unification is nationalistic reflexes together with too many voluntary projects: EEC vs EU, Schengen, human rights, immigration, the euro... the instigators of such projects thought the success of these projects/goals would encourage more countries to opt in at a later date, which never happened, as a general rule. This resulted in more ways to slice and dice what "Europe" means, instead of contributing to unification.
A frequent occurrence is national politicians pretending they played no part in the council of ministers and blame-shifting towards Europe in order to gain or maintain domestic popularity. This actively undermines belief in EU institutions.
The facts seem to indicate the individual countries want to keep the systems they have in place, which can include vast differences in labour law, bureaucracy, remuneration schemes, pension plans, sick leave regulation and workplace safety, despite a basic common regulatory framework. As far as I'm aware, US states don't have as much variance between them.
As a result, a would-be tech giant has higher startup costs if it wants to employ people throughout Europe. I would say actual language localisation is a much less prohibitive cost.
As a German, do you see greater unification happening any time soon? I'm not sure I do, as one of your smaller neighbours.
To stay competitive Europe needs unity in the political process, defense and border security for example, and not in regulations in economy, finance, immigration etc, which are excessive already.
I'd say the main US advantage is that it's set up to create stagnant monopolies that can then leverage that power into other areas.
Microsoft is now one of the players in gaming consoles, but they basically bought their way in on the back of monopoly rents from Office and OS.
Abuse would be when a company leverages a monopoly to enter or influence another market, such as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.
Not Swedish, but Danish founders, working in Australia. Google purchased the company and made it google maps
It depends what you mean by successful I guess, but nearmap fits my definition of successful. Far better more and detailed maps that google, sold to people who needs such things rather than being used as platform to sell advertising.
In the beginning they used to have an honour system that allowed everyone to view their maps for free. They merely requested people who used it commercially to to purchase access. I gather that didn't work out, or maybe it was just a way of ensuring everybody knew about their product as there is no free access now. but while it was free it was great for checking when roof gutters needed cleaning, comparing flood levels and that sort of thing.
The rate of new business creation is higher in Europe than the US. I would guess that the US has more venture-backed entrepreneurs, but more businesses are being start by Europeans than Americans.
“The net rate of business creation among the EU economies has been over three times faster than in the USA and Canada since the financial crisis, according to research by RSM International, the seventh largest global network of independent audit, tax and consulting firms.”
== https://www.businessawardseurope.com/news/item/rate-of-new-b...
I remember someone used to call Sweden an "top innovative country" and when I took a closer look, he based that argument on amount of new business creation (weighted with population)
Taking a closer look, it was evident that they didn't sort the business by size, or how long they stayed, revenue or amount of employer. And as a person who lived there I know a lot of people start businesses just to circumvent the high tax rate, very restrictive hiring laws/taxes, and essentially do consulting (freelance) job. This is a symptom of how the society was made: hiring and income are heavily taxed, but not the same can be said for businesses. The claim that the country was innovative based on number of business creation quickly fell apart.
Same is true in the US. We just changed to tax code to make it even more beneficial to be a business over a salaried-employee. Did you apply the same skepticism for the US numbers?
I agree with you to a degree on capital and tax (although there are exceptions within Europe if you take the time to look).
However, if you say Europe should be adopting the US employment system, I'll tell you right now that you can stick that where the sun doesn't shine. Sure the European employment model is not perfect, but by god is it a gazillion times better than the Wild West model deployed in the US.
An Israeli one did.
This is only a problem because I have a few sites that are like "search engines" in that they have basically an infinite number of pages (one for each possible search term), and so they just keep crawling the "related searches" links. It's probably not a problem for most sites, but it's a pain for me.
Google seems to more strategically crawl pages based on search terms that they know are popular, whereas Yandex just crawls every possible link it can find.
All of that said, I'm quite happy to deal with it for the benefit of having another competitor to Google - the more the merrier. Hopefully one day they add some more "smarts" to their crawlers though - starting with respecting 429s across all their IPs, perhaps.
If features, what features?
I do wonder if Google's poor performance in Russia, and Yandex's poor performance outside Russia are a function of data restrictions. I'm not sure western countries would be as keen to share data with a Russian company, and vice versa.
These kinds of startups can often compete/outcompete on tech, in fact that's their premise, but they're looking for an ASAP exit, rather than running something sustainably for decades.
How does a company’s stock price affect salaries? Companies only receive capitalization (via stock) at IPO.
Stock market valuations do enable higher total comp through RSUs / options.
Put it this way: if products depend on viral growth, then European countries are socially distanced from each other as a result of these barriers.
Another point is that historically the US tech sector took off fast and takes off fast, so they are awash with cash based on being first movers, and they have a competitive advantage when it comes to attracting talent. I think that advantage has been perhaps completely destroyed in the last 4 years due to local political and social issues making life there unattractive. Sure many people will run for the money, but perhaps now not enough to create imbalance in the labor market. Also, companies today understand better how fast things scale in the US due to the single market/language/comparatively lax regulations, and they know to focus on that market much earlier in their growth cycle. This contributed to the success of Spotify, Zendesk, etc. So if I had to predict there will be a rising percentage of successes out of the EU in the next ten years compared to the last ten years. But it's always going to be hard to start.
I'd also not be so quick on the regulation front. Looking at the (lack of) environmental regulation in the US right about now or the absolute astonishing cost of any medical emergency, I'd say they went too far in the other direction.
Europe does not share a language in common, a culture in common, not even a currency in common. The "federal government" idea would be rejected by many out of hand. The history of bitter wars between European countries has not simply been forgotten and many would feel it encroaches on their sovereignty.
Just look at the reaction to mild proposals for an EU armed force as an example, or the many "Euroskeptic" politicians going around.
I think you underestimate what it takes to form a strong federal government.
* Responsibility to implement treaties remains with the individual members. * No ability to tax or set fiscal policy.
The advantage of a single set of laws is obvious. For starters I wouldn't be spending my Sunday reading a 500 page document on minor items describing how Denmark's implementation of an EU treaty differs from the treaty's wording. (Although it would cost the jobs of the people who produce such documents, and as such would fly in the face of the one central pillar of paneuropean identity).
The ability to tax and set fiscal policy is needed to offset the imbalance created by the single currency. Another lengthy topic, but basically the assumption that every EU member should "export" is simply impossible. A normal currency system would correct a trade imbalance automatically. The euro systematically undervalues the cost of German output buy forcing their European neighbors to transact in the same currency.
And then you have mafias, bankers, tax havens, uneven social nets, and a raft of other social problems that can only effectively be dealt with by a central government. The irony should not be lost that the American government has had better success battling the Italian mafia than the Italians have.
Minorities don't care well under powerful central government. Unless that government is a minority dictator tha terrorizes the majority.
Would you enjoy being europe's version of an Uighur in China?
> And then you have mafias, bankers, tax havens, uneven social nets, and a raft of other social problems that can only effectively be dealt with by a central government
US has all these problems even worse than Europe except maybe the mafia next the mafia took over the government directly.
With the turn the democratically elected Hungarian and Polish governments have taken the past few years, I sure hope there won't be a powerful federal EU government any time soon.
Germany tried that twice but the Americans stopped it. Either because the US didn't want that particular genocide or because they didn't want a unified Europe under european control.
https://hai.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/ai_index_2019_r...
Sorry I can't link directly to the plot. Go to page 16 in the pdf, a section titled "Published papers: AI Papers by Region".
In short, Europe has been the region with the most output in AI research in the last 30 years with US second and China initially at third place, but overtaking the US around 2006 ish and finally Europe in 2018.
It seems from my perspective that most European countries are pretty decently innovative, in particular with a variety of companies offering advanced engineering and technology services.
Is there actually a lack of innovation, or is it specifically a lack of “innovation” in the “there is no Airbnb so Europe sucks” sense?
And that's talking about the things that are already there. Looking into the future I don't see anything technology related on the horizon either.
The main technological thing that isn't like that is cars, but even there EVs from Tesla appear more innovative.
I think that many people conflate "innovation" with "big companies" which isn't the case: You don't need a google/Apple/Facebook equivalent to innovate (and having such towering companies may hurt in the long run, but wether or not big "googlesque" companies are a good thing is an entirely different question)
There are also a lot of unknown companies that have huge influence on the overall market by being global leaders in very narrow non-consumer facing areas, so called "hidden champions". These companies have become more important due to globalisation. To give a concrete example: While your phone wasn't built in the EU, odds are that it was at least partially produced with machines by ASML, a company that produces lithography machines for ~80% of chip manufacturers.
Also, due to this site here literally being "hackernews" and the pervasiveness of digital systems in normal life, we are getting a pretty skewd look at the industry as a whole: For example, the biggest chemical company in the world is BASF, a european company and the chemical company Bayer now owns a majority share of agricultural chemistry.
It’s likely that something significant is going on in Europe that we don’t know about yet.
The EU Horizon 2020 budget is 70 billion EUR, spent over basically 6 years. Around 80 billion is now being spent as post-pandemic stimulus, but less than what was proposed by the Commission.
That said, you're probably right that US pumps hundreds of billions into "innovation" (let's say R&D) whereas it's just a hundred for the EU.
Fortunately the EU is catching up, but alas it's not because it's so aggressively allocating more for R&D, though the trend is positive, but the US' trend is at best flat, maybe even negative: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... (Of course these are GDP percentages, and since the US' economy is bigger, the absolute numbers are a lot bigger for the US. And that's why even though Japan's percentage looks best, their absolute amount is below what the EU spends on R&D.)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-12/nvidia-is...
I know it's off topic, but could you clarify how you could see this happening?
I mean the only issue I can see is that the EU will end up with multiple, smaller finanical centres, hindering scale. But other than that, I can't see the problems of EU with respect to Brexit.
Now, the euro without transfers, that's a bloody problem, but that's been a real problem for 20 years, and no amount of ECB bandaging will fix it.
Innovation must stand up to the test of time, but history teaches us that large empires and political unions generally don't. Even the US might be having trouble one day.
I cannot look into the future, but as far as I know, i would rather be in the same club as all the wealthy guys than stand outside and not have anything to deal with.
The UK might still have the idea and arrogance of being a big kingdom, but they're really not. We'll see, i don't think it will end neither good or bad for the EU in that regard, but if the days comes that UK is derailed in any way, the EU will not help - i think.
And that's dangerous of course, but its solely a problem the UK put on themselves. Good luck
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/former-exec-of-f...
But the issue I see is that innovation is a bit like herding cats. You can't really push for it. And even in the US, most of it is located on 2 cities. And of course, being on SV it is much easier to get you a check for 10Mi dollars for a worse idea than 1Mi or even 100k in Europe
I don't see China's "innovation" as being much that (maybe except in AI and maybe ByteDance is a new thing, still) but more scaling up known solutions (ecommerce, fb on steroids in the form of wechat, etc) and market protection.
and other industries they have a lead in include drones, solar technology, EV (arguable).. considering the unparalled hardware ecosystem in Shenzhen/the PRD, I expect more and more industries will be getting added to the list
Agreed, non-trivial but also not rocket science (at least not now - I guess it's easier today than at the beginnings of twitter and fb for example) and throwing money at the problem usually helps.
Agree on the other industries, and maybe their innovation is building things more cheaply than other places (externalities aside)
Its best years are already behind it.
As for innovation? US isn't even top 10 when it comes to Nobel prize per capita (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_l...).
IKEA, SAP, Beretta, Airbus, Spotify, Linux, Prometheus, Grafana, Booking.com just from the top of my head of things that are proof of European innovation and tech sector.
Your per capita list is an epic compliment to the US.
The fact that the US is #15 per capita is extraordinary, given your list is comparing the US to top ten countries like East Timor, Saint Lucia, Luxembourg and Iceland, where if you get one or two you leap ahead of the entire world.
Among large population nations, only the UK and Germany rank higher, with Germany only slightly ahead. The UK for their part are far beyond everyone else on any reasonable comparison scale.
The US has five times the population of France and exceeds them on Nobels per capita. That is an amazing performance by the US.
The fact that the US is so massive and still ranks ahead of: the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Finland, New Zealand, Italy, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc. - is similarly staggering.
The US has over three times the rate of Italy, nearly double the rate of Canada, and over five times the rate of Japan.
The US per capita rate is 46% higher than the EU.
I'm going to drop Saint Lucia, East Timor, Iceland and Luxembourg from the comparison list because it's beyond silly, they all have one Nobel and micro populations. On a more rational list, the US is #11, with an 11.7 rate per 10m people. A nearby comparison is Ireland with a 14.5 rate; Ireland has seven total, the US has 383 and roughly 70 times the population. Like I said, it's an epic compliment for the US to be so highly ranked on a list dominated by small populations. The US is the sole country over 100 million population until you get down to #35 Japan at a 2.2 rate; except for the UK, the top 10 is all under 10 million population.
Compare that with the resources available and it will look much less extraordinary
It is extraordinary that countries with much less resources, much less competition and orders of magnitude smaller pool of talents to chose from (4 orders of magnitude in the case of Iceland, East Timor and Luxembourg), can rival the richest and most powerful country in the World in modern history
But let's look at the US noble prize winners
19 born in Germany
12 born in Canada
11 born in United Kingdom
7 born in Italy
7 born in Russia
6 born in China
6 born in Austria
4 born in India
4 born in Hungary
3 born in South Africa
3 born in France
2 born in Poland
2 born in Netherlands
2 born in Romania
2 born in Japan
2 born in Israel
1 born in Venezuela
1 born in Turkey
1 born in Taiwan
1 born in Switzerland
1 born in Spain
1 born in Norway
1 born in New Zealand
1 born in Mexico
1 born in Korea
1 born in Ireland
1 born in Egypt
1 born in Australia
Meaning not only does the US outperform in Nobel laureates as a massive nation at a per capita level, it’s simultaneously attracting even more.
- as Mark Kastner said "these prizes are a lagging indicator. They show us what we were doing right decades ago"
- Much of the research that lead Joachim Frank, a German born chemist, to win the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2017 took place in Europe and it was based on base research that took place outside of the US. The trio who was appointed was formed by Jacques Dubochet from Switzerland, Richard Henderson from Scotland and Frank from Germany. Frank was affiliated with US institutions when he was nominated, hence the prize has been claimed by US. They are basically buying Nobel prize winners post facto.
Israel has more than 3x more unicorns than we in Germany that tells one thing or two...
For example, if you look at foreign direct investment, the Netherlands lead the pack in 2017 with $4.888 trillion invested by residents of other countries. [1] Yet apparently there's only one Dutch unicorn (team.blue). Evidently there's a lot of investment going to other companies instead of betting on a single unicorn.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Put it in another way: their success is due military application of technology
Besides: what does counting unicorns proves?
Is Israel GDP per capita higher than Germany?
Is Israel richer than Germany?
Europe values other metrics more than simply pure market valuation
For example WhatsApp only employed 50 engineers when already had 900 million users
In Germany, and Europe in general, we prefer businesses that increase the general population employment than pure profit margins
EDIT:
a few resources about military industrial complex in Israel
https://medium.com/@davidsperorn/a-match-made-in-hell-israel...
https://www.tni.org/es/node/13511
https://www.jstor.org/stable/174246
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0140239830843716...
- Uber, whose only innovation is price dumping using infinite investor cache on losing billions of dollars yearly
- Facebook, whose only innovation is creating festering echo chambers, siphoning private data wholesale and dodging laws
- JUUL, whose only innovation is selling electronic cigarettes
- Coinbase, whose only innovation is to be a middleman in bitcoin scams
- Magic Leap, whose only innovation is siphoning off investors' money and finally producing a subpar gadget
- Pinterest whose only innovation is spam Google search results with stolen pictures
etc.
There are very few actual innovators among these "unicorns".
Interestingly, those tables show the EU, as a whole, being several places behind the US per capita, both overall and in terms of science Nobels specifically. Kind of negates your point.
I go to the US every 2 or 3 years for a few days, and that's enough to end up on a bunch of American marketing lists. GDPR is here to prevent things like that.
It also prevents companies from holding my data hostage, and gives me a way to delete it.
There are other privacy-related laws that prevent companies from publishing a mugshot of me and extorting money from me to remove it.
There's more, but I think you get the point.
But the current legislation is spotty as best and doesn't really help, Google and Facebook are still collecting tons of data while SMBs will be the guys who get sued for not complying 100%.