> Nothing with worldwide relevance in the software, AI nor cloud space came out of Germany / the EU within in the last decades.

Let me list some:

* Teamviewer: used to be more famous in the past but it is still a known brand to people world wide

* Cherry: more of a hardware thing, but they are known world-wide for their MX switches

* Deepl: a xoogler founded startup that is better than Google translate

* Soundcloud: well known all over the world, was founded in Berlin

* Suse: founded in the 90s and had steady growth since

* SAP: world leader in ERP software. Seriously people underestimate how well entrenched they are.

In the last two years, three of these companies had IPOs, two of them as unicorns. Sure, its is dwarfed by the US tech Cloud/AI/software sector but there are certainly world wide players from germany in the digital industry.

I'm afraid that though I've heard of most of these, this short list reinforces rather than refutes the claim by covering such wide ranges of area and time period.

these are exceptions

US produces more unicorns per year that Germany managed in 20 years

https://news.crunchbase.com/unicorn-company-list/

Germany is #5 on your provided link if you click on "Countries with most current unicorns". But yes, the USA has 20 times the number of unicorns, and I've said that the german tech industry is dwarved by the US one. More than half the unicorns on that website are in the USA (665 in the USA, 1328 - 665 = 663 outside). My point was that Germany definitely had some world known brands in software, it's more than zero.

The US is exceptional.

To be fair, apart from SAP, none of those are hugely profitable or hiring like crazy.

That's probably due to market size. Germany has a market of 80 Million people and the only countries you can easily expand to without a lot of additional overhead are the DACH-region.

Compare this to the US and their population of 300 Million people and how influential US culture is in the world and how many people speak English. A US company has a potential market of 300 Million people and use that to support your expansion into smaller markets later.

There are probably other factors in play here but it's not surprising to me that Europe didn't produce a Microsoft, Google or an Apple.

I wonder how much of this is due to the vast tech salary discrepancies (especially in areas like AI and cloud) between Europe and the US. I bet the Lidl cloud engineers are getting paid at most a third of their AWS counterparts. If you want AWS quality, you have to pay AWS salaries.

I think we (Europe) need a Shenzhen-like zone (probably between France and Germany). That is a tax-free (15%) english speaking tech zone.

Afaik both countries have tax incentives for R&D already. What the EU needs is :

- a proper vision

- the balls to implement it, even if that means booting lobbyists off and annoying the US

We have OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak, Proton, Nextcloud, and plenty of smaller companies, some heavily invested in open source. There's also a mechanism to fund flagship projects with billions.

I agree. I'd love to see European institutions to begin using European software and infrastructure. I feel like we have lots of puzzle pieces already, I'd add ONLYOFFICE to the mix, which would be very important to replace Google Drive / Docs / Sheets or Microsoft 365. They even have a free personal tier to test the waters.

You might be interested in the "Public Money, Public Code" campaign of the Free Software Foundation in Europe (FSFE).

https://publiccode.eu/

In my experience with government organizations, the argument that public tax money should be used for public/free re-usable software instead of funding proprietary development (essentially subsidizing R&D of foreign corporations), really strikes a nerve on all administrative levels.

I fully agree with the campaign. I even donated to them some time ago and got a nice package of promotion material in return.

You mean "Schengen" not the Chinese city Shenzhen right? The agreement allowing free travel/work between EU countries and Switzerland as well as some others signed in Schengen, Luxembourg.

Why would they mean "Europe needs something like Schengen" when Europe already has Schengen?

I meant Shenzhen

We should do Strasbourg. 2 hours from Paris by train, a few from Berlin and Bruxelle. European name and international notoriety. Great place, climate, used to be fought for by both France and Germany and I think its sounding like a place eastern EU would like as well.

Isn't that already Ireland?

Yeah. I dont know. I guess Ireland is irish's. Also it is managed by Irish government. We need a place that will grow into a federal europe. Something like that.

On the other hand, you created Lidl and Aldi. So that’s not worth nothing.

It’s not a German thing. It’s a European thing. Lots of Europeans have made huge contributions to technology working in US companies, mostly in the US because that’s where the money is.

They don't even have to work for US companies. As a recent example, the Dirty Pipe vulnerability was discovered by a German Engineer working for a very basic website hoster.

He found it when he was investigating a customer complaint about corrupted log file downloads.

There is still in-depth high-value engineering happening, even if you don't work for the flashy silicon valley VC unicorns.

In fact, such a basic support request would probably have been closed as "could not reproduce" in a highly competitive environment.

another Good example of this is the work RIPE is doing in regards to its work in securing the internet/bgp peering the model of ixp's as a community compared to how it works in the US.

Except for the pharmaceuticals. We still rely on the inventions that happened in WW2.

Hetzner at least is a pretty good competitor to Linode and Digital Ocean.

It's sad, even sap runs a lot on aws

I thought they have their own “SAP cloud”

but maybe it’s just some marketing BS