It's telling that you're lumping France and Germany together that you don't know what you're talking about. France has come an extremely long way in the past few years, with pretty good mobile and fibre coverage (there are villages with hundreds of people with proud signs "Commune fibrée"), and vast government digital services. The last time i had to interact with a government office physically was to file the (online prepared) form for ID and passport, where it's purely done for verification purposes. There's a government SSO which gives access to all government services online, for free.
There's also a very healthy startup culture and scene (check the FrenchTech's Next40).
> Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech
Insulting to companies such as Doctolib (revolutionised health appointments, a single platform to book one, send your documents if needed, have ones online, etc.), Back Market, fintechs such as Qonto and Swile, Ornikar, etc. etc. Real world companies solving actual problems and widely used in France and starting to export (Back Market have an EU wide presence, Ornikar are in a couple of Western EU markets, etc.).
Do you realize that even here on HN, the percentage of people who know at least one of those names is likely to be in low single digits?
Compared to Google or Meta or Apple or Microsoft, these are not successes. And yet, France with its relatively big population and relatively good schools, should theoretically produce at least one or two comparable companies.
Specializing in a niche corner of the market can be called a success, but a cunning dwarf is still a dwarf. For one, it lacks the necessary capital to invest into something more risky but potentially more rewarding.
That the US by itself forms an easily accessible largely single-language market is one of the reasons they do disproportionately well.
And that's fine because those companies are serving the French market first? I don't expect French people to know about Zelle or Konbini payments.
It is certainly not bad, but it makes no sense to pretend that they play in the same league as the global giants, or even just one level under them.
At this level of significance, countries like Thailand or Turkey can play, too. I would expect more from France, one of the heavyweights of the Western civilization and a cradle of Enlightement.
I say this as an avid Zelle user.
you are trolling.
Estonia has high-tech exports of 2.6 billion USD. Germany has high-tech exports of around 200 billion USD, which makes it world-wide number three, with the US being number four. Data from the World Bank.
There is literally two orders of magnitude of high-tech you are ignoring.
The plan has worked, to share the success of the big economic powers within the EU with the lesser fortunate so that they could be competitive in the future and even the grounds. It's not a surprise that coming out like the original commenter isn't exactly well received.
[1] https://statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/38139/umfrage/ne...
Estonia is miles ahead of other EU countries when it comes to software culture and hygiene: other countries (such as France) still mostly see IT as a center of costs / necessary evil.
Estonians think from first principle and bring software early in any new endeavors.
Add to that the “show don’t tell” culture, necessary in a world where Estonia is (still) an underdog, that works well with the naturally hard-working nature of Estonians.
Look at companies like AMSL which no one comes even close. It is likely that every device you own has a microchip made with a machine by AMSL. Is it sexy? Is there a narcissistic tweeting CEO? No, but there is invasion at the highest level.
The mRNA vaccine also came out of the "EU".
What the EU has little off and what you are probably complaining about it throwing money at a hundred things to see what sticks. Those methods cause things like Theranos to spawn.
Rampent capitalism causes people to suffer and die. You may get a few unicorns with some inovation but you can get there without the suffering as well.
But as you said, it's not very sexy, there's a little bit (not that much really) of management/bureaucracy (and most actually understand that state of things as the european equilibrium between corruption and too-much-red-tape) and it's not that hard to get funded on small to medium projects.
Whenever you introduce large bureaucracy into any process, risk mitigation becomes the main goal of the most important actors, at the cost of all the previous goals.
I’d be surprised to learn that it would have been possible to run packet data on the original telephone system.
I’d be less surprised to learn that decades of incremental improvements ultimately enabled packet data to run on top of telephone lines.
Most of the groundlaying work on mRNA has been done by Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian scientist who moved to the US to continue her research in better conditions.
The history of mRNA research is pretty tangled, but its majority took place at the American side of the pond. Unless you want to cherry-pick one particular moment and disregard all others, then no, mRNA technology is not a European, or even majority-European invention.
To take an example were all the ground work was done in Europe and later propelled US companies to riches: MP3.
But hey, if you want to play Super Trump with countries, and the US to win, fine for me. The US win by virtue of being the most exceptional country on earth.
She did her research at UPenn and accepted a demotion and pay cut in 1995 because grant agencies decided this weird mRNA stuff wasn't worth funding.
In 2006 she founded startup company RNARx, funded with 100k USD of government grants, but didn't come to an agreement to license patents of her own work which UPenn held.
So in 2013 she joined German company Biontech, funded with 150m EUR of venture capital, which was finally able to productize the research.
Incremental research is needed, and as a collaborator or downstream from many of these projects, the developed tech is often disruptive in many ways, be it cost reduction (keeping the industry competitive) or creating new features, improving safety of security of the products. Yes, developing a slightly better telegraph has its use and it doesn't beat inventing email but email itself was a incremental progress from telegraph, telex, fax, BBS, internet... Haven't seen a 747 assemble itself from a DARPA project yet.
A lot of the cutting edge stuff on all kinds of wireless or fiber communication is funded through the EU and I'd say looking at funded projects year after year you can see lots of research lab work percolate quite quickly to a large network of SMEs that then provide new services to lots of European companies.
Why did BioNTech have to partner up with American Pfizer to get anywhere with their (groundbreaking!) technology? Why did we give the Americans the secret sauce?
> Rampent capitalism causes people to suffer and die.
Ill-informed but strongly held attitudes like that are a big problem in the EU. There would be a lot fewer people on Earth and they would suffer a lot more if we didn't have Capitalism. They would suffer even less if we had more of it.
No regulations are fine and dandy unless you are one of the first 346 to die from Boeing's MAX disaster until the "market corrects itself".
Even the EU has been complaining how expensive it is to run rail through Switzerland. The reason being regulation which prevent such disasters as in Ohio. [3]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/nov/02/child-labor-laws...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-sa...
The bad kinds of child labour disappear as poverty disappears. No need for any hard regulation there.
I actually looked at the reported workplace safety violations and the reported workplace accidents for Tesla a couple of years ago to see whether the reporting was biased against Tesla or not -- turns out it was. It still is.
I'm sorry but that is extremely cold hearted, mostly useless and bordering on the sociopathic. As an excuse for child labour. Just "fix" everything, have enough money and no children will need to work in risky conditions? You should go and tell the DRC government that, as well as the families whose children are dying/poisoning themselves for their whole lives, they would be overjoyed.
It is not a solution in any way a form, it's a desired state. Hard regulations banning these kind of undesirable practices will be an immediate (ish, with time for enforcement) fix and literally save lives.
Is your view similarly useless and sociopathic with regards to all regulations? Building codes are only a chore and increase housing prices, once everybody is rich all housing will be of good quality (until an earthquake or hurricane or poor living conditions strike and kill, but who cares, right?).
We still have shocking differences not just in tech, but in food quality across the EU. Whatever sells in Czechia, Croatia or Bulgaria tends to be a) more expensive than in Germany and b) less good. I can't imagine the same happening in the US; Mississippians wouldn't tolerate being fed with worse cheese than Newyorkers only because their different economic power.
To some degree, this is caused by the babel of languages and resulting cultural barriers. I am not parochial, and yet I am totally ignorant about who is a popular singer in Hungary or a popular writer in Belgium. The same barrier influences businesses and consumers.
I'm shocked that that is still the case. I remember recurrent news stories years ago on German TV about that exact thing, except with Poland. Poles who lived close to the border shopped food in Germany for that very reason.
I don't understand why food would be more expensive in countries with lower wages. The VAT rates are not that different.
https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-06/v...
There are Danish supermarkets right across the border in Germany for the locals because things are still a bit cheaper there but most of us no longer bother driving all the way to Germany with a trailer on the car just to buy stuff. It used to be common to do that a couple of times a year.
The multinationals do what they can get away with. A fine from a Bulgarian authority is likely to be trivial to them, and if it actually bites, they can always withdraw from the market as a retaliation.
No one wants to lose market access to Germany, but the smaller countries don't have as much leverage.
The price at the time is generaly considerably higher than in neighbouring countries because VAT is just a part of the general taxation scheme. Whatever taxes companies get saddled with just get transferred to the general population via prices on the stuff they sell. And taxation in Croatia is crazy high unfortunately for everyone.
And yet, it's the case ? Sure, you can find the same products if you go looking, but the average food quality between those two states will be wildly different. And that's without taking into account that the average food quality in the US is awful.
I agree that Estonia is doing great and a role model in many ways, but the by far biggest EU software company is still German: SAP
Also, have a look at the very successful ELISE AI initiative: https://www.elise-ai.eu/
In my comment edit, I mentioned the 20 year limit specifically, because the ossification in last decades is real. The US generates a lot more startups, even the London scene is livelier than the rest of Europe taken together.
Germany alone has roughly half of all so-called hidden-champions world-wide. Many of them are in High-tech.
Europe lacks the large internet and software companies. Though T-Mobile is German and known in the US. SAP provides the software which runs large enterprises. But high-tech is much more, it's factory automation, it's aerospace (think Airbus), it's biotech (think Biontech), ... Soft- and hardware are a crucial factor for those.
But there were times when German companies actually were world leaders in the big things as well, not just reliable suppliers to foreign big players. Don't you count this as a regression?
We have the world leader in civil aerospace in France/Germany, Many high-speed trains in the world are coming from France or Germany. There are many large high-tech sectors.
It's nice that Estonia is successful, but it's not where the next big chip manufacturing sites will be build. Intel and TSMC are in talks to move to the former East Germany (Saxony has roughly 70000 employees already in the chip manufacturing industry). The big Internet exchange node is in Frankfurt.
The EU has a lot to catch up in many countries, but it's not that we have no high-tech.
They will be an even better solution when we have small electric jets, especially for inter-European flights.
Do you think the first practical electric jet will come from a subsidized EU development plan -- or from a VP funded US company?
I was traveling this week with both, an Airbus from Lufthansa and high-speed trains from Siemens.
Not for short to medium distances they're not. Everything under 3-4 hours of train is faster, more comfortable and with much less hassle than flying (going to an airport, security checks, uncomfortable seating, interruptions for take off and landing, long queueing).
Sure if you think its a good idea to blow lots of carbon in the air and a punch of emissions with led all over the continent.
Trains absolutely make sense in the waste majority cases in Europe.
And having high speed dedicated lanes also has the additional benefit of removing capacity from older lines and allowing more regional and more cargo.
Building trains, both conventional and high speed is a huge win.
P.S:
The current lead in terms of electric viable plains I would say is Heart Aerospace from Sweden.
The trouble is that this has been known since at least the late 1990s, discussed quite often, plans made, and yet the gap hasn't grown appreciably smaller. It has arguably widened. 15 years ago, you could choose from a plentitude of European feature phones. Now the vast majority of our own mobile phone market is dominated by US or East Asian products.
Btw., I'm a happy user of a bunch of US tech products. It's not that I need to replace all that. I want the EU to be competitive, but I'm also using other stuff. Apple in the recent years made some excellent product technology, like their chips, which are produced in Taiwan, also with a lot of technology from Europe.
Sadly that isn't that many. And China and Japan are doing their own. The US plans to use Japan technology (Texas). So does Indonesia.
Its just a smaller industry.
Siemens signed with Egypt (8 billion Euros), Turkey, ...
Deutsche Bahn is investing ten billion Euros in modernizing their fleet.
Which phone is this?
Technology is notoriously two-faced. Or zero-faced if you can't produce it. The medieval people didn't have to worry about Facebook memes influencing the clergy and triggering heresies.
True, but not very relevant. A continent with 25 per cent of humanity's wealth is expected to produce at least something sometimes.
But just look at the brain drains. How many Nobelists or other important scientists moved from the US to Europe and vice versa? We are losing our most talented people to a better research environment.
There is no shortage of European workers in Google or SpaceX, where the main limiting factor is actually ITAR laws, not lack of interest. How many Americans moved to Germany to work in SAP or to France to work in Arianespace?
While I understand what you're saying, I think what you're observing and commenting on is the huge amount of money that is thrown at technologies developed in the US compared to similar technologies developed by an EU nation which don't get the same attention. US tech infrastructure is by no means exceptional. It's good in many places, don't get me wrong, but it's an extremely similar or lesser experience compared to many EU nations (including the ones you mentioned), and a lot more costly for end users.
Even when I lived in Russia for a time, the infrastructure/costs were amazingly better in Russian cities (outside of Moscow and Saint Petersburg even) than in many US cities.
This is not to say everything US == bad everything EU == good; far from it. Instead just try to understand that the main difference between the tech you read about in US that gets millions or billions and the tech in the EU which just stumbles on like any other business is simply the high attention from investors looking for investment vehicles.
Beat for beat, the day to day technology that I used in the US has either an acceptable or better EU-accessible version, and the EU version is often even a bit cheaper.
The big projects like Starlink are extremely subsidized by the US government; it's the US residents paying person like Elon Musk to let him sell them something right back, without having any real control or input over the way that money is spent by Musk and other similar corporations, or even ensuring that everyone has a chance to use the stuff that billions of dollars of their tax dollars are going to. It's an oligarchy that's been fully legalized and approved.
I really don't think that's the direction we want any nation to be taking, as it does _not_ provide good results long term for the people. US broadband is a perfect example for this with the incumbent providers doing everything in their power to offer as little as possible while still technically qualifying for the subsidies so they can pocket the remainder after the bare minimum requirements are met.
Don't misunderstand the high investor attention that US tech companies get as always being great innovation; investors want a good investment vehicle, and that doesn't always mean the vehicle is a worthy and innovative product. It just means it's something that has a way of providing good returns on investments, including short term fads.
No, it's not.
(No, "SpaceX's US government launch contracts = US government subsidies" is not true.)
SpaceX gets plenty of government contracts because it has proven, reliable, and volume-capable launchers of government payloads. Many within NASA were fiercely opposed to SpaceX for years.
You are ignoring that Airbus is also getting additional government contracts. Arianespace gets massive infrastructure subsidy, they are gone get at least 5 billion all said and told for Ariane 6, and that does not cover the last 20 years of sub-component level development for things like the engine and the solid fuel. Lots of the testing and development for sub-components is all done in govenrment funded institutions that all have their own public funding.
In addition to Arianespace has received lots of 'contracts' for development of things like engines, carbon fiber second stages, different re-usability prototypes and the list goes on.
And when all that is done, Ariane 6 will STILL GET GOVERNMENT contracts, such as launches from ESA, EU governments projects like Galileo and countries own launches.
SpaceX actually likely lost money on development of Dragon 1 and Crew Dragon. The had incredibly competitive bids and the govenrment got absolutely amazing deals by anybodies accounting.
For Arianespace to claim SpaceX is subsidized and that's why they can launch cheaper is simply the height of hypocrisy and and Arianespace actually knows that they are outright lying when they say that.
The reality is Arianespace and Europe dominated the market for 20 years and barley made any technological or price progress in that time. Even in the 2010s they mostly launched Russian rockets developed in the 1960s. If that's not a complete failure I don't know what is.
Is that correct? Are/were Arianespace designs based on Russian rockets? I know that the US used Russian engines for years.
Basically Ariane 5 was only worth flying for double GEO launches. That was Okish because this was during a time period where there were a pretty decent amount of GEO launches. Europe had the tiny Vega rocket as well.
However between those two things the Russian Soyuz launched by Arianespace and Russian Proton rocket were successful.
> Are/were Arianespace designs based on Russian rockets?
Europes own rockets, like Ariane 5 and Vega are not meaningfully derived from Russian designs. The are more a product of copying from the post-Apollo, Shuttle area in US space flight. Basically Ariane 5 was suppose to be the base of a European Shuttle.
This is why Ariane 5 is so big, instead of doing the sensible thing and making a mid-sized rocket to take over all the market, they made a huge rocket so it can fly a big space plane (Hermes). And then of course they canceled the space plane but didn't reevaluate the rocket.
The Ariane 5 uses hydrogen core stage with side booster, so its basically like the Shuttle. Notably why these European designs can never be reusable like Falcon 9. The Core stage is way higher energy then the Falcon 9 Core stage.
Vega, Vega C, Ariane 5 and Ariane 6 all use solid fuels, something that Russians don't use much. Its basically a lot of research done by France on the ICBM program that is being use here.
> I know that the US used Russian engines for years.
This was a post cold war development of course. By that point Europe had started development on their own hydrogen engine and didn't have much interest in RP-1. Hydrogen and solids were the way to go, or so they thought.
I wish Europe had just picked up the Nk-33 and built a medium sized rocket with it.
The FDP and the Greens are the more modern ones, but there is an anti-tech undercurrent in the Green party that distrusts anything industrial. The space industry has a nontrivial carbon trace; its development in Germany would be, at the very least, pretty controversial.
Heck the Pentagon probably has a plan B in the drawer for a Starlink-like constellation dated fall 2022 should Musk go more unhinged that he already is. LEO constellations went from ‘interesting’ to ‘paradigm shift’ overnight, nothing to be surprised about.
One of the necessities is cheap access to the orbit, and I just cannot see the national behemoth space agencies developing economic, reusable rockets. The traditional rocket industry in the US was unable to do that either.
The barriers to becoming an agile space company are formidable. When looking at SpaceX, we forget how many space startups from that period are now defunct and forgotten. John Carmack founded one, too; it is gone.
An interesting fact is that they did very well as long as they could conduct cheap tests very often. As their rockets got bigger, they could no longer do that and then they floundered.
Was there a good enough reason to go again?
In contrast, there is a good reason to have re-usable rockets and quick deployment now.
Star-Link and reusable rockets now have tremendous military uses which are being demonstrated in Ukraine.
Monetary concerns will take a back seat to that.
What is religious is the outright aversion to state intervention without good reason.
No, it's coordination between aligned states to do what is needed to improve things in general. GDPR wouldn't have been possible if it were a Danish or Estonian thing only. Same goes for DMA and DSA, the rail packages, anti-competitive rulings, normalisation in standards (like Micro USB and now Type C) and a million other things.
Maybe the reality of a 27-nation collaboration is richer and more complicated than either of these extremes.
There are many relatively market-friendly nations in the EU, especially in the eastern half, but the EU is mostly an extension of the French model and without the British, it really started leaning heavily into the protectionist bureaucratic model. The UK acted as a brake of sorts on those tendencies and its influence is sorely missed, at least by people like me. (Certainly the bureaucrats rejoice.)
* The privatisation of UK railways has been an unmitigated disaster
* The privatisation and selling off of various UK heavy industries (like steel, automobiles, trains, aeroplanes, shipbuilding) has been somewhat of a disaster with the majority of it closing, and the rest being foreign owned. Where the UK were a leader in many areas, they no longer are, with a drastic impact on the people who used to work there. As a counterpoint, France has managed to maintain shipbuilding, airplane, train construction at a pretty good level.
* Where the UK is "better" is financial services - IMO in part due to the English language, in part due to money laundering with the help of the various crown tax havens; and the startup scene - again the English language surely helped, but so did less rigorous labour laws (and that has been slightly relaxed in France).
Anything else come to mind?
"You know what they say about the average Common Market official. He has the organising ability of the Italians, the flexibility of the Germans, and the modesty of the French. And that's topped up by the imagination of the Belgians, the generosity of the Dutch and the intelligence of the Irish."
True. I still think Thierry Breton does a really good job, though, despite being French. Sylvie Goulard would have been a disaster -- she couldn't even speak English!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvie_Goulard
(The wiki page lies and says she speaks English -- no, she really doesn't. Her German is pretty good, though.)
I think a modest proposal for curb stomping the bad French influence in the EU is to have all EU civil servants retake their entrance exams in another language if they originally took it in French. We should also form an alliance to automatically reject Commissioner candidates who 1) don't speak English and 2) speak French at the confirmation hearings in the European Parliament.
I'm still waiting for the Estonian space rockets and Finnish airplanes and high speed rail. Seriously your rant is a bit misplaced.
You are on the other hand setting unrealistic expectations for Estonia / Finland.
Hardware is obviously a lot more costly than software, hence why you hear more about software tech from Estonia (Skype, Transferwise, Pipedrive, Veriff to name a few) than hardware (Milrem robotics, Co-Module, Woola...) as the latter are of much smaller scale (respective to the size of Estonia) than the former: software scales a lot better.
Given that despite the comparison to Starlink, the article focuses on defence and crisis response considerations after Ukraine, I don't think the people behind this proposal are really that concerned about widespread peace time use.
> Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech
A small subset of well-funded companies started in Paris and immediate surroundings alone in the last 20 years (most of them much more recent). Most of these have raised between $100m-$500m, and several are unicorns:
Ledger, Deezer, Shift Solutions, Malt, Agicap, Back Market, Ankorstore, Vesitaire Collective, Virtuo, Sendinblue, HiFiBio, Aircall, Mirakl, EcoVadis, Criteo, DoctoLib, Voodoo, Qonto, BlaBlaCar, LumApps, Lydia, OpenClassrooms, Shift Technology, PayFit, Meero, Ynsect, Scality, Ornicar, Wynd, HR Path
Paris has similar levels of (some estimate more) tech startups than London, and overall France is at a similar level to the UK and Germany in terms of tech startups.
Europe ( haven't looked at numbers for just EU) is lagging in terms of VC funding relative to the US, sure - according to McKinsey, in 2019 Europe accounted for 36% of VC backed companies that raised funding in the preceding decade globally (vs. 45% for the US), and just 14% of unicorns (vs. 50% for the US), but from working in the VC field for the last 5 years, what we saw was also that capital inflows in Europe were growing rapidly as attitudes to risk have been changing, and more founders achieving exits are turning around and feeding capital back into VC funds.
The amount of effort to evaluate everything and work out where the "catch" is ..... it's just understandable that we might look for our governments to shoulder a bit of that burden in the critical areas. At least our healthcare systems usually help us that way.
Yes, Europeans are fond of telling scary tall tales about these kinds of strawmen. "Our economic growth may be sclerotic, our regulatory environment may be completely uncompetitive, and every third company may be relocating operations elsewhere, but the real win is that we don't have too many kinds of products to be confused choosing between!"
It's a coping mechanism for decline.
As for decline....look in the mirror. Everyone experiences it.
> As for decline....look in the mirror.
I’m in Europe, so I can just look out my window. It’s very pretty! And completely sclerotic and dysfunctional.
If the tech wing of the EU were headed by Estonia, we would have a chance. But with the current distribution of influence and capital within the Union, a successful EU-Starlink is about as likely as a successful EU-smartphone with a successful EU-operating system and EU-search engine. In practice, there will be a flow of taxpayer money into something highly subsidized that no one will ever use.
We have fallen so far behind the US in tech that the situation starts to remind me of the gap between the Eastern and the Western Bloc when I was a kid. It is no longer even funny.
Edit: downvotes without rebuttals. C'mon, folks, I know that some of you worship the EU, but our digital performance is horrible, and if it wasn't for a few outliers in Scandinavia and the Baltics, it would be negligible. Entire huge countries such as France and Italy produce basically nothing of value when it comes to tech, while small nations like Estonia and Finland punch well above their weight.
The only somewhat usable EU-based software product younger than 20 years that people around me sometimes use is DeepL. Don't make the mistake of considering JetBrains a EU company. They are registered in Czechia, but they are mostly Russians.