Re:Amstrad Emailer, the UK’s first smartphone
by mike_hearn on Thursday March 09, 2023 @10:18AM
(#35082074)
Yes there's a lot of firms that are actually in some senses UK companies from a tech perspective, but are owned by Americans. I used to work for one. All the engineering work was done out of the UK. The US focused on sales. Funnily enough, when we started working together I was getting drinks with the CEO and I mentioned I seemed to have spent my whole life working for Americans. He laughed and said he'd spent his whole life working for Brits (his background was finance).
Re:Amstrad Emailer, the UK’s first smartphone
by maxbaines on Thursday March 09, 2023 @10:44AM
(#35082417)
Good piece of wisdom, I had not thought about it but I think you make a valid point, it applies to other industries too. Not sure there is anything wrong with the approach, I would rather be innovating than maintaining.
We've got Creative Assembly (owned by Japan-based Sega), Rockstar North (previously DMA Design and founded the GTA Srtries, now owned by US-based Rockstar ofc), Jagex (owned by a US PE company), and a whole host of others mostly now owned by US companies.
There's a piece of wisdom floating around that the UK is actually really good at building tech and tech-adjacent companies, bu really bad at scaling them beond a certain point. We don't have the BigTech companies China and the US do (nobody does, really), but we're a pretty open economy, so lots of promising companies get acquired before they hit _big_.