They can't buy anything unless Europeans are willing to sell.

Vivendi and Tencent attempting to buy Ubisoft via shares might be one thing in living memory that disagrees.

If you are publicly traded there is little you can do to prevent people buying shares - though you are right that people sell privately held companies a little too often.

Ubisoft in particular created many poison pills to prevent companies getting too dug in, however that didn’t prevent anything except a total buyout. Their board is stacked with Microsoft and Tencent which causes weird, extremely harmful, decision making in the org.

> If you are publicly traded there is little you can do to prevent people buying shares

Nobody can force you to sell your shares. Nobody can force you to make your company public. It's all voluntary. You can't have your cake and eat it. Want to get that juicy foreign investor money then cry that the foreigners are taking over?

I have a low tolerance for absurdly stupid comments.

Once you sell a share you don't get to control who it is sold to afterwards, you could give shares to people as stock-options, and they are (rightly) going to sell their shares regardless who the buyer is, only based on the price.

So. Seriously, shut the fuck up, you're suggesting that the only answer is isolationism.

Identification of an issue (people buying up European talent before it gets large enough to be competitive) is not an invitation for absurd and deficiently reasoned victim blaming.

Your anger comes from your frustration, your frustration comes from realizing that you're wrong.

If you want to keep control of a company - or anything - within certain hands, then you can't sell that thing to others. As evident by millions of companies never having their shares publicly listed or sold on any market. If you sell, you have to accept that you don't have any control of who owns in the future. You can't have your cake and eat it. Not even Europeans can do that.

"People buying up European talent" - they can only buy if Europeans are willing to sell. Such victims...

This reminds me of people complaining about foreign investors buying up real estate. But of course, no blame is to be put on the greedy sellers who slurped up that juicy foreign money.

What's your intended message?

Yes, people sell things voluntarily. (In particular, small companies being bought and killed by monopolies is usually very benefitial to the small companies' owners, even if it's bad for the economy as a whole.) That does not contradict the parent comments.

The parents comments are about foreign companies owning your company.

If you do not want that, do not voluntarily sell your company.

I like my cat. I don't want others owning my cat. I probably shouldn't sell my cat then right? I can't take the money now and complain later the neighbor owns my cat.

There is an issue with that perspective though. The Europeans sell out. Ok. Maybe they are bad at valuation and don't realise that their companies are worth more than they are being paid for. Or maybe an EU company can't capture as much value as a US/Chinese company. And those are really the only two options - either the decision is rational or irrational. If it is an irrational decision then there isn't much to talk about. But it is probably the second case - selling out to someone on a different continent generates value. And there is a good chance that is because it helps avoid EU regulators.

For example, you mentioned Nokia. Nokia was blown out of the market by superior Chinese manufacturing and US design [0]. It wasn't a close battle, the EU contender was crushed. Apple's motivation for entering the market was that among other things that companies like Nokia were so bad at making phones that Apple reckoned it could break in to a new vertical. That is a very EU-led-industry problem to have. The reason they sold out was because the EU turned out to be incapable of incubating a modern, successful phone manufacturer in the 21st century even with an incredible lead and Nokia was being outmanoeuvred everywhere.

[0] Both looked like regulatory issues to me, we've seen how the EU responds to things like micromanaging the iPhone charging port.

> Nokia was blown out of the market by superior Chinese manufacturing and US design [0].

No, Nokia was blown out of the market via the exclusive deal with Microsoft, which in turn made the dumbest management decisions ever. Nokia bled under the horrible management of Steve Ballmer and their own ignorance with regards to Android. They also proved later on that you don't need any expertise to produce decent Android phones, as HMD global used their name as a brand and has been thriving.

To add to this: It's not that hard to develop a mobile operating system that's on par or better than Android, despite what Google might want you to think.

Pretty telling though. When dijit was talking about Tencent, Microsoft or Google a few comments ago they were being presented as these huge incumbent behemoths that scoop up everything in their path. And, fair enough, they are.

But when Nokia starts with an overwhelming incumbents advantage, their board doesn't even have confidence that Nokia's internal talent pool can lead them to make a mobile phone! They couldn't defend themselves from multiple companies in completely different industries with no prior competence in the mobile phone world. That was an A-Team EU hardware company's performance.

The issue here isn't company size, it is something specific to the EU. I'm not sure what, but since it is a geographic thing I'd start with regulation and branch out from there.

> their board doesn't even have confidence that Nokia's internal talent pool can lead them to make a mobile phone!

I'm sorry but it's honestly pointless discussing this as no one in this thread wants to spend even an ounce of time into researching this. Reading your comment in it's entirety tells me you weren't there when stuff was happening.

> That was an A-Team EU hardware company's performance.

For the record, the Lumia phones had A-Tier hardware in them. They boasted the best low light cameras on phones for a while around ~2012.

Nokia made the Lumia phones, MS provided the operating system. Previously, Nokia had their own Linux based OS, called Maemo, which was originally supposed to run on what became Lumia. It later formed into Sailfish OS, which had it's own device family.

The issue wasn't the hardware platform itself, it was the fact that Nokia decided to go with the MS ecosystem, instead of Android. And honestly, I don't even think that was a bad move. I am at a loss trying to figure out how device manufacturers actually make profits based on what has turned into extremely restrictive licensing deals with Google in order to get GAPPS on their phones.

I used to have a Lumia phone as a teenager and it was very nice. I loved how curved and rounded it was, made it look very sleek and sci-fi, and it felt really good in the hand. Even the panel-style home screen was considered to be pretty cool. I remember at the time that, as you say, the main criticism was that it was isolated from the main android/iOS app store ecosystem and there were hardly any apps for it.

Exactly. Part of Nokia still lives on in Jolla and they have a modest team.

I owned a Jolla phone and it was the sickest thing ever, even though I was a Linux noob.

I honestly think Android was a net loss for mobile computing, both in terms of platform and performance.

> There is an issue with that perspective though. The Europeans sell out. Ok. Maybe they are bad at valuation and don't realise that their companies are worth more than they are being paid for. Or maybe an EU company can't capture as much value as a US/Chinese company. And those are really the only two options - either the decision is rational or irrational. If it is an irrational decision then there isn't much to talk about. But it is probably the second case - selling out to someone on a different continent generates value. And there is a good chance that is because it helps avoid EU regulators.

I think it comes down to two things:

1) The US is a large, uniform (regulation, language, media, etc.) making it easier to grow quickly. This puts the US competitor in a better place to buy the EU competitor than vice-versa.

2) More significantly, the US capital market is bigger & better. That starts with VC funding but is also the case with IPOs and publicly traded companies. That‘s how the EU tech standouts such as Spotify end up IPOing in the US.

#2 is certainly something the EU can work on improving but it has very little to do with tech regulation.

SAP, too.