That is really total rubbish. How could 1-2 year old regulations go back 30+ years to stifle the European "tech scene"? By the way, there is other technology than that which is used to sell advertising on the internet.
Indeed anyone who has started a potentially global business quickly learns to avoid European markets for as long as possible.
Paying for lawyers, exploring utilizing local business networks to avoid headaches, and countless special edge cases is a great deterannce from offering services/products there... Let alone building actual companies and teams from there.
It's worth remembering that Silicon Valley got started way back in the 50s with Shockley's transistors. Then Microsoft in the 80s and Amazon, Google in the 1990s.
What was going on in Europe during these times?
For most of the 20th century continental Europe was a hotbed of dictators and extremists. The first half was dominated by two world wars that flattened everything. The second half saw dictatorships across all of eastern Europe that kept it impoverished, there were dictatorships in Spain and Greece and significant political instability and corruption for decades in Italy.
Britain, which came out of WW2 the strongest having been on the winning side, was nonetheless totally wrecked and worse still, the population concluded that the government must be pretty good at things due both to the victory and years of news suppression which prevented people learning about government errors (e.g. Exercise Tiger). So Britain became strongly socialist and remained that way until Thatcher in the 80s. The economic destruction this socialist environment wrecked was extreme enough that the UK had to go to the IMF for a bailout and was suffering things like electricity shortages during the worst periods of the 1970s. It was a place where even established businesses struggled to survive, so the idea of a startup culture or creating advanced tech firms was totally absurd - the government had given up even attempting to fix things and unions under the control of Marxists were practically shadow governments in and of themselves.
In other words, if you look at the time that the USA was establishing startups like Intel that'd become huge tech firms, which then spawned generations of technically skilled VCs, Europe was mostly either actual communist dictatorships or so hard left that the idea of creating dynamic new businesses was a pipe dream. There was no environment in which to create the generations of successful entrepreneurs that America benefits from.
Interestingly, Germany did much better than Britain during this time because - having had their faith in government wisdom destroyed by the Nazis - Germany deregulated and experienced much better economic growth, despite having been cleaved in half by the Soviets. This sowed the seeds of German economic strength dominating the Euro today.
Things only really changed for most of Europe in the 1990s with the fall of the USSR, reunification of Germany and Thatcher's reforms having turned around the UK. But then Europe collectively decided that the right path into the future was to slowly merge together under a vast centralised bureaucracy centred in Brussels, one which had its roots in the Ventotene Manifesto, a document written by communists in the 40s. Remarkably, the EU to this day still has never really shaken a vague sense that communism was roughly in the right area. Its ultra-powerful unaccountable Commission President (Juncker) routinely makes statements like "when it gets serious, you have to lie" and he travelled to the birthplace of Karl Marx where he defended Marx's legacy:
The EU has historically often had former communists in its most senior positions and does things in ways that are reminiscent of the USSR (e.g. a Parliament that can't actually overrule the unelected parts of the government). No surprise that it takes an ambivalent view of business, especially successful American business, and largely defines itself as a defender of The People against Capital.
Combined with no culture of granting equity and we have today's situation.
> The first half was dominated by two world wars that flattened everything [in Europe].
What about Japan's rise from a bombed out, defeated nation to a G7 economic power and world leader in electronics and automotives in the same time period?
Good question. I suspect it's like Germany and precision machinery/automotives.
Japan lost comprehensively enough to destroy any notion that their government was good, and had a huge US involvement in the rebuild. IOW they were rebuilt along US lines and, like Germany, benefited from the "loser's victory" in which they avoided a sharp turn towards big government.
During the same era the UK lost its own car manufacturing industry, with aggressive unions and general industrial malaise being the prime culprits.
Exiting WWII Britain was fully competitive in computer technology, look particularly at the University of Manchester, home of the Williams Tube and many pioneering computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_computers which Ferranti was barely able to move the needle in commercializing.
yes however Britain squeltched its own computer scientists and engineers, Tommy Flowers in particular, immediately after WWII due to false concerns of military secrecy
That's not reflected by the historical record of the U.K.'s post war pioneering computers, which I provided just one link to.
Per Wikipedia Tommy Flowers couldn't get a bank loan because he couldn't cite his cryptoanalysis machines as proof he could do what he claimed he could do. "False concerns of military secrecy" when we were in an existential cold war with international socialism? That put so much of Europe under Soviet occupation?
Or the cited severe lack of funding mechanisms and other things necessary for commercial success, going all the way to the concept of doing stuff outside the aegis of the government which included the public University of Manchester? The latter could and did make numerous record breaking computers, going at least as far as the early 1960s Atlas, a competitive microsecond cycle supercomputer that was the first to page. But this didn't translate into commercial success.
The UK had a small but modern computer industry in the 1980s, via Acorn and the resulting ARM chips that are world-beating today. It also had firms like RIM, Sinclair etc.
Until ARM was sold to SoftBank it was the primary British high tech computer firm. Little known fact - ARM is one of the very few European tech firms that incentivised its employees with equity sharing. It was and still is standard for firms outside the USA to keep all equity for the founders and investors, with none for early employees.
It's hard to know to what extent Acorn struggled to compete with Apple because of Europe-specific factors vs just bad luck: Acorn computers were very slow to get FCC regulatory approval in the USA, and they had a failure in their supply chain at a critical moment that pushed Brits towards buying US computers instead. They sold 300k machines but could only get 30k from the factories. There were a few other problems that stalled their expansion, and all this was taking place in the context of a country going through a major recession as Thatcher ended a government policy of employment targeting to bring inflation under control (inflation hit 22% in 1980). In the end they never recovered - US firms grew too strong and outcompeted them, despite initially stronger technology. Given that Acorn and ARM showed the same cycle of former employees becoming entrepreneurs and investors themselves, it's possible if things had worked out a bit differently for Acorn it could have been the "British Apple" and seeded a British computer industry competitive with Silicon Valley. But - it didn't.
How much of Acorn even having a chance is consistent with your correct as far as I know history of the British economy, with socialism only being (partly) rolled back by Thatcher? I'd also note that Apple et. al. were also subject to similar macroeconomic headwinds, although our inflation rate's peak was "only" 15%.
Bad luck indeed, although looking at the details of e.g. the Acorn Electron which had that production bottleneck doesn't suggest they had significantly stronger technology at the time, pretty much all 6502 based stuff like their competition except for e.g. the also local Sinclair Research with its Z80 based systems. In the US market there was also the Z80 based and monstrously successful Tandy TRS-80, per Wikipedia significantly outselling the Apple II for a long period.
Tandy also had a huge retail network to sell its wares, it's Radio Shack stores were the place to buy random basic electronic stuff all over the USA. Per Wikipedia, in 1982 4,300 company stores and 2,000 independent franchises in towns not big enough for a company store. One reason I mention this is to ask, how big was it in the U.K. post-WWII until Thatcher? It became a very big thing the US in the 1950s, combining local capital and market focus with centralized and bulk product planning, technology, marketing, and often purchasing.
Hmmmm, Tandy also did a Motorola 6809 based "Color Computer" of some note, but its expensive/superior CPU prompted them to forgo things that made competing 6502 systems more popular, like built in sound and graphics for e.g. games. There was also a very American cottage industry style market in Z80 CP/M systems built around the S-100 bus.
Radio Shack was pretty big in the UK. I remember them having stores when I was a kid.
I think the general macro-economic and social conditions may explain why Acorn was rare, whereas the US birthed many such companies. But then again, the UK has less than a quarter of the population of the USA, so presumably that right there should slash the number of companies.
I've also done a focus switch in this discussion, from all of Europe to just the UK. The rest of Europe was still very messed up outside of west Germany and the small northern states, either dictatorships, or just exited from dictatorship, or were France:
West Germany gave birth to SAP in 1972, UK gave birth to Acorn and a few other small computer firms that didn't really make it, only SAP and ARM still survive and only one independent. I don't know of any big French tech firms from this era, but maybe there is one.
So I guess Acorn and maybe SAP are the exceptions that highlight just how dire conditions were in most of Europe at this time.
Maybe if the EU adopted China's model of tricking U.S. giants to come there for the "huge market," then steal/coerce giving away their tech to the local small companies that can become billion-dollar giants a few years later, and then kicking the big U.S. companies out of the country or making it almost impossible for them to compete locally would've been a better strategy for the EU, too.
Instead, the EU has allowed the U.S. tech giants to come and take over the local markets, and then crush or buy out all the smaller competition (UK's DeepMind anyone?!), and then wonder "where are the European competitors?!"
But it also seems that the US produces new big tech companies in new sectors whereas Europe appears not to. Sure maybe there aren’t any viable Google or Facebook competitors, but the US produces Stripe, Airbnb, uber, etc.
Those examples seem to highlight America's weaknesses, not strength. Uber and Airbnb are both mostly-criminal enterprises that could only succeed at the level they did because of corrupt or impotent law enforcement and legislators, and Stripe's success is facilitated by the inaccessible mess of America's underlying banking system.
I'm sorry but Taxis were a criminally poor, inefficient, and dangerous product before Uber came along. I'd like to see you argue in favor of Taxis, because there really aren't many good arguments or excuses for how they operated and really just squandered their own opportunity.
Uber is better on literally every single dimension.
Stripe is an international company that's facilitated by the internet.
Yes, America's existing taxi system was also awful. The fact that the only way to improve upon the situation required a series of criminal conspiracies and attempts to obstruct justice that were never properly punished reflects very poorly on the country.
You're aware of the Taxi lobby and borderline criminal interests and practices surrounding Taxi medallions right?
Not to mention that if you were black or lived in under-resourced areas, good luck getting a Taxi to stop for you or go where you need to go.
> The fact that the only way to improve upon the situation required a series of criminal conspiracies and attempts to obstruct justice that were never properly punished reflects very poorly on the country.
Isn't this an ironic statement given the actual history of how America was founded?
Venture capital and socialism (+overgrown, multi-level bureaucracies in the EU's case) can't really coexist. Nor can $200K+ US salaries coexist with $70K EU salaries for software engineers. So I wish Tusk good luck dealing with this one.
The "pay cut" is one-dimensional. In Europe I don't have student debt. In Europe I pay less for health care. In Europe I have more time of. In Europe I have better public infrastructure. In Europe I pay less for housing than the Valley.
Of course you can validate those things differently, but only looking on salary tells little.
You don't pay that much less for healthcare. Remember, it's not the government that's paying for it, it's _you_ paying, with your taxes. The cost structure is different, that's true (European doctors also make a lot less, and US pharma companies subsidize non-US customers for some reason), but that doesn't matter with a typical US SWE salary.
And with a fat $200K+ paycheck student debt goes away in a few years, if you had it in the first place (substantial fraction of students receive financial assistance).
Best of both worlds: get your "free" degree in Europe, move to the US, make a killing. This, in short, is Tusk's problem.
But even then comparison is hard, since treatments etc. differ.
> And with a fat $200K+ paycheck student debt goes away in a few years, if you had it in the first place (substantial fraction of students receive financial assistance).
If a European however, isntea dofnoayingnof debt has some money to invest there can be long term benefits (also Europeans often have better retirement funds)
All just to say that is complicated and comparison is hard. And true, it can financially be beneficial to get a good education in Europe and the go to make some money. Tusk's issue however is that digital world is important and US has a big leap and control.
Sure, but as a SWE you're making 3 times as much and paying half as much in taxes. You have to take that into account when deciding which is better for you economically, and it won't be in Europe's favor.
3x and .5x in US taxes are pretty hefty exaggerations, but I agree, financially you're better off working in the US. that being said, im moving to the UK for a year or two with the intent of traveling a lot through Europe, so there are other considerations that may sway your decisions :)
Wolfson. Olivetti. The EU fosters an environment where tech companies can be successful and then they're crushed by American market dominance because murica.
Personal opinion: the biggest problem of Europe is the marketing, or rather the lack of it and its ineffectiveness.
USA completely owns this.
Just look at what the Silicon Valley media-integrated marketing machine can do. A complete fraud with unsubstantiated promises like Theranos raised 700M with a 10B valuation. Even though they had nothing, their visions became practically an established fact in world wide media, driven by articles like the one in Wired in 2014 ("This Woman Invented a Way to Run 30 Lab Tests on Only One Drop of Blood").
Europe needs to learn to "overpromise and underdeliver" as well. And they need an integrated way to push the message of shiny new stuff to blue-eyed technology media to amplify it into people's consciousness.
I don't mean to create frauds like Theranos. I mean to say (for example) you will drone deliver on-demand customized popsicles made on the orbit of Mars five years from now, and then end up mailing customized ice cream made in Denmark instead.
People might find the greatest product in the world organically, eventually, by getting fed up with the alternatives, but in the meanwhile those banging the drum the most may just end up cornering the market.
I don't think the biggest problem is about salaries or luring in venture capital or the nature of legislation or density of microbreweries within a square kilometer or something like that. I think it is simply about marketing. (And this is not to say that other things play no role whatsoever)
If they want EU citizens to enjoy the fantastic EU privacy protections via EU tech giants, they need to have a beneficial legislative ecosystem. GDPR needs work (as only the giants can afford more than zero breaches, which are an unfortunate reality for every company at some point) and their shiny new copyright law is outright fatal to startups.
EU legislation has a very clear message: start your tech company elsewhere.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. I think people don't quite understand the extent of GDPR. Hurting start ups and hobby projects that might make some money on the side means that you'll have fewer successful businesses down the line. It also means that you'll have fewer qualified workers.
The problem in the EU is that GDPR isn't the first such signal the EU has sent either. The cookie law was a signal that indicated that the EU regulates things without understanding what they're doing. The data retention act from over a decade ago was similar. I'm sure there were others even before that, but probably on a national level.
Either of us is reading it backwards - for example, Michał Boni is "green" in both "Vote on Possibility to
Change the Final Text" and "Final Vote on
Copyright Directive". Doesn't it mean he opposed it? Or is the first list of yours referring to a third voting, not mentioned on the website?
PO party is a Platform of corruption and lies, they used to change tune every poll/elections and are implicated in every major corruption scandal to date.
I'm not sure why the comments here are unusually toxic, but I think it is good to hear this. The EU tech sector has an opportunity to create customer-first text services with a strong focus on privacy and data portability, but it'll need some concessions and some support. There's no reason why the EU cannot replicate at least some of the success the US has had in the tech market, and even internally it has a large enough market to give rise to some healthy entities.
Of course these might be actually sustainable businesses and not startups playing the unicorn game with VCs, trading at impossible sky-high valuations instead of what they're really worth and without a vision for profitability, so whatever metric you use to calculate success should definitely take that into account.
There's no reason Europeans can't just do it from a place where they get better access capital and a more business-friendly environment (unless the EU tries to stop this by creating a 'safe' website list like China, or penalizing US companies in other ways). One problem with firewalling Google, Facebook, is that the fines bring in more money than European tech.
I don't think it's toxic to criticize the regulatory practices that have created the business environment that the article laments. Actually I think it's more than fair to do so. "Blunt" may be a better word to describe the comments here.
Indeed, Europe has been behind the US in tech since WW2. The lead the US acquired in the following ~20 years has proven impossible to overcome. It spawned so many various advantages that compound and build on each other (to say nothing of the single market of enormous size).
If they knew what they were doing, they'd start by massively increasing the pay for software developers across Western Europe. Software is why the US dominates global tech. 1.25 million software developers earning a median of $105,000 in salary.
Software is why Japan wasn't able to dominate tech, despite that being the near universal thought - that it was the inevitable outcome - in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They couldn't do software well, it's the difference between Apple doing the iPod and Sony flailing after the Walkman. It's also why Apple murdered Nokia, it's the software: the smartphone is about the software, not the hardware (which always drifts towards commodity, low value, low margin; Apple was focused on building a device that could effectively run serious software programs). The rise of Microsoft from 1975 to its eventual position as global tech titan by the time Win95 came out, charts the course of the US solidifying its position in tech via software margins. Most of the value gradually shifted from hardware to software, from the 1970s to the 1990s. The immensely profitable nature of most software pours an endless deluge of profit into the US tech machine (which is then used to keep expanding it and buying up global competition).
US cloud dominance is similarly all about the software, rather than hardware in the cloud (again, low margin, low value). It's why Europe can't compete with AWS. Imagine if the US tech dominance were dependent on competing in server hardware, black rectangle smartphones or PC boxes. The US would have entirely gotten its brains stomped in by now. Instead, the US moved upstream and got all the profit in the tech industry: it's all in the software margins.
It's the software, Europe. Pay your software developers a lot more if you want to compete.
That arc of software history is recognizable to me. There are excellent devs all over and pretty much every large company has divisions with european offices with devs. There's something about the business of starting large software based enterprises that seems to work better in the us though.
Also, I think China is coming for the us software industry's dominance. If they can figure out how to get around the worry of chinese govt access to external to china customers, chinese software companies could out compete the us, just like microsoft with windows beat out ibm maybe.
That "something" is the huge, relatively homogeneous, english-speaking and thus very "international-by-default" single market.
It's the one and only actual moat that the US has over Europe when it comes to developing huge corporations in the winner-takes-all online markets. Everything else (like better VC situation, more attractive environment for international talent) is just a result of this original moat and would have just as well developed the other way round if this one advantage had been on the other side of the Atlantic.
It isn't really about software developers pay IMHO. I think it is about: a relatively poorly capitalised investment community (relative to the US); relatively (to the US) inexperienced VCs/accelerators; a splintered market with a variety of regulators, languages, rules, currencies, cultures etc; more conservative approach (not left/right politics) in politics and in business.
EU officials don't understand the current trade war. The US keeps coercing EU companies, buying them out by force (Alstom), pushing them out of markets (Iran), using extortion against EU banks, generally pressuring the EU in the position of an obedient vassal; but the EU doesn't get it, at all. That's a tragedy (for us Europeans).
Eu officials are completely bought into the free market ideology and "gentle commerce". Nowadays strategic companies are even sold to the Chinese, because "free markets". Morons. EU is inept, useless.
It's quite saying that Russia, with its limited means, limited population and GDP inferior to Italy, successfully kept its digital independence (mostly).
A lot of core EU policies are based the neoliberal "gentle free markets" model of the world, like the rules to privatize infrastructure, transport, and telecom. They're largely to allow an EU-wide market where protectionism applies at the level of the entire bloc and not at the level of individual countries, but they are easily taken advantage in an asymmetric setting. It's not unlike how US companies go into China to show growth, yet complain about the coercion and theft of their IP, as if these happenings weren't an open secret.
The US takes advantage of EU's tech landscape being worse paid, more regulated, and less nimble, and takes advantage of the difficulties of policing the interaction between users and Internet-delivered services.
China takes advantage of the naivete of the EU and the greed of the US. Other players, like Russia, UAE, and Qatar play a similar game, but unlike China they don't use hardware and software, but stick to property ownership and influencing hearts and minds.
Except that no protectionism at all happens at the EU level, because officials are completely clueless. Or bought-out, I don't really know. that's my point when I say that they're useless, toothless really.
Had the chance to live a few years in western Europe and I was shocked at the servility of the European institutions to the American interests.
In Europe nobody dares to criticize clearly and openly the ways of the US, not even the communists. No wonder Obama was a huge hit in Europe. Perhaps this explains why most Americans think of Europeans as a spineless and weak
I'm not leftist at all but I have to admit that Chavez had more balls than the whole western Europe
A similar case can be made for Chinese tech companies, many of whom are actively complicit in human rights violations [1] [2].
Yet EU countries like Italy have no qualms about supporting the geopolitical aims of China, inevitably strengthening the position of the Chinese tech companies. Which should come to no surprise given their close ties to the communist party [3] [4].
> A similar case can be made for Chinese companies, many of whom are actively complicit in human rights violations
Snowden showed us that US companies routinely do this, with FISA forcing them to participate just like the Chinese Govt does to Chinese companies. Also, US law only protects the human rights of US citizens, while non-citizens get their privacy invaded routinely (in contravention of Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
US tech companies routinely aid the government in systematic ethnic cleansing [1]?
Also last time I remember there being a showdown on privacy between Apple and the FBI, Apple refused their request to side-load software that would allow them to crack a terrorists phone. I can't imagine Huawei being able to refuse such a request from the Communist party.
well many of them have no problem using China for a manufacturing base and frankly how is that different from companies based there? I scoff at companies like Apple touting their concern for rights when they effectively turn a blind eye to China's behavior because the market is too valuable
> US tech companies routinely aid the government in systematic ethnic cleansing [1]?
Perhaps you're responding to the wrong comment. This thread is about the invasion of ones human right to privacy.
As for the other point, the public show by Apple is irrelevant... of course they publicly refuse to cooperate with the FBI. FISA warrants are secret though and in any case, would have no ability to refuse an order from a FISA court.
A rebuttal which ignores the problem of moral relativism. Yes, it whataboutism. No,it doesn't mean it can be ignored. If our privilege is to critique the other and refuse to fix our own, we're all impoverished. Also, strong biblical roots to whataboutism in the mote/beam parable no?
Of course he is, US is in a much stronger position than the EU in the technology sector. You think he'd be saying the same thing if Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc... acted the exact same but were EU companies? I doubt it.
EU failed to gather participating countries in an equalizing force of progress freedom and wisdom. It transform to a hegemony like the first Athenean alliance. We failed to our targets and in the meantime,, the external empires got stronger and lesser democratic. We failed miserably. I believe in the European dream, but not with these European politicians. We have no relation to the universal human, we have transformed to consumer/money junkies a new generation of cyber aboriginals ta satisfy our inner appetite for quality with beads like 500 years ago. Shame on the homo universalis, shame on the European christians.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadYeah, that's why.
Paying for lawyers, exploring utilizing local business networks to avoid headaches, and countless special edge cases is a great deterannce from offering services/products there... Let alone building actual companies and teams from there.
It's worth remembering that Silicon Valley got started way back in the 50s with Shockley's transistors. Then Microsoft in the 80s and Amazon, Google in the 1990s.
What was going on in Europe during these times?
For most of the 20th century continental Europe was a hotbed of dictators and extremists. The first half was dominated by two world wars that flattened everything. The second half saw dictatorships across all of eastern Europe that kept it impoverished, there were dictatorships in Spain and Greece and significant political instability and corruption for decades in Italy.
Britain, which came out of WW2 the strongest having been on the winning side, was nonetheless totally wrecked and worse still, the population concluded that the government must be pretty good at things due both to the victory and years of news suppression which prevented people learning about government errors (e.g. Exercise Tiger). So Britain became strongly socialist and remained that way until Thatcher in the 80s. The economic destruction this socialist environment wrecked was extreme enough that the UK had to go to the IMF for a bailout and was suffering things like electricity shortages during the worst periods of the 1970s. It was a place where even established businesses struggled to survive, so the idea of a startup culture or creating advanced tech firms was totally absurd - the government had given up even attempting to fix things and unions under the control of Marxists were practically shadow governments in and of themselves.
In other words, if you look at the time that the USA was establishing startups like Intel that'd become huge tech firms, which then spawned generations of technically skilled VCs, Europe was mostly either actual communist dictatorships or so hard left that the idea of creating dynamic new businesses was a pipe dream. There was no environment in which to create the generations of successful entrepreneurs that America benefits from.
Interestingly, Germany did much better than Britain during this time because - having had their faith in government wisdom destroyed by the Nazis - Germany deregulated and experienced much better economic growth, despite having been cleaved in half by the Soviets. This sowed the seeds of German economic strength dominating the Euro today.
Things only really changed for most of Europe in the 1990s with the fall of the USSR, reunification of Germany and Thatcher's reforms having turned around the UK. But then Europe collectively decided that the right path into the future was to slowly merge together under a vast centralised bureaucracy centred in Brussels, one which had its roots in the Ventotene Manifesto, a document written by communists in the 40s. Remarkably, the EU to this day still has never really shaken a vague sense that communism was roughly in the right area. Its ultra-powerful unaccountable Commission President (Juncker) routinely makes statements like "when it gets serious, you have to lie" and he travelled to the birthplace of Karl Marx where he defended Marx's legacy:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/karl-marx-jea...
The EU has historically often had former communists in its most senior positions and does things in ways that are reminiscent of the USSR (e.g. a Parliament that can't actually overrule the unelected parts of the government). No surprise that it takes an ambivalent view of business, especially successful American business, and largely defines itself as a defender of The People against Capital.
Combined with no culture of granting equity and we have today's situation.
What about Japan's rise from a bombed out, defeated nation to a G7 economic power and world leader in electronics and automotives in the same time period?
Japan lost comprehensively enough to destroy any notion that their government was good, and had a huge US involvement in the rebuild. IOW they were rebuilt along US lines and, like Germany, benefited from the "loser's victory" in which they avoided a sharp turn towards big government.
During the same era the UK lost its own car manufacturing industry, with aggressive unions and general industrial malaise being the prime culprits.
Per Wikipedia Tommy Flowers couldn't get a bank loan because he couldn't cite his cryptoanalysis machines as proof he could do what he claimed he could do. "False concerns of military secrecy" when we were in an existential cold war with international socialism? That put so much of Europe under Soviet occupation?
Or the cited severe lack of funding mechanisms and other things necessary for commercial success, going all the way to the concept of doing stuff outside the aegis of the government which included the public University of Manchester? The latter could and did make numerous record breaking computers, going at least as far as the early 1960s Atlas, a competitive microsecond cycle supercomputer that was the first to page. But this didn't translate into commercial success.
Until ARM was sold to SoftBank it was the primary British high tech computer firm. Little known fact - ARM is one of the very few European tech firms that incentivised its employees with equity sharing. It was and still is standard for firms outside the USA to keep all equity for the founders and investors, with none for early employees.
It's hard to know to what extent Acorn struggled to compete with Apple because of Europe-specific factors vs just bad luck: Acorn computers were very slow to get FCC regulatory approval in the USA, and they had a failure in their supply chain at a critical moment that pushed Brits towards buying US computers instead. They sold 300k machines but could only get 30k from the factories. There were a few other problems that stalled their expansion, and all this was taking place in the context of a country going through a major recession as Thatcher ended a government policy of employment targeting to bring inflation under control (inflation hit 22% in 1980). In the end they never recovered - US firms grew too strong and outcompeted them, despite initially stronger technology. Given that Acorn and ARM showed the same cycle of former employees becoming entrepreneurs and investors themselves, it's possible if things had worked out a bit differently for Acorn it could have been the "British Apple" and seeded a British computer industry competitive with Silicon Valley. But - it didn't.
Bad luck indeed, although looking at the details of e.g. the Acorn Electron which had that production bottleneck doesn't suggest they had significantly stronger technology at the time, pretty much all 6502 based stuff like their competition except for e.g. the also local Sinclair Research with its Z80 based systems. In the US market there was also the Z80 based and monstrously successful Tandy TRS-80, per Wikipedia significantly outselling the Apple II for a long period.
Tandy also had a huge retail network to sell its wares, it's Radio Shack stores were the place to buy random basic electronic stuff all over the USA. Per Wikipedia, in 1982 4,300 company stores and 2,000 independent franchises in towns not big enough for a company store. One reason I mention this is to ask, how big was it in the U.K. post-WWII until Thatcher? It became a very big thing the US in the 1950s, combining local capital and market focus with centralized and bulk product planning, technology, marketing, and often purchasing.
Hmmmm, Tandy also did a Motorola 6809 based "Color Computer" of some note, but its expensive/superior CPU prompted them to forgo things that made competing 6502 systems more popular, like built in sound and graphics for e.g. games. There was also a very American cottage industry style market in Z80 CP/M systems built around the S-100 bus.
I think the general macro-economic and social conditions may explain why Acorn was rare, whereas the US birthed many such companies. But then again, the UK has less than a quarter of the population of the USA, so presumably that right there should slash the number of companies.
I've also done a focus switch in this discussion, from all of Europe to just the UK. The rest of Europe was still very messed up outside of west Germany and the small northern states, either dictatorships, or just exited from dictatorship, or were France:
https://uramericansinparis.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/france-i...
West Germany gave birth to SAP in 1972, UK gave birth to Acorn and a few other small computer firms that didn't really make it, only SAP and ARM still survive and only one independent. I don't know of any big French tech firms from this era, but maybe there is one.
So I guess Acorn and maybe SAP are the exceptions that highlight just how dire conditions were in most of Europe at this time.
Instead, the EU has allowed the U.S. tech giants to come and take over the local markets, and then crush or buy out all the smaller competition (UK's DeepMind anyone?!), and then wonder "where are the European competitors?!"
Uber is better on literally every single dimension.
Stripe is an international company that's facilitated by the internet.
Not to mention that if you were black or lived in under-resourced areas, good luck getting a Taxi to stop for you or go where you need to go.
> The fact that the only way to improve upon the situation required a series of criminal conspiracies and attempts to obstruct justice that were never properly punished reflects very poorly on the country.
Isn't this an ironic statement given the actual history of how America was founded?
> Yes, America's existing taxi system was also awful.
Of course you can validate those things differently, but only looking on salary tells little.
And with a fat $200K+ paycheck student debt goes away in a few years, if you had it in the first place (substantial fraction of students receive financial assistance).
Best of both worlds: get your "free" degree in Europe, move to the US, make a killing. This, in short, is Tusk's problem.
Well, if I look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_h... per capita is almost double to many European countries.
But even then comparison is hard, since treatments etc. differ.
> And with a fat $200K+ paycheck student debt goes away in a few years, if you had it in the first place (substantial fraction of students receive financial assistance).
If a European however, isntea dofnoayingnof debt has some money to invest there can be long term benefits (also Europeans often have better retirement funds)
All just to say that is complicated and comparison is hard. And true, it can financially be beneficial to get a good education in Europe and the go to make some money. Tusk's issue however is that digital world is important and US has a big leap and control.
USA completely owns this.
Just look at what the Silicon Valley media-integrated marketing machine can do. A complete fraud with unsubstantiated promises like Theranos raised 700M with a 10B valuation. Even though they had nothing, their visions became practically an established fact in world wide media, driven by articles like the one in Wired in 2014 ("This Woman Invented a Way to Run 30 Lab Tests on Only One Drop of Blood").
Europe needs to learn to "overpromise and underdeliver" as well. And they need an integrated way to push the message of shiny new stuff to blue-eyed technology media to amplify it into people's consciousness.
I don't mean to create frauds like Theranos. I mean to say (for example) you will drone deliver on-demand customized popsicles made on the orbit of Mars five years from now, and then end up mailing customized ice cream made in Denmark instead.
People might find the greatest product in the world organically, eventually, by getting fed up with the alternatives, but in the meanwhile those banging the drum the most may just end up cornering the market.
I don't think the biggest problem is about salaries or luring in venture capital or the nature of legislation or density of microbreweries within a square kilometer or something like that. I think it is simply about marketing. (And this is not to say that other things play no role whatsoever)
They could have fostered an environment for tech companies, but at least Germany chose do something else.
[1] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Der-Kam...
EU legislation has a very clear message: start your tech company elsewhere.
The problem in the EU is that GDPR isn't the first such signal the EU has sent either. The cookie law was a signal that indicated that the EU regulates things without understanding what they're doing. The data retention act from over a decade ago was similar. I'm sure there were others even before that, but probably on a national level.
https://saveyourinternet.eu/pl/
Could you let me know where you have this information from?
Just for reference, official PO party twitter posted this https://twitter.com/platforma_org/status/1015184834623365120 "No to ACTA" in July, and in 2012 Tusk (very same from main topic, head of PO) officially announced Polish position as "categorical YES to ACTA, nothing will change our mind" https://www.tvn24.pl/wiadomosci-z-kraju,3/premier-podpiszemy...
PO party is a Platform of corruption and lies, they used to change tune every poll/elections and are implicated in every major corruption scandal to date.
(apologies for cynicism by a disappointed European)
Of course these might be actually sustainable businesses and not startups playing the unicorn game with VCs, trading at impossible sky-high valuations instead of what they're really worth and without a vision for profitability, so whatever metric you use to calculate success should definitely take that into account.
EU was always behind in internet stuff, even when there was no regulation.
If they knew what they were doing, they'd start by massively increasing the pay for software developers across Western Europe. Software is why the US dominates global tech. 1.25 million software developers earning a median of $105,000 in salary.
Software is why Japan wasn't able to dominate tech, despite that being the near universal thought - that it was the inevitable outcome - in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They couldn't do software well, it's the difference between Apple doing the iPod and Sony flailing after the Walkman. It's also why Apple murdered Nokia, it's the software: the smartphone is about the software, not the hardware (which always drifts towards commodity, low value, low margin; Apple was focused on building a device that could effectively run serious software programs). The rise of Microsoft from 1975 to its eventual position as global tech titan by the time Win95 came out, charts the course of the US solidifying its position in tech via software margins. Most of the value gradually shifted from hardware to software, from the 1970s to the 1990s. The immensely profitable nature of most software pours an endless deluge of profit into the US tech machine (which is then used to keep expanding it and buying up global competition).
US cloud dominance is similarly all about the software, rather than hardware in the cloud (again, low margin, low value). It's why Europe can't compete with AWS. Imagine if the US tech dominance were dependent on competing in server hardware, black rectangle smartphones or PC boxes. The US would have entirely gotten its brains stomped in by now. Instead, the US moved upstream and got all the profit in the tech industry: it's all in the software margins.
It's the software, Europe. Pay your software developers a lot more if you want to compete.
Also, I think China is coming for the us software industry's dominance. If they can figure out how to get around the worry of chinese govt access to external to china customers, chinese software companies could out compete the us, just like microsoft with windows beat out ibm maybe.
It's the one and only actual moat that the US has over Europe when it comes to developing huge corporations in the winner-takes-all online markets. Everything else (like better VC situation, more attractive environment for international talent) is just a result of this original moat and would have just as well developed the other way round if this one advantage had been on the other side of the Atlantic.
So the governments of Western Europe should just increase the pay for software developers?
Eu officials are completely bought into the free market ideology and "gentle commerce". Nowadays strategic companies are even sold to the Chinese, because "free markets". Morons. EU is inept, useless.
It's quite saying that Russia, with its limited means, limited population and GDP inferior to Italy, successfully kept its digital independence (mostly).
The US takes advantage of EU's tech landscape being worse paid, more regulated, and less nimble, and takes advantage of the difficulties of policing the interaction between users and Internet-delivered services.
China takes advantage of the naivete of the EU and the greed of the US. Other players, like Russia, UAE, and Qatar play a similar game, but unlike China they don't use hardware and software, but stick to property ownership and influencing hearts and minds.
In Europe nobody dares to criticize clearly and openly the ways of the US, not even the communists. No wonder Obama was a huge hit in Europe. Perhaps this explains why most Americans think of Europeans as a spineless and weak
I'm not leftist at all but I have to admit that Chavez had more balls than the whole western Europe
Yet EU countries like Italy have no qualms about supporting the geopolitical aims of China, inevitably strengthening the position of the Chinese tech companies. Which should come to no surprise given their close ties to the communist party [3] [4].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/alibaba-b...
[2] https://www.thestar.com/news/huawei/2019/03/27/canadas-partn...
[3] https://www.ft.com/content/5d0af3c4-846c-11e8-a29d-73e3d4545...
[4] https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/02/tech/china-tech-communist-par...
Snowden showed us that US companies routinely do this, with FISA forcing them to participate just like the Chinese Govt does to Chinese companies. Also, US law only protects the human rights of US citizens, while non-citizens get their privacy invaded routinely (in contravention of Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
Also last time I remember there being a showdown on privacy between Apple and the FBI, Apple refused their request to side-load software that would allow them to crack a terrorists phone. I can't imagine Huawei being able to refuse such a request from the Communist party.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/ethn...
Perhaps you're responding to the wrong comment. This thread is about the invasion of ones human right to privacy.
As for the other point, the public show by Apple is irrelevant... of course they publicly refuse to cooperate with the FBI. FISA warrants are secret though and in any case, would have no ability to refuse an order from a FISA court.