If Europe wants their own tech companies on par with the American ones, it should first and foremost fix a business climate that caters to such companies emerging. If we drive the American businesses out of Europe without doing so first, we'll more than likely end up even further in the direction of turning the EU into the second coming of the DDR.
I think it's possible that Europe doesn't want tech companies on par with American ones. Rather they may want there to be no tech mega-corporations with tons of political/cultural power.
This isn't a perfect analogy but: It's similar to how not wanting to be colonized doesn't imply that a nation themselves wants to be a colonial power.
One of the biggest problems with the European business environment is that it's primarily set up to cater to big European tech companies, largely at the cost of smothering smaller companies.
Problem is most of these companies are so old they date back to the industrial revolution, making a company like IBM look like a spry startup by comparison. This includes old dragons like Siemens, Ericsson, ABB, Bosch. SAP is perhaps the odd one out, being only 53 years old.
Except the US tech is locking any compatibility layer one after the other. Every OS release is now more locked down than the previous one. Every piece of hardware is totally locked down.
What this means is that it's harder and harder to create new hard tech (e.g. OSes, computers, phones ...) that is compatible with what's existing now.
Let's make a thinking experiment : Imagine that somehow an european company is magically releasing the most perfect phone you would ever imagine but it's not running an american OS ?
No app ecosystem, no possibility to bootstrap it. You can't connect to your friends that are using closed IM apps. You can't access this Google doc "file" someone just sent you without using Google suite...
And that's because we lost the war for standards. File standards, protocol standards. This ship has sail a long time ago.
And the issue is not only for this magical theorical european company.
Americans are also deluding themselves if they think this situation is good for them, this issue isn't unique to Europe, it would be the same for any american company trying to compete with Google or Apple. Except it would be even worse because they could be easily bought by existent actors if they managed to succeed.
In fact, everyone would gain form breaking tech giants, europeans, for sure, but especially americans.
You hear this over and over again that Europe is over-regulated and this is why tech-companies don't succeed here. I would say this is utter bullshit. If you look at the acquisitions made by the tech-giants it just that anything that is going to be successful is instantly bought up by these companies.
People probably don't know how little Google for example builds in-house with everything from Analytics to Gmail being of European origin.
If Europe had a healthier corporate culture, European startups wouldn't keep being hoovered up by American tech giants. Selling like that is a vote of no confidence against the European ecosystem.
> If Europe had a healthier corporate culture, European startups wouldn't keep being hoovered up by American tech giants. Selling like that is a vote of no confidence against the European ecosystem.
It's not the culture, it's the lack of capital markets. Each EU country has it's own market and none of them can compete with the US markets.
The really depressing part of this is that a large part of the capital funding these companies is European savers/organisations and governments.
If you need to pay 10% of your company to get your next round (EU) versus less than 5% (US) (numbers totally made up) then clearly you'll go for the US money and the US markets, which compounds the problem.
The problem runs deeper than business climate - it’s cultural.
Across most of Europe (not all - the Baltic states have produced quite a few unicorns) there’s a pervasive attitude that technology is… icky. Struggling to come up with a better way of putting it, but at best entrepreneurship in tech is met with blank incomprehension, and at worst sneering contempt. People use it, unthinkingly, but to be interested in it, to invest in it, seems to fall into the category of “we must have world peace before we spend money on space exploration”.
Yes, this is hand-wavy, but in my experience as a tech entrepreneur in Europe, if you want investment, you talk to the Americans. If you want a growth market, you target the Americans. If you don’t want to be justifying your price tag 20 times a day… you get the picture.
Of course there exist incubators, funds, and so-forth, but the money on the table is a pittance compared to the U.S., and again, the culture here is like “why don’t you get a real job, train as a lawyer, a doctor, or a banker, and stop playing video games?” when you’re running a profitable technical startup.
> Across most of Europe (not all - the Baltic states have produced quite a few unicorns) there’s a pervasive attitude that technology is… icky. Struggling to come up with a better way of putting it, but at best entrepreneurship in tech is met with blank incomprehension, and at worst sneering contempt. People use it, unthinkingly, but to be interested in it, to invest in it, seems to fall into the category of “we must have world peace before we spend money on space exploration”.
Generalising a whole continent with such nonsense is... bold. Any data to back this up? Surveys? Anything? There are tons of people in tech, and tech startups all around various European countries. Most don't become unicorns, or get bought out by American giants. But that doesn't mean that people generally find them "icky".
Or did you only talk to 80+ year olds in some rural areas in Belarus?
> but in my experience as a tech entrepreneur in Europe, if you want investment, you talk to the Americans
Yeah, but that’s not so much cultural but rather the US capital markets are fueled by foreign demand of USD.
The same inflated capital markets with mid-level investors with few pocket existed in every historical financial hegemony, like the British and the Dutch before then.
I do agree on the points, but I think the root cause it's more connected to the use of the resources available. US has lots of resources and is willing to "bet" most of them on risky things. One implication is that they don't use them for other things - like trying to improve the life quality of their population.
Now, if I look at the evolution of tech, nowadays there is so much already possible with open source solutions (think 2000s - did you have an open source office solution? communication platforms? mobile os? etc.) that I think developing new solutions not relying on American companies will be orders of magnitude easier. Will it be efficient economically? Probably not. But if it is required it will work.
Because of the Bretton Woods system and the subsequent Nixon shock. The combination of these meant the USA can print much more money than anyone else, give it to whoever it likes (it always ends up at shareholders), and the resulting inflation is the whole world's problem. Because the USA prints so much money that ends up at shareholders and some at bondholders, the rest of the world buys US shares instead of the rest of the world's shares. The US ownership class basically ends up with so much money and not enough things to do with it, and some of it gets put in these risky technology bets. Other side effects include low wages, since US owners don't have to pay workers to make good products as much as they do in other parts of the world, preferring to just siphon off the endless free money stream, and high non-financial asset prices (e.g. houses), since there are so many wealthy owners to sell to instead of workers.
And the Bretton Woods system is basically a side effect of the fact that Europe had World War 2 and the USA didn't.
