[HN Gopher] Europe's Software Problem
___________________________________________________________________
Europe's Software Problem
Author : jobstijl
Score : 282 points
Date : 2021-06-15 10:47 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (berthub.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (berthub.eu)
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| I take offense at such massive overgeneralizations as "Europe
| lacks imagination."
|
| What it lacks is freely flowing funding such that risky
| enterprises can be funded even if 1 out of ten or 1 out of
| hundred actually are successful. This kills business models which
| cannot show any profit whatsoever, and a large portion of the
| remainder are killed by data regulations forbidding "alternate
| paths of monetization" (to put it charitably.)
|
| Rather, a problem is that once a European project becomes
| successful enough, it soon becomes an American project, either by
| acquisition or by moving to where the investment money is.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >risky enterprises can be funded even if 1 out of ten or 1 out
| of hundred actually are successful
|
| correct me if i'm wrong, Europe is dominated by legacy
| business/banks that normally won't take such risk. legacy
| business like BMW. European and Asian want to see you have some
| success or already making money before they invest. while
| American will throw money into something that just an idea.
| fvdessen wrote:
| It's dominated by businesses where network effects are not in
| play; commodities, specialist equipment, medicine, biotech,
| hardware, etc. If there's a cultural, legal, or network
| element to the business, then the fragmentation of the
| European market puts it at a massive disadvantage. Investor
| knows it and thus avoid investing in those sectors because
| they don't want to fight uphill battles
| HPsquared wrote:
| Three problem is, these institutional investors lack the
| ability to evaluate risk:reward on entrepreneurial projects.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| The entire culture is based around "legacy" and "experience".
| Truth is, Europeans are extremely risk-averse and favor
| legacy, with grants, laws and such reflecting that. That
| said, Europeans will throw money at an "idea", as long as
| that idea is approved by peers. They'll even die with that
| idea, once invested.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > I take offense at such massive overgeneralizations as "Europe
| lacks imagination."
|
| It also strikes me as really inaccurate. If anything, a lot of
| Europeans value creativity and cultural interests over raw
| productivity or money.
| [deleted]
| odiroot wrote:
| > Rather, a problem is that once a European project becomes
| successful enough, it soon becomes an American project, either
| by acquisition or by moving to where the investment money is.
|
| That's not a problem, that's the solution. There's some other
| problems causing the need for this solution.
| preordained wrote:
| > I take offense at such massive overgeneralizations...
|
| Boy, you would make one offended American...
| [deleted]
| pelorat wrote:
| In some countries, if your startup fails you're legally obliged
| to pay back all money that was invested in it, and you won't be
| able to start another until you've done so.
| jcelerier wrote:
| ... it's not the case in the US ? Wtf
| pwthornton wrote:
| It's not a loan from a bank. It's an investment, and the
| nature of investments are that some fail.
|
| It's pretty wild that founders would need to pay back this
| money. That would have a massive drag on any risk taking or
| innovation.
|
| The entire point of venture capital and similar funding
| mechanisms is that in exchange for a potential massive
| return on investment, funders are willing to lose
| everything.
| csomar wrote:
| Loans from the bank if they are tied to you personally. A
| delaware c-corp has pretty good protections.
| 988747 wrote:
| Which also means that banks would be very hesitant to
| giving them any loan.
|
| Bank strategy is to avoid risk, while VC strategy is to
| take risks.
| siscia wrote:
| Which countries?
| bennysomething wrote:
| Which countries? I've never heard of this, sounds insane!
| qznc wrote:
| It depends on what kind of company you start. One with
| limited liability often requires more upfront investment.
| throwaway210222 wrote:
| > I take offence at such massive overgeneralizations as "Europe
| lacks imagination."
|
| Why then did Airbus put their VC arm [1] right slap-bang in the
| middle of Silicon Valley?
|
| Note. In this case, its Europe bringing/managing the capital -
| they are _choosing_ - all by themselves - where to find the
| talent.
|
| [1] https://airbusventures.vc/
| pjc50 wrote:
| .. and if you look at the list of companies, it looks fairly
| global. Some, but far from all of them, are in SV.
|
| You'd have to ask them, but I'd posit that it's simply
| because SV is where all the meetings are.
| fvdessen wrote:
| The reason the US has freely flowing funding is because the VC
| has an immense amount of cash from the previous generations of
| successful Unicorns. So why was it (and still is) easier to
| raise unicorns in the USA ?
|
| The thing that separate the internet economy with the
| traditional is the massive network effects that makes it a
| winner take all game. And at that game the USA has a massive
| home advantage with a huge cultural, legal and financially
| unified market. In Europe you start in a small country then
| face big barriers to expand out of it, which slows growth
| enough that you never get to get competitive by the time the
| much better funded American competitor comes to crush you.
|
| And then it's game over, because you only get one shot at being
| the monopoly. Once you have a Facebook, you can't have a second
| one, even with all the VC cash, talent & creativity in the
| world. Notice that the USA did not succeed in building a
| competitor to Google, Youtube, Facebook, or Amazon, so how
| could Europe, or anybody else ?
|
| Well the Chinese and the Russian could, by banning American
| monopolies from their own markets, which let them built
| monopolies on their own, & then attempt to conquer the rest of
| the world with them.
|
| The USA is perfectly aware of this dynamic because faced with
| TikTok, their first reflex was to try to ban them.
|
| And that's what Europe should do, ban American Monopolies. If
| we would ban facebook, instagram, youtube, etc, we'd have solid
| equivalents in a year, and from there enough cash flow to fund
| a next generation of startups.
| russli1993 wrote:
| need to clear up the misconception here: China is not simply
| banning US companies. With social media and internet content
| products, there is Chinese law "Measures on the
| Administration of Internet Information Services". Whether one
| agrees with the provisions in this law is another story. Lets
| just talk about purely from a commerce perspective. This law
| is applied equally to everyone, whether it is a Chinese
| company or US company. If Google, Facebook and anyone else,
| want to have a specific product operate in Chinese market,
| that product need to be compliant to local laws. They will be
| able to operate if they are in accordance to the law. And
| many US companies do comply with Chinese laws and have
| products present in China, such as Microsoft (office365,
| Azure, Bing, Linkedin etc), Amazon(AWS, Amazon.com, Kindle),
| Airbnb, Apple (Icloud, app store etc). This law concerns with
| Internet Information services. There are other digital
| products too. Database services are very much available in
| China, Oracle DBs has a dominating market share in China.
| Adobe, Autodesk, etc. Even for Facebook and Google, I believe
| they have business operations in China. I know Google have ad
| sales in China, and have significant revenue. By adhering to
| this law, the internet information product could have
| significant differences from the product operating in another
| country, resulting in companies make two versions of the
| product, one for international, one for china's market. So
| Bytedance having douying for China and tiktok for
| international, is not different from Microsoft having
| Linkedin China and Linkedin international, or Bing China,
| Bing international, or Amazon.com China or Amazon.com
| international. From a pure commerce standpoint, this law is
| non-discriminatory. Whether its company headquartered in
| China or foreign, anyone have to do the same thing according
| to the law. It does not provide any advantages for Chinese
| over foreign companies. Also how do you define what is
| Chinese/Foregin company? Bytedance is registered in Cayman
| Islands and 40% is owned by foreign investors. Maybe you
| could have Chinese nationals running a company in another
| country and tried to offer a product in China. For running a
| product in China, both cases is the same, comply to Chinese
| laws and regulation then the product can operate in China.
|
| The appearance that Chinese companies have advantages over
| foreign companies comes from a combination of factors: local
| culture, understanding of the market, much much faster and
| fierce competition (If speed and competition in international
| market is 2, in China its 10. For example, Uber left China's
| market not because of regulatory, regulatory was equal to
| Didi and uber at the time, but Uber and Didi was locked into
| extremely heated competition at that time, both sides were
| pouring money down the drain. It was most likely a business
| decision. Alibaba's taobao vs Amazon.com, taobao was very
| competitive and played to the Chinese culture advantage very
| well. Taobao created 11/11 singles day in 2009 and hit a cord
| with Chinese people, even becoming a cultural phenomenon).
| But let say if Google/Facebook funded a team in China to
| create a targeted product for the Chinese market, they could
| have a a significant presence in the market.
| hardolaf wrote:
| > The reason the US has freely flowing funding is because the
| VC has an immense amount of cash from the previous
| generations of successful Unicorns. So why was it (and still
| is) easier to raise unicorns in the USA ?
|
| You're ignoring that all of this money initially came from
| massive investment by the Defense Advanced Projects
| Administration (DARPA) which funded the semiconductor
| industry in its infancy, which funded the creation of the
| Internet, which funded the creation of mainframes, which
| funded the creation of personal computers, and continues to
| provide massive funding to tech companies. Heck, their
| decision to choose Microsoft DOS over IBM OS/2 for the US DOD
| literally solidified its rise as the dominant operating
| system. It's requirement that all parts must be multi-source-
| able is why AMD and Via were created as additional
| manufacturers of x86 processors. But it also funded PowerPC
| and even provided significant funding to ARM.
|
| Sure, we don't have much socialism here (USDA farm
| "subsidies" not included), but we do have very strong,
| protectionist-welfare capitalism.
|
| So you had the combined might of the US government founding
| the creation of the computing industry. That let companies
| take massive risks which left tons of people making tons of
| money before private VC even really became interested. The
| IPOs of the original tech companies funded the creation of
| half of the current major VC funds.
| tored wrote:
| Europe, at least Sweden, used to have this approach for the
| traditional industry, e.g. companies like Ericsson, SAAB,
| Volvo, is/was all heavily involved in the Swedish defense
| industry with government backing and at the same time they
| sold consumer products.
|
| Perhaps the ending of the cold war ended this policy, thus
| a boom of new companies never took place.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Apple was funded by DARPA? I don't think so.
| hardolaf wrote:
| Apple was a zombie before Steve Jobs was rehired. Also,
| it was initially funded by Mike Markkula who was from
| Intel which was a company founded with DOD and DARPA
| backing.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I guess that means that since my father was in the
| military, I owe everything to the military. Right?
| gizmondo wrote:
| > Well the Chinese and the Russian could, by banning American
| monopolies from their own markets, which let them built
| monopolies on their own, & then attempt to conquer the rest
| of the world with them.
|
| Russia didn't ban American monopolies, they were outcompeted
| fair and square by the more focused local companies. For some
| time, at least. It took years for Google to catch up with
| Yandex in search quality in Russian language, and Facebook's
| clone is imo still better than Facebook itself in every way,
| no wonder it's still more popular there.
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| As another comment pointed out, the small countries vs US
| Network effects excuse doesn't really fare well when you look
| at the successful startup environment of Israel.
|
| _The USA is perfectly aware of this dynamic because faced
| with TikTok, their first reflex was to try to ban them._
|
| And this take is just hot garbage.
| atq2119 wrote:
| How many unicorns are from Israel, though?
|
| Israel should be lauded for managing to be an intensely
| vibrant and high-tech country, and European countries
| should try to learn from that, but even that is apparently
| not quite sufficient. So I think GP has a point.
| mikevm wrote:
| https://www.techaviv.com/unicorns
| hardolaf wrote:
| None. But they have tons of startups that provide
| services to the military-industrial complex which is why
| they're so successful. They copied the USA's SBIR system
| but provide much bigger grants.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Once you have a Facebook, you can't have a second one, even
| with all the VC cash, talent & creativity in the world.
|
| That's not how it works, just look at MySpace. Even sites
| with a lot of market share are sometimes overtaken by a
| competitor.
|
| The best alternative to Facebook in a fragmented market like
| Europe is federation across multiple social "hosting" sites
| with a regional focus, based on standards that are either in
| place already or being worked on. This can exploit even
| stronger platform effects than a conventional one-size-fits-
| all solution like Facebook.
|
| Google and YT are in a different position since they're
| actually solving hard resource problems (Video streaming at
| scale is hard; building a usable crawl of the Web is also
| hard); much of their success comes from addressing these in a
| way that is compelling for users.
| bitcurious wrote:
| >That's not how it works, just look at MySpace.
|
| It recently blew my mind to learn just how small MySpace
| was. Peak user count was ~75.9 million, total. Facebook has
| ~2.85 billion _active_ users.
| varispeed wrote:
| > What it lacks is freely flowing funding such that risky
| enterprises can be funded even if 1 out of ten or 1 out of
| hundred actually are successful.
|
| Or that people pay great % in tax and they cannot afford to
| save their own money to start a business. They need to apply
| for government grants instead (which people who decided about
| them can be corrupt) or share their business with someone from
| the start. That's a buzz killer.
|
| Funnily big corporation are free to avoid tax as they please,
| because the high earners won't even turn to the streets to
| protest so they can be taxed through the nose.
| tasogare wrote:
| Not to mention a lot of very skilled European engineers move to
| US (sometimes Canada). It's easy to brag about talent when
| being on the receiving side of the brain drain.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Large US companies to have offices over the world.
|
| It's extremely common to siphon the most promising projects
| or ideas to the HQ. Keep the golden egg hen close to home.
|
| Once the project becomes successful people will ignore or
| quickly forget where the idea came from.
| jpttsn wrote:
| > What it lacks is freely flowing funding such that risky
| enterprises can be funded even if 1 out of ten or 1 out of
| hundred actually are successful
|
| Might this be a flip side of regulations that combat economic
| inequality?
|
| If so, the two should not be addressed as separate issues. But
| frontpage HN posts tend to be "Applauding Europes' long
| vacations and progressive taxes" and "Bemoaning Europe's lack
| of VCs with fuck you money".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Maybe, but I might need actual evidence as to that being the
| case.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| It could well be the opposite.
|
| For example free education improves a software company's
| hiring prospects as there are lots of employee candidates
| available with good education. In some countries social
| mobility is a real thing. As a practical counter example,
| Sweden has massive taxation and something like most
| billionaires per capita and a very vibrant software and
| startup scene.
|
| One could actually do some kind of survey what happens to
| European software companies. Take for example this one
| started by three Danish guys:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland
| _-david-_ wrote:
| Sweden does not have the highest billionaires per capita.
| Hong Kong, Monaco, Switzerland all have higher rates for
| example. There are several additional places as well.
|
| Is Borland actually a European company? It looks like it
| was started in California and has a headquarters in Texas.
| It is now owned by a company in the UK, but it doesnt
| really seem European to me.
| egman_ekki wrote:
| From the wikipedia article:
|
| > Borland Ltd. was founded in August 1981 by three Danish
| citizens, Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad,
| to develop [...] However, response to the company's
| products at the CP/M-82 show in San Francisco showed that
| a U.S. company would be needed to reach the American
| market. They met Philippe Kahn, who had just moved to
| Silicon Valley...
|
| So yes, Borland is a US company, but founded by 3 Danish
| folks. That might indicate that Europe doesn't lack
| innovation or talent, but a large unified market with
| high purchasing power.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Well in 1981 if you wanted to sell stuff for personal
| computers you would _have_ to be in the Valley. No
| question about it.
|
| I'd say it would have been hard to sell anything that
| specific even elsewhere in the US at the time.
| hardolaf wrote:
| You could have been in NY near NYC too. But yes, at the
| time, you were either in the valley or by NYC if you were
| starting a personal computer related business.
| tored wrote:
| Sweden has failed to build almost any new big company since
| the last 100 years. Just look at OMX30 (30 most traded
| companies at Stockholm stock exchange). Almost all of them
| are companies older than 100 years.
|
| Simplified, many great old successes (old money, i.e the
| billionaires) and many new promising, but few in-between.
| socialdemocrat wrote:
| While it may seem connected, it isn't. Just look at history.
| America has been infamous as a country of get-rich-fast
| people almost since it was founded. Long before progressive
| taxes and social welfare. It is a cultural difference.
|
| This was at a time when the US was actually more egalitarian
| than Europe.
| coryrc wrote:
| Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the USA. Similar
| to the US, they also pay less in taxes than the middle class.
|
| I wonder if Sweden has higher funding than the rest of the
| continent?
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Sweden has higher funding per capita, but does not answer
| why it became this way.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071105/value-of-
| investm...
| coryrc wrote:
| Wow, thanks for the link! Four times Germany and almost
| the same as the USA.
| aapl88888 wrote:
| You are using a false equivalence. Almost none of Swedish
| billionaires are in high tech.
| mannerheim wrote:
| > In the 2013 list, approximately 40 percent of Sweden's
| billionaires are self-made while 60 percent inherited their
| wealth. In the United States, by contrast, 70 percent of
| billionaires are self-made while around 30 percent
| inherited their wealth. Once we exclude inherited wealth,
| the United States has around 1 self-made billionaire per
| million inhabitants compared to 0.6 for Sweden.
|
| https://www.nationalreview.com/the-agenda/guest-post-tino-
| sa...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| 50% of all wealth in the United States is inherited by
| the top 5% wealthiest families.
|
| 60% of all wealth in the United States is inherited.
| mannerheim wrote:
| Not particularly relevant. A significant chunk of that
| inherited wealth comes in the form of housing. The US has
| a total wealth of $105t, $36.2t of that is housing, which
| then ends up getting inherited by homeowners' children.
|
| We're talking about how billionaires make their wealth as
| a proxy for entrepreneurship. It makes no sense to talk
| about how many billionaires Sweden has as a measure for
| their entrepreneurship if most of them inherited their
| wealth.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Gates/Allen/Bezos/Jobs/Ellison/Google/Netflix/etc did not
| inherit their wealth.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Of the top 15, 5 inherited. You are right that
| billionaires are less likely to have inherited wealth.
| goodpoint wrote:
| ...but they are still extremely likely to come from
| families with very strong political connections. Wealth
| is the byproduct.
| aapl88888 wrote:
| Almost all of them are old people outside of tech
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedish_billionaires_
| b...
| coryrc wrote:
| Overall, little of Europe's VC goes into the kind of
| things we talk about on this site. But if levels are much
| smaller than the USA it just produces another burden.
| Looking at these numbers, if I was going to get funding I
| would try Sweden before France.
| hackerNoose wrote:
| Sweden is unusual in that way. You often hear about that
| it's one of the countries with the most equal income
| distribution but at the same time it has one of the highest
| wealth inequalities. Basically it's hard to make any money
| by working you have to own things.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| And I take a bit offense with selective quotes, because the
| original:
|
| " For one, we lack the imagination and vision to launch
| something without knowing how it might eventually make money. "
|
| tells a different message, than just
|
| "Europe lacks imagination."
| jasode wrote:
| Fyi... a related 11 minute video from a Hungarian on why Europe
| doesn't have many big consumer-facing tech startups:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSU5MFPn6Zk
| davidkunz wrote:
| >> typical clunky open source software
|
| What?
| jiofih wrote:
| You don't agree? A more substantial comment would be
| informative.
|
| Can you give us one example of a stellar open source UI you use
| daily?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Firefox is roughly as good as any other browser, which is to
| say it does some things better and some things worse, and
| many things roughly the same.
|
| Blender is one of the 2 or 3 dominant tools in its field.
| It's a niche field, so it's not for office work, but is
| nevertheless an incredible tool by any standard.
|
| For almost anyone's purposes, LibreOffice is better than any
| closed source equivalent tool (though some of them do have
| specific features that are critical for some users). The only
| issues with it come from being forced to interoperate with
| data generated by closed source applications. I don't happen
| to enjoy using LibreOffice very much, but there's denying its
| "stellar" quality compared to the alternatives.
|
| [ EDIT: I really can't fail to mention VCV Rack, a
| libre+gratis virtual modular synthesizer. It wasn't the first
| such tool, but it is by far the most successful, and by far
| the best, at least in terms of user experience. It has also
| created an ecosystem of module developers (more than 2200
| modules already), which is both a reason why and an
| indication of just how stellar a tool it really is ]
|
| Of course, as a software developer, I could name a long list
| of FLOSS tools that are also stellar, but you and others
| would likely dismiss them as not of interest to "the general
| public". In the context of this article, that would probably
| be fair.
| jiofih wrote:
| These are powerful tools, but Blender and LibreOffice are
| also perfect examples of "clunky" open-source. They've
| never had the kind of polish that makes software great to
| use.
| bzzzt wrote:
| You had me at LibreOffice. It struggles to render a blank
| page on a mac (something to do with retina resolution which
| is default since 2012). I've tried to use it on all
| supported operating systems, but everywhere it's a slow
| starting, glitchy mess. Still the best OSS way to interop
| with Office documents, but not something I would classify
| as "stellar".
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Given that I know dozens of people who use it without
| such issues on various platforms, and come across similar
| kinds of show-stopping problems on forums for related
| software, I personally wouldn't lay this at the feet of
| LibreOffice. Your mileage may vary.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I mean, saying LibreOffice is better than Microsoft Office
| is like saying eating toothpaste is better than eating
| soap. You'll never get a Michelin star for serving Colgate,
| so I'm not sure I'd call LibreOffice "stellar".
|
| But I don't think it's surprising that highly complex UI-
| driven applications aren't as plentiful in open source,
| where the sweet spot (from my perspective) has been smaller
| applications that scratch particular itches. Would an open
| suite of office tools even get off the ground today, built
| from scratch without funding from Sun and then Oracle?
|
| Maybe I was just burned too hard by trying to figure out
| GIMP.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| For _most_ users MS Office is a nightmare program to
| learn and use. It 's functionality is incredibly
| extensive, having accumulated the kitchen sink, stove and
| refridgerator over its long life. But this doesn't make
| it actually very usable for people coming to it at this
| point. LibreOffice, while certainly not matching the
| functionality of MS Office, is much closer to the subset
| of what most people need most of the time.
| davidkunz wrote:
| I'm more of a terminal guy and don't care so much about a
| "stellar open source UI", but one example is the Gnome
| Desktop Environment, it's very polished.
|
| Today, the world runs on open source, so we shouldn't call it
| "clunky".
| sabas123 wrote:
| VLC is as good as it gets when it comes to playing video
| adrian_b wrote:
| Among user interfaces that I use daily, that of MS Windows
| Explorer has become, since many years, much worse than the
| user interface of most file managers available for Linux. The
| numerous extra mouse clicks that I need to do in Windows
| Explorer to navigate the file system or to perform any other
| task, compared to a non-stupid file manager, are extremely
| annoying.
|
| The same can be said about MS Word, which has become much
| worse than LibreOffice, also since many years.
|
| I have been using MS Word for 30 years, but recent versions
| frequently surprise me because when I have to search some
| command through its menus it never is where I would expect
| it.
|
| With older versions of MS Word, I had no need for a manual or
| for a help command, because I could easily discover how to do
| anything that I had not done before.
|
| With the newer versions of MS Word it is hard for me to
| discover how to do anything that I have done many times
| before, but not recently enough.
|
| Even if I have used LibreOffice for much fewer years than MS
| Word, with it, like with the old MS Word versions, I never
| had difficulties to discover how to do something.
|
| These days, I will never use willingly MS Windows Explorer or
| MS Word, instead of their open-source equivalents.
|
| These are just some of the most obvious examples of
| commercial programs with a bad user interface, but there are
| many more.
| imNotTheProb wrote:
| Meanwhile the majority of computers use open source software as
| their OS....
| FredPret wrote:
| But not the majority of people
| marvinblum wrote:
| Depends on what you consider a "user". You're a user of
| this website too, presumably running on Linux.
| FredPret wrote:
| Good point. Everything has free software somewhere in the
| system. Most content is served using open source
| software.
|
| But almost no-one uses Linux for general computing
| because open source requires configuration to be usable.
| gspr wrote:
| So? Software demand is driven by the tasks software need to
| solve. Whether those tasks involve human interaction or not
| is surely irrelevant for the demand for software?
| zepto wrote:
| Software demand isn't driven by the number of copies that
| can be duplicated across servers.
|
| It is driven by distinct use-cases.
| jacob2484 wrote:
| Europe lacks the US bankruptcy laws which encourage risk-taking
| that is needed in this space
| imNotTheProb wrote:
| They don't have LLCs?
| zerkten wrote:
| LLCs aren't really relevant to this. The poster was
| commenting on bankruptcy laws with the assumption of
| familiarity. You can check out articles like https://link.spr
| inger.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10657-006-8978-..., but the gist
| is that bankruptcy in the US is forgiving versus being a
| terminal state in Europe. This is both in law and in society.
|
| Once someone has gone bankrupt in Europe, they are
| historically, are a pariah. They will struggle to get
| financing to take a risk with another company. This is on top
| of a risk-averse system that generally places much higher
| requirements on non-bankrupt people seeking financing.
|
| Compare this to the situation in the US. Here there is
| relatively easy access to financing at all sizes of
| organization. It only noticeably tightens when there is a
| recession or there are very serious issues with the founders.
| When a company fails there are more options for recovery,
| sell-off, acquisition, etc. Labor law permits companies to
| jettison all employees easily too in certain situations
| whereas that is much more difficult in Europe. Although this
| is starting to get away from pure bankruptcy law it overlaps.
| Juliate wrote:
| There are equivalents (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsa
| bilit%C3%A9_limit%C3%A... - in French) but country-specific,
| there's no a European common structure.
|
| But another benefit from LLCs in the USA might be the lighter
| paperwork and simpler taxes filing.
|
| Which we also have (in France at least, as entrepreneur
| individuel), but both don't intersect.
| Bayart wrote:
| >there's no a European common structure.
|
| There are European corporate entities nowadays. See SE[0],
| SCE[1] and SPE[2]. The SPE is what you'd call an LLC, GmbH,
| SARL etc.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societas_Europaea
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societas_cooperativa_Europaea
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societas_privata_Europaea
| MatthewMcDonald wrote:
| I don't know about the bankruptcy laws, but Germany's GMBH
| (similar to an LLC) requires 25k in capital to get started.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| It used to be 18k here. Not anymore. However an LLC will
| provide you with almost no protection anymore.
| thesimon wrote:
| UG requires only 1ct, though extracting profit is a bit
| more difficult until you get to 25k.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| I think the author's reasoning that the entire continent of
| Europe lacks imagination was a major weakness of this article,
| and perhaps unintentionally some kind of -ist or -ism.
| Anecdotally, many of the brightest American software developers
| I've met hail from Europe: UK, Greece, Russia, Serbia, Italy,
| etc. I can go on and on and think of many geniuses I've had the
| privilege to work with. The question that people should be asking
| is why do the best and brightest often tend to migrate to
| American companies? My personal perspective on why European
| software doesn't seem to ever become market leading boils down to
| their government culture of wanting to regulate almost
| everything. Software is a world of possibilities. You can start
| from nothing and code literally anything. To me, the European
| tendency to want to have government regulate that and confine you
| to a narrow box of allowed services stifles that. Anybody who has
| a unique idea (unique ideas always step you outside of the box of
| existing regulated services) is going to be hampered. To give an
| example: something as simple as their Cookie law, which no doubt
| started with good intentions, just makes the first impression
| with any European website ugly and focuses away from the actual
| product. Does anybody really not know what a cookie is by now?
| Seriously?
| dvdkon wrote:
| As far as I know, there wasn't ever any law mandating banners
| for any and all cookies, it was for (frankly poorly defined,
| GDPR somewhat fixed that) non-necessary cookies. But nobody's
| going to put "Do you want to be tracked? Y/N" banners on their
| site.
| iamcurious wrote:
| United States' platforms on Chinese hardware sounds like
| everybody's problem. Except for China which has both.
|
| To be honest, it would be nice for Europe to handle the platforms
| and for the United States to go back to radical innovation. The
| times of emacs, vi, Bell labs, Xerox and pushing the computing
| medium to the edge.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| afaik china has their own google/facebook
| Mary-Jane wrote:
| All the FAANGs are American companies, and they've all been
| pushing the boundaries. What do you feel America has lost in
| this respect?
| ballooney wrote:
| It's not really technology though now is it. They're pushing
| the boundaries of capitalism and morality but not technology.
| It's been ages since Silicon Valley was about silicon. Almost
| all the current energy of the valley is in surveillance/ad-
| tech. Maybe the odd rocket as a fig-leaf.
| est31 wrote:
| Where are the HQs of Qualcomm, AMD, Intel, Nvidia located?
| Yes, everyone talks about Uber et al and indeed those
| companies barely add innovative ideas compared to the
| innovation that is needed to increase a CPU's performance.
| Uber et al instead mainly do a better job at extracting
| money from their extremely good market positions than the
| hardware companies do.
| jiofih wrote:
| Erm... a lot of the "pushing the boundaries" of
| technology happens at the foundries in South Asia, and
| equipment providers in the Netherlands.
| bandris wrote:
| The US and California in particular lost it's appeal. 20
| years ago it was the dream destination for many. Now, even
| some Indians steer away. I don't know a single European who
| would want to live in the US. Not even from Eastern Europe.
| The go-to place is London, Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam, etc.
|
| FAANGS were started 1-2 decades ago. In past 5 years the
| trend changed. Ask PG. He will never move back to the US.
|
| And no, Texas will never be the next big innovation hub.
|
| Living in the US is dull and uninspiring if you lived away
| for long. Also the missing social net makes the situation
| worse and worse every year.
|
| "America" is losing the talent pool.
| bandris wrote:
| To give an example: I was among the first airbnb users when
| it started. In the past few years I used booking.com more
| because I liked both their website and booking experience
| better. And yes, they offer private accomodation.
| Booking.com improved a lot while airbnb stagnated. I admit
| that I am not the target audiance for the airbnb
| "experiences" feature though.
| mmarq wrote:
| Instead I would argue that if the Americans opened their
| borders, a huge fraction of European tech
| workers/professionals will relocate there. I'd say that, as
| middle-class persons, they wouldn't subject themselves to
| the torture of getting a visa, which may also partially
| explain the rise of Berlin as a tech hub after Brexit.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Nonsense. You do realize that people don't just relocate
| to another country let alone to another continent,
| especially when the benefits are questionable at best.
| Somewhat more pay, but for more expenses due to a
| ridiculous health-care, depending on location, it may
| very well be less safe, etc.
| mmarq wrote:
| You may disagree, but "nonsense" sounds a bit excessive.
| An Italian or Spanish software developer earning 30K
| euros per annum would likely go to the US if they were
| offered an American salary. Many of those who went to the
| UK or to Germany (me included) would have crossed the
| Atlantic for the right offer.
| kaba0 wrote:
| So you are claiming that the only reason European
| developers don't cross en mass is due to non-open
| borders?
| bandris wrote:
| I agree with you that inexperienced (lower paid) or young
| developers might find the US attractive if there weren't
| visa issues. The older better paid ones, maybe with
| families even, would probably still choose the social
| safety of Europe, the mix of people and ideas, the
| density of interesting places, cultural events, etc.
|
| I mainly reflected on the current trend I observered. Did
| not consider a sudden change in the US visa policy.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > If Europe wants to have its citizens (and companies) rely
| significantly on European-operated software, it has no choice but
| to develop better software,
|
| NEVER in my 30+ years as a user of computer networks or
| communication programs I have seen the "better software" win. It
| has always been the most marketing, the most shady ethics, or
| anything else that lead to the strongest network effect.
| arp242 wrote:
| I do agree this is an important factor, but there are various
| well-known counter examples, so "NEVER" seems far too strong.
|
| Google was significantly better than anything else at the time,
| and in spite of the problems with Google, its search result are
| still quite a bit better than most others I've tried.
|
| GitHub was a _huge_ improvement over anything that came before
| it, and after a review of alternatives some months ago it still
| clearly is the best product IMO.
|
| Internet Explorer was a lot better than Netscape. Yes, it was a
| mess, but Netscape was an even bigger mess.
|
| There are probably other examples.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Following this, I think it might be instructive to ask what
| happened to EU tech successes that have failed. Nokia and the
| famous "burning platform", for example. Was it the case that
| natural market competition leads to there being only room for
| two phone OSs?
|
| And a far more controversial question: would it be allowed? Or
| would a successful European world-dominating quasi-monopoly on
| the FAANG scale get banned from the US market? We've seen
| twitches in that direction (remember the "Tiktok will be forced
| to sell to Oracle" nonsense?). Or in the aerospace market,
| things like
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/26/bombardier-...
| or https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32542140 ; Boeing vs
| Airbus shenanigans go back a long way.
|
| I found out the other day that one of the UK's longstanding
| tech companies collapsed after accidentally buying a CIA front
| organization for illegal arms sales:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti#Collapse
|
| Or ARM: are they an "EU" tech success any more? As their
| ownership is passed from Japanese Softbank to US NVIDIA.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Or ARM: are they an "EU" tech success any more?
|
| Even if they stay where they are they're not in the EU any
| longer anyway!
| thu2111 wrote:
| For ARM it was already deeply ambiguous because their CPU
| design teams are these days in Austin, Texas. Obviously a lot
| of staff are still in the UK but AFAIK the actual CPU design
| no longer is.
| DrBazza wrote:
| The UK government have blocked the sale to nvidia as far as I
| know. Whether that means it is being brought back to the UK,
| I don't know.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56804007
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Google vs. Yahoo, Ask Jeeves etc.
|
| After it was basically the winner it brought in marketing,
| shady ethics and everything else to keep growing.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Just to be clear, you're listing Google as a counterexample,
| as a piece of software that was good rather than just
| marketed as such, right? [ I would accept it as a
| counterexample. ]
| dnautics wrote:
| At the beginning Google was pretty much technically better
| than yahoo (and even Altavista, which I would argue was the
| "technical" leader). It also solved search for that era;
| you really could find anything on google, and easily, so it
| was a better product too.
|
| The definition of "better software" is vague. Does it mean
| technically better? Better product? Easier to use? Ethical?
| Probably have to ask GP for clarifcation on that.
| thrower123 wrote:
| Perhaps people do not remember what using search engines in
| the 90s was like; statistically, there are a huge number of
| current software engineers who never did, and a largish
| number who were not even born when Google Search launched.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| sure, but perhaps the same is true for a lot of products
| that nowadays we think are not necessarily that good but
| only marketed as such. At any rate the original parent
| said that good has never won out, and I think there is
| still a larger number of people on HN than not that can
| remember at least one software product that was better.
|
| on edit: I mean there seems to be a large number of
| people of the opinion, and I concur, that Google now is
| not as good as the Google of a decade ago. This is part
| of the reason why I think that many products we think of
| as bad might actually have been very good at the time
| that they gained their initial success.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| yes.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Interestingly, in FLOSS the opposite is true.
| DrBazza wrote:
| > If Europe wants to have its citizens (and companies) rely
| significantly on European-operated software, it has no choice
| but to develop better software,
|
| Europe is at a permanent disadvantage with language. You either
| target your local market in your local language, or you do
| English first. If you do English first, your market isn't even
| in your home country. Even culturally England and the USA (and
| AUS/NZ) are a bit different to France, Germany, Sweden and so
| on.
|
| Only one "European" success I can think of whilst typing this:
| Spotify (anglo-swedish).
|
| America on the other hand has access to a literally flood of
| venture capital money.
| varjag wrote:
| Skype.
|
| And really, i18n is a minor issue.
| Chiron1991 wrote:
| From a technical perspective, yes. Most frameworks worth
| their salt provide good-enough mechanisms for that.
|
| Where i18n becomes nasty is when you have to find, evaluate
| and constantly coordinate with n external translation
| agencies. Working from Germany on an international product,
| this is a nightmare. From a technical standpoint we can
| release features within a minute thanks to our CI/CD setup,
| but as soon as some user-facing text is affected we have to
| hold changed back until all translations were collected.
| DrBazza wrote:
| Agreed, but i18n of your software isn't really what I'm
| talking about.
|
| There's other things like GDPR, local taxation, many cross
| border laws, and by culture I mean a variety of things:
| you'll see university graduates flogging themselves to
| death in Silicon Valley, but a start up in London will be
| slightly more relaxed by comparison. In the US, "free VC
| money" means there's an incentive to get to market asap,
| monetize, and move on. That doesn't really exist in Europe.
| varjag wrote:
| Fortunately most of the above mentioned is harmonized in
| the EU. Culture is a fair point, but I suspect much of it
| is chicken and egg problem. Thin VC money, less lively
| M&A market, fewer reasons for gold rush.
| krylon wrote:
| SAP - I'm not making a statement re the quality of their
| software, but they seem to be doing pretty well for
| themselves.
|
| Siemens SiMatic - again, I won't say anything about the
| quality of their software, but they seem to be successful.
| DelightOne wrote:
| > what Europe also doesn't have is a true single market. It has
| fractured markets, each with a different language, different
| legal requirements and so on.
|
| I agree with this from a commenter below. In US you have so many
| more customers that speak your language and have your culture.
| You can move around and find common issues. One government. One
| law. So different from the EU.
|
| I do not see a fix until government, law and language becomes
| unified to a common government, common law and the common
| language.
| oftenwrong wrote:
| The US has one dominant language and one dominant culture, but
| the legal system is complex. There are national laws. There are
| also 50 states, each with their own sets of laws. There are
| also laws at lower levels (county, city, etc). There are
| similarities that hold true, more-or-less, across the nation,
| but also differences that are relevant to businesses.
|
| For example, the recent battle in California over how "gig
| economy" workers are classified:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22
|
| Or, the problem of figuring out where you can sell your micro-
| mobility vehicle:
|
| "The classification of ebikes and other forms of transport is a
| complex matter in the US. There are federal rules and lots of
| different regulations at state and city level."
|
| https://www.mypodride.com/faqs (see the "PodRide for USA and
| Canada" section)
|
| The US may be better than in the EU in this regard, but it's
| also not that different.
| DelightOne wrote:
| US legal system seems less complex than the EU. Thought I
| admit that I do not have a complete overview of US law.
|
| I see it like having many small US countries at the same
| time, while the EU law above just directs these smaller US
| countries to implement custom laws for their own backwater. I
| chose the example because for each country, all the levels
| you describe also seem to exist.
| yesbabyyes wrote:
| I must say that I lack the Scandinavian/Baltic perspective here.
| Some successful software projects founded in Scandinavia and the
| Baltics some of you have heard of include:
|
| Linux Skype Spotify Mojang (Minecraft) Rovio (Angry Birds)
| SoundCloud Klarna MySQL Opera Qt
|
| Even Tidal, Rdio and Beats Music can trace their ancestry to this
| region.
|
| Not to mention the only(?) remaining competition to Chinese
| telecom, Ericsson and Nokia, following the defeat of Lucent,
| Nortel, Siemens et al.
|
| With this perspective, perhaps it can be argued that speaking of
| Europe as a whole in this sense is unproductive.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| We already have plenty of OSS software.
|
| Signal can be a perfect replacement for Whatsapp. If the EU want
| to spend money on maintaining, improving and deploying Signal,
| that'd be great.
|
| People still won't use it, though.
|
| It's too late. If Europe wants a slice of the market they need to
| make business as frictionless as possible like the USA did in the
| past - that will bring capital, eventually.
|
| I think Europe has bigger problems to care about though.
| 1experience wrote:
| If the issue is about security and not economics, free open
| source platforms already exist.
|
| Europe should fund them heavily and by doing so give them the
| advertising power to compete with for-profit ones.
|
| Otherwise they will end up squandering a lot of money, Covid apps
| are not a good example.[1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/henwet/the_uk_...
| slavoingilizov wrote:
| "Since all communication platforms are now free, the only way to
| get people to use competitive European software and services is
| to also offer these for free, and to make sure this technology is
| very good and compelling"
|
| I have never seen a government or any regulation deliver anything
| "good and compelling", or take any other action to "make sure"
| someone else delivers it.
| Bayart wrote:
| Try living in a country without roads, electric grid and water
| management. Those aren't granted.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Since you never witnessed the magic of governement or
| regulation that works, lets me give you some example.
|
| - I had a college education pay by tax payer money.
|
| - You might be old enough to remember the CFC cans? I find it
| good and compelling that they are illegal and a thing of the
| past now. It was a regulation signed in 1987, with both Russia
| and the US on the ticket, during a cold war. CFC are not a
| consumer product anymore. I have no idea if they still exists
| at large.
|
| - I miss some regulation that were beneficial, glass-steggal
| comes to mind.
|
| Anyway, all that to say, I find your statment pretty broad and
| easy to poke at.
|
| A last one for the road: don't you think of the children?
|
| I appreciate that child labor have been regulated out of the
| greedy hands of our capitalist overlords.
| brigandish wrote:
| > I appreciate that child labor have been regulated out of
| the greedy hands of our capitalist overlords.
|
| Child labour ended _because_ of capitalism. The increased
| income and power that begets then allowed for child labour
| laws to come in - it certainly didn 't happen in pre-
| industrial societies or capitalists wouldn't have been able
| to employ them in the first place. Same goes for slavery, not
| only did economic pressure from increasing automation make it
| less viable but the increased wealth and power of people
| within society who were opposed to it meant slavery was
| finally ended _by the most capitalistic societies the world
| has ever seen_.
| ndosnfiwjaijx wrote:
| Capitalists didn't end child labor. In fact they opposed
| banning child labor. Had the governments not banned it, it
| would probably still be legal.
| slavoingilizov wrote:
| Yes, my statement was very broad. But the point I'm trying to
| make is that regulation is usually reductive, not additive.
| It is definitely needed in many cases, and the state should
| interfere when necessary to ensure safety and fairness. But
| regulation is never the reason innovation happens.
|
| The spirit of the author's comment was that if you regulate
| for something becoming compelling, it would become
| compelling. That never happens. You can't regulate your way
| to being innovative. I think it was Ben Evans who said the
| difference between the US and EU is that the US sees
| regulation as necessary evil, while the EU sees it as an
| exciting project. Hence the different outcomes.
| iamcurious wrote:
| The moon landing is nice example.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Or going back a bit further, the mail.
| dnautics wrote:
| well with the mail, lysander spooner tried to (and
| succeeded at) setting up a private alternative and was
| beaten the fuck back by the government. It wasn't until the
| late 20th C that private mail services came back, and they
| are specifically abjured against delivering 1st class mail.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > I have never seen a government or any regulation deliver
| anything "good and compelling", or take any other action to
| "make sure" someone else delivers it.
|
| * US Digital Service
|
| * 18F
|
| * Pubmed
| hughrr wrote:
| gov.uk is pretty excellent.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| As long as fastly is up of course!
| hughrr wrote:
| Haha good point :(
| jdasdf wrote:
| The reason is very simple. Europe is overtaxed and over-regulated
| and the situation is not likely to change for the better any time
| soon.
| jimmyvalmer wrote:
| Once again, proof that no good deed goes unpunished. It's a
| credit to Europe's social values that they find themselves prey
| to the profit-first institutions of Silicon Valley. And lest we
| forget, the world-changing beneficence of the internet and Linux
| originated from a Swiss lab and a Finn.
| 3GuardLineups wrote:
| ignore the fact that Linus is now an American citizen
| adreamingsoul wrote:
| Finns have been behind a lot of what we have today.
| StavrosK wrote:
| * the web, not the internet.
| pwthornton wrote:
| Some of the stuff in this article may be fine, and trying to
| raise money is certainly harder in Europe, but I thought one of
| the biggest drags on Europe's tech industry is poor pay for
| engineers and other tech talent?
|
| In the U.S., going into a tech career can be one of the best ways
| to make a high salary quickly -- especially without needing an
| advanced degree. Without this incentive, you'll have a lot less
| people pursuing education and careers in these areas.
|
| A software engineer makes like 50% more salary (let alone all of
| the other stuff) in the Bay Area as they do in London. London is
| a really expensive city that pays certain industries a ton of
| money.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| I think its a feedback loop.
|
| --> better engineers
|
| --> more successful/innovative company
|
| --> company generates more revenue
|
| --> company can pay higher
|
| --> better engineers
| xputer wrote:
| Exactly, the substantially higher salaries for tech workers in
| the US allows them to attract the best and brightest from all
| over the world.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| The reason US developers are paid more is because US startups
| are much more successful. As to why they are so much more
| successful is a different question.
| kazen44 wrote:
| Also, the US dollar being the defacto reserve currency and it
| currently being incredibly cheap helps quite a lot. The US is
| basically the only country being able to borrow directly
| against natural resources (which it has plenty off,
| especially compared to the EU).
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| EU is not one market. its 27 markets with different language,
| history, culture, preferences...etc. is it even worth the time
| and efforts?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| It is one market for google, facebook, apple etc. They all
| succeeded and there's no reason a successful EU company
| wouldn't become european and essentially global. But for this
| to happen u have to have companies that grow
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| but google, facebook, apple...etc. already huge in US with
| vast amount of resources before they enter foreign market. a
| start up in US/China have one big market for them to grow
| domestically and gain enough resources before entering
| foreign market.
|
| lets say you are a small German start up. is German big
| enough to grow and gain enough resources before you enter say
| Estonia?
|
| edit: isn't Rocket Internet business model is copying
| successful US company for Europe before the US company have
| enough resources to enter?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| facebook entered europe at the same time as US and there
| were even a lot of european competitors. It did not really
| displace them, what happened is their competitors lacked to
| motivation to outcompete facebook in europe. The only
| remnant of that era is VK for obvious reasons (both it and
| Yandex are actually pretty good though not great)
| jbverschoor wrote:
| No it didn't. It stayed in the US until it blew up.
|
| They did win. Not because the lack of innovation. Because
| the international aspect of Facebook.
|
| Friends from holidays, people using Facebook abroad etc.
|
| Facebook itself is always lagging the market, and then
| either copy or buy the thing that's hot at that point.
| jopsen wrote:
| It's not for Amazon...
|
| And historically it's taken forever for streaming services,
| etc. to find their way.
|
| Lol, I have HBO Nordic, as in they literally wrote a
| dedicated platform for serving HBO to Scandinavia!
|
| If you start a tech company you start with customers in the
| US because the market is huge.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| We finally have prime since a year. I had that almost 15
| years ago in the US. Actually. We only got Amazon.nl since
| a year or 2. Bevroren that we had to use the German Amazon
|
| We still don't have HomePod, or Dutch swiping keyboards.
| We're always in the late batch of iPhones
| jahsis wrote:
| And it is not even like that, in smaller countries google
| don't offer some of services (android auto) and hardware
| (pixel).
| ik22kkKK3i wrote:
| Want to establish a business in Europe? Good luck wasting 150
| hours a month only for compliance with billions of laws and
| spending the rest 10 hours for the actual development.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Good luck opening a bank account
| tormeh wrote:
| My previous comment on this issue:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27508759
|
| (Slightly edited) copy-paste:
|
| Economist ran an article on this:
| https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/06/05/once-a-corpora...
|
| We're in the service economy now, and Europe has no real single
| market for services, due to all kinds of national regulations
| that differ throughout the block. Nor does it have well-developed
| financial and labor markets, partly also because they are
| currently partitioned by nationality. Its stock exchanges are too
| many and too small, etc. The list goes on.
|
| For many big European companies, an astounding percentage of
| revenue comes from the US or China. But if you start a startup
| building for US/China from the start, why would you want the HQ
| to be somewhere in Europe?
|
| This also means that the story is very very different for
| products that can be shipped in boxes. Europe does extremely well
| in cars, beverages, clothing, chemicals and that sort of thing.
| Also electrical utilities for some reason.
| insert_coin wrote:
| Innovation requires instability. Europe decided long ago that
| life security and 'quality of life' was their goal, which is a
| worthy goal, but every decision you make means there is a path
| you didn't take.
|
| You can't have everything.
| ema wrote:
| I think a law that forbids blocking third party clients (either
| through terms&conditions or technical means) would level the
| playing field a bit. Though I see issues around balancing the
| need of platforms to update their APIs and an API update
| essentially blocking third party clients who don't keep pace.
| fsflover wrote:
| Such law would even help with the walled garden of Signal.
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| While I'd appreciate such a law, I doubt it would work in
| practice.
|
| First-party can turn it into a cat-and-mouse game where they'll
| introduce some minor changes that require third-party apps to
| be updated over and over again. We've seen this happen with
| some education related app / system in Sweden where people
| built a better third-party app / client.
|
| Finding a decent, enforceable solution this way is certainly
| not trivial.
| yreg wrote:
| A similar thing is part of the PSD2 regulation[0]. It forces
| banks to open APIs.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Services_Directive
| grishka wrote:
| Mandate that every API version that introduces breaking
| changes remains available for X years. Big companies do this
| anyway because there always are people using outdated first-
| party apps.
| Nursie wrote:
| > Mandate that every API version that introduces breaking
| changes remains available for X years.
|
| Then you've just crippled the ability to deliver new
| functionality at a rapid pace without huge associated
| support costs.
|
| no?
| grishka wrote:
| No. You didn't read my comment fully. Companies already
| support app versions that are years old, for various
| reasons -- the most obvious one being that many people
| use older devices that run an OS that's no longer
| supported by the app in question, and others just don't
| ever update anything. So since they're already doing this
| right now, and have been doing this since forever,
| there's literally zero additional work involved.
|
| Besides, no one is asking them to "deliver new
| functionality at a rapid pace", especially to feature-
| complete products. This whole "keep flapping your wings
| or you'll die" thing is a lie. It's fine for a product to
| be _done_. It 's fine to stop. It's fine to go into
| maintenance mode.
| Nursie wrote:
| > Companies already support app versions that are years
| old
|
| Some do, agile startups tend not to.
|
| > Besides, no one is asking them to "deliver new
| functionality at a rapid pace"
|
| And your proposed legislation would ensure that they
| cannot.
|
| > It's fine for a product to be done. It's fine to stop.
| It's fine to go into maintenance mode.
|
| It's not fine for this to be the law.
| gizmondo wrote:
| > It's not fine for this to be the law.
|
| This law sounds silly and counter-productive enough for
| EU to actually implement it!
| grishka wrote:
| Maybe there should be some sort of condition, like
| minimum MAU or something. Only regulate those that grow
| to be huge enough for many people to depend on them. This
| would exclude startups but would still apply to Facebook
| and Twitter.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| How so? What prevents you from making new functionality
| available incrementally and in a backwards-compatible
| manner on the newest version of the API?
|
| Besides, this would reduce e-waste from perfectly
| functional devices that are not longer functional because
| the cloud endpoint went away. So it would be good for the
| environment too.
| Nursie wrote:
| You've just imposed a set of legal constraints on an
| entire industry there.
|
| You genuinely can't see how this might stifle creativity
| and add costs in a small, fast moving company? I can
| already hear the jaded developer conversations -
|
| "Oh god, no don't change that, we'll be stuck with
| another 'version 3 ' we have to support forever".
|
| And the managerial equivalent - "delivering X new feature
| will break existing APIs and as a result of the
| regulations we have to keep those running, adding time to
| the dev cycle for back/forward porting and increasing
| support costs, maybe hosting costs too, best shelve it"
|
| It's fine for slow-moving enterprise stuff, for everyone
| else it's a crazy imposition. You can't drop a feature
| you don't want to support any more, you can't completely
| change how one works, you're constrained.
|
| Of course it's possible to work that way, but it adds
| load. In the context of "Europe doesn't have enough fast
| moving home-grown tech", legislating that would be
| precisely the wrong move.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Mandate that every API version that introduces breaking
| changes remains available for X years.
|
| This is the kind of insane regulation that holds Europe
| back - it's the problem not the solution.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| We have to operate by american rules in the hope that something
| will catch on, and then pray european countries won't create
| legislation that outlaws or makes it impossible to monetize your
| product. Schemes like the H2020 research grants are more of a UBI
| for Phd holders than a real attempt to outcompete the world. I
| don't think any funding scheme coming from the EU can be
| competitive, instead of a job-and-bureaucracy-creation machine.
|
| Europe lacks on marketing, distribution and ability to acquire
| and lock-in users, fast. This has been the american recipe to
| success time and again, not the quality of consumer-facing
| products which has been going downhill for a decade now. We can't
| bet on EU as a whole to create an ecosystem, instead the best use
| of EU funds would be for states to run the most basic consumer
| services for free for their citizens (such as email or a mastodon
| instance). It will be sub-par but it will at least create an
| alternative due to the EU's large distribution mechanism.
| s_dev wrote:
| Patrick Collison replying to an Economist Article that is
| pessimistic about European Tech Future:
|
| https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1403340409787469836
| sdevonoes wrote:
| > For one, we lack the imagination and vision to launch something
| without knowing how it might eventually make money
|
| I don't think there is lack of imagination. The biggest barrier
| for any person who wants to launch something is: paperwork around
| establishing a company. In some countries you have to pay every
| month some amount of money if you want to be a freelancer, in
| others you need to setup a sole proprietorship, in others the
| distinction is not that clear. In almost every country in Europe
| (perhaps with the exception of the UK) the whole process is
| cumbersome. Young people who are willing to launch some projects
| online don't want to mess up with taxes authorities nor lawyers
| nor the commerce chamber... and hence they decide not to launch
| anything at all. Besides, setting up a company costs money
| (perhaps not much).
|
| I live in Europe. I don't want to setup a damn company for every
| little project I may think it can become big. I want to let my
| projects grow in the wild, and if any of them get traction then
| sure, I will setup a company without fear of losing money.
|
| Also: being a software engineer/computer programmer in Europe is
| not as sexy as it is in USA. It's getting better, yes, but here
| the "engineer" is the last monkey. Managers and sales are the
| ones who get the credit. So, European mentality also plays a role
| here.
| varjag wrote:
| > The biggest barrier for any person who wants to launch
| something is: paperwork around establishing a company.
|
| Seriously? Your plumber managed to establish a company. That
| kebab place across the street. The delivery guy subcontracting
| for courier service. And the company that wants to conquer the
| world can't?
| kansface wrote:
| I live in the US, but the plumber is just doing business in
| one jurisdiction and expects that business will continue to
| exist for years. Jumping through a bunch of hoops may not be
| worth what starts out at a couple hundred dollars a month.
| Lots of companies only accidentally conquer the world. If you
| put a barrier in front of any activity, you will get less of
| it in direct proportion to the height of the barrier.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| Yeah I remember some big4 companies saying that France is
| among the easiest country to incorporate a company ( I think
| it was E&Y). The problem is more on : 1 - Europe can't have a
| common language 2 - Each country will support first their own
| companies, then US, then other competitive European companies
| 3 - A mess to expend outside of its own country. 4 - Culture
| of useless consultancy companies (Atos, Alten, Altran, Cap
| Gemini, Accenture, and a shit load of others) for France and
| several other countries killing any IT innovations.
|
| And many more things.
| varjag wrote:
| Much of it is true. However as for #2, there are often at
| least clusters of countries where expansion isn't a big
| deal (BeNeLux, Nordics, Baltic...) so it's not _that_
| terrible. And supporting the US companies, well maybe it 's
| true for the whales but nobody gives two damns about
| competing American startups.
| PeterisP wrote:
| IDK, I set up an LLC to bill for a single project, and it cost
| me something like 100 euros and a few hours of my time reading
| up on how to do it. Yes, that brings the need to file taxes
| every year - but on the other hand ordinary people in USA have
| to that for their personal income (unlike most people in EU),
| and that doesn't seem like something impossible to them.
|
| Like, it definitely is a barrier for trivial hobby projects, if
| you whip something up in a single day and don't want to spend
| any more time on it, then this becomes a problem, but it's not
| a meaningful barrier for any actual project on which you're
| working every week that brings you some revenue.
| Scarblac wrote:
| > > > For one, we lack the imagination and vision to launch
| something without knowing how it might eventually make money
|
| > I don't think there is lack of imagination. The biggest
| barrier for any person who wants to launch something is:
| paperwork around establishing a company.
|
| I don't think that is true for the type of company that is
| described by the line you're replying to. Starting a company is
| not _that_ hard. Starting a company _without even knowing what
| its eventual business model will be_ , purely banking on growth
| for growth's sake, that requires a vast amount of investment
| with very little guarantees of a return. And that is hard to
| get in Europe! Much harder than merely starting a company is. I
| have been part of one such startup for a short time years ago,
| and I thought it was a complete scam, so unused was I to that
| type of company. I've never seen any since.
|
| > In some countries you have to pay every month some amount of
| money if you want to be a freelancer,
|
| Yes, but freelancing isn't the topic.
|
| However, I have a feeling that companies that just want to grow
| big and are unclear on what their business model will be when
| they are, are not exactly working on the most important
| problems. So maybe it's not all bad for Europe.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > Also: being a software engineer/computer programmer in Europe
| is not as sexy as it is in USA. It's getting better, yes, but
| here the "engineer" is the last monkey. Managers and sales are
| the ones who get the credit. So, European mentality also plays
| a role here.
|
| Eventually those manager and sales people will learn that they
| need developers to build stuff, or else they can't manage
| anyone because nothing has been built or sell products that
| don't exist.
| mnouquet wrote:
| > Eventually those manager and sales people will learn that
| they need developers to build stuff
|
| The "bourgeoisie" never really figured out they needed
| workers to run the mines...
| abz10 wrote:
| Unfortunately they are very slow learners and by the time
| they figure it out a lot of damage has been done.
| gryn wrote:
| they found a better alternative called: 'you do the work, I
| get the pay in your place. win win'.
|
| and it's structured in the form of useless middlemen
| `consulting` companies going by the names of (Atos, Alten,
| Accenture, ...)
|
| finding a job in tech related industries means most probably
| going through them, and in practice they value business
| school people and management types way more than the lowly
| engineer.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Why would you assume they'd change? They will simply go to
| non tech companies and "manage "people there
| seu wrote:
| > European investors specifically are much more interested in
| traditional business plans than US venture capitalists. "Data is
| the new oil" does not translate well into German, French or
| Spanish.
|
| > In addition, with the GDPR, NIS (2) Directive & other
| regulations, data in Europe is definitely more "the new toxic
| waste". It is in any case not a business plan.
|
| > So not only do we lack the imagination to launch free
| platforms, the path to one day making money with them is blocked
| by regulation.
|
| So protecting your citizens' rights and their privacy is "lack of
| imagination"? This is such a horrible argument. As if the only
| way to provide a service were to spy on your users.
| dralley wrote:
| >So protecting your citizens' rights and their privacy is "lack
| of imagination"? This is such a horrible argument.
|
| I don't really think it's the argument the author is making, or
| if they are, they mean it sarcastically.
|
| The frustration is with the state of affairs where American
| companies can destroy the entire market for software products
| with free services built on data mining, much like Uber, Lyft,
| Doordash, etc. have upended the market by completely ignoring
| profitability in search of marketshare.
|
| And data mining pretty much _is_ the only way to provide a free
| service and still make money.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Protecting? They're dining small companies millions, but fail
| to do anything against "big tech"
|
| The whole gdpr is a big mess.
|
| In terms of investors, there is barely any seed capital. There
| is series A/B, but the amounts are smaller than a typical seed
| round. They need to see profits from day one
| gabaix wrote:
| _If Europe wants to have its citizens (and companies) rely
| significantly on European-operated software, it has no choice but
| to develop better software, and to also offer that for free._
|
| I can't help thinking of Qwant, the alternative privacy-aware
| European search engine. Their financial standing is so dire that
| this week they had to ask money from Huawei. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.politico.eu/article/french-search-engine-
| qwant-h...
| klaaz0r wrote:
| Raising capital is getting easier but still nothing compared to
| the US. If we want change we need more capital to make
| competing software. If my competitor from SV has 10M in the
| bank and I can only raise 500k in Europe how do I compete? The
| end users doesn't care that much.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| This apparently isn't as much of an issue anymore, although
| there are supposedly other constraints on scaling.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| > If Europe wants to have its citizens (and companies) rely
| significantly on European-operated software, it has no choice
| but to develop better software, and to also offer that for free
|
| It already does. Look at the very large number of open source
| projects (like Linux) that originated or received substantial
| contributions from continental European volunteers.
|
| What Europe doesn't have is a strong VC infrastructure or a
| large density of software engineers in any given location to
| simplify growth scaling.
|
| Some of these are changing. Whether they will change fast
| enough to compete in software is another story, but it's very
| likely that Europe will be better positioned to take advantage
| of the next tech revolution. You can already see this in
| biotech.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| what Europe also doesn't have is a true single market. It has
| fractured markets, each with a different language, different
| legal requirements and so on.
|
| For all the disagreements here, look at where people move.
| Only around 5% of EU citizens live and work in an [edit: EU]
| country other than their own and a large slice of that is
| people from the east moving west. Only a sliver is highly
| skilled work and the majority is semi-skilled or low-skilled.
| The EU loves to boast about how freedom of movement of people
| is an important pillar but getting it to work over the long
| term is still a bureaucratic nightmare.
|
| Meanwhile, the US continues to vacuum up talent from across
| the world despite an utterly broken immigration system. Heck,
| even Canada is a top destination for talent due to its
| proximity to the US.
| jopsen wrote:
| Spot on!
|
| Even with EU making travel easier, the language barriers,
| etc are really strong reasons why people prefer not to move
| far away.
|
| When I lived in SF, people were from all over the US /
| world. There were very few native SF'ers to be found
| anywhere in tech.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| This problem will never get fixed. The author forgot to mention
| in depth the main reason why EU isn't even in the game: culture.
|
| In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible
| working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing
| lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
|
| A lot of third world countries are years ahead of the whole EU
| continent in that aspect. I say this because I live in Europe for
| the quality of life, come from a third world country, and I see
| how kids and adults are spoiled here. Much of what they have was
| just given to them. At least for the strong countries in west EU,
| lifestyle is very relaxed and any ambitious is frowned upon, it
| is extremely demotivating, not to mention bureaucracy.
| Corporations and regulations will just drive your small company
| out of the market no matter what.
|
| I find for me more likely to save some money, move to my country
| and create my own business and sell in Europe. People here are
| too lazy to compete in the fast world we live in, there in my
| country there is so many skilled people, so little capital, here
| is the reverse. Good amount of capital and foreigners working in
| tech. For instance, I live in Berlin and almost all the "working
| people" from tech companies here are foreigners. Germans are
| generally the executives and/or management. It is quite rare to
| find a german software developer on Startups.
|
| I personally think(my opinion, not the ultimate truth)... that
| Europe is definitely a very interesting market for companies to
| come here and sell their stuff, but not to make it.
|
| Instead I think Europe should focus on its strengths, which is
| healthy market regulations, creating a good playing field for
| companies from above, rather on its weaknesses. It should also
| figure out a way to keep part of the profits inside the continent
| to benefits its inhabitants.
|
| More important than competing is to know where and when to
| compete.
| bildung wrote:
| _> In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible
| working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing
| lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people._
|
| And yet Silicon Valley lies in one of the states with the most
| employee friendly regulation in the US wrt worker protection,
| paid overtime etc.: https://s3.amazonaws.com/oxfam-
| us/www/static/media/files/Bes...
| zeruch wrote:
| Yes, but how you interpret "employee friendly" matters. Case
| in point, California is an "at will" employer, which
| depending on how you want to leverage it, can be seen as
| employee friendly or employer friendly.
| kazen44 wrote:
| from a social democratic perspective, it just means your
| employer has eroted your rights of a stable living and
| extracted even more value from you through pressure.
| gerash wrote:
| SV has a momentum due to a number of factors. One of the ways
| they have been able to maintain the momentum has been the
| fact that CA allows employees freely move to a competitor and
| work there.
|
| This keeps the companies competing.
| _pmf_ wrote:
| > I see how kids and adults are spoiled here
|
| Where do you live in Europe, and what do you mean exactly?
| wreath wrote:
| He already said where he lives in the comment.
| samsquire wrote:
| Wow that's a lot to unpack... But I'll just leave this here.
|
| > I see how kids and adults are spoiled here
|
| I think what you're seeing is how people are meant to be
| treated.
|
| Maybe the German software developers don't want to work for a
| startup sweat shop?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible
| working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing
| lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
|
| The US has those things and it's turning into a "third world
| country with a Gucci belt" (as someone put it) for everyone
| except the 1% and the indispensable knowledge worker class that
| can't be automated away or juiced dry for all the productivity
| they are capable of.
|
| "Flexible working laws" and "less relaxing lifestyle" to me
| translates as "light a fire under their ass until they are
| forced to innovate", while "big growth mindset" and "ambitious
| people" translate as "hustle culture", which I consider toxic
| in its very nature.
|
| As a European, I can only hope that our culture doesn't degrade
| itself to that degree.
| qsort wrote:
| Not going to comment on anything else since "flexible working
| laws" and "less relaxing lifestyle" can mean anything, but
| "light a fire under their ass until they are forced to
| innovate" is unironically and unapologetically good.
|
| If there's _one_ thing that consistently fosters innovation
| and progress it 's competition. That's something that holds
| true everywhere. Software, industry, education, games,
| sports, you name it.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Innovation for innovation's sake is meaningless. Innovation
| to improve quality of life is reasonable, so decreasing
| quality of life to increase innovation is like shooting
| yourself in the foot for faster access to healthcare.
|
| And competition is not the only thing that breeds
| innovation. Just think back to all the HN articles about
| needing to make time for curious people to innovate.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| Isnt it actually all the pseudo monopolies that created all
| the innovations? Bell labs, Xerox park?
| jk3921 wrote:
| Its weird really. Europeans do pretty well in sports so its
| not like they lack drive. Speaking having just watched
| Djokovic, Nadal et al battling it out.
| kaba0 wrote:
| It's just blatant overgeneralization by grandparent
| comment. You can't really describe a whole continent like
| that, especially on a very variable human attribute like
| drivenness.
| Daishiman wrote:
| I've had the best ideas and the sharpest intellect once I
| had _plenty_ of money to be comfortable such that I could
| just sit on my ass thinking about whatever I wanted without
| worrying whether I needed to make ends meet.
|
| You are so wrong it's not even funny.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Easy to advocate this when you are not the one that goes
| hungry or homeless if you lose a job
| dgb23 wrote:
| The most impactful and important innovations typically come
| from people who are intrinsically motivated.
|
| Also, competition skews innovation towards solving problems
| that arrive from competition. You might just be hiring
| lawyers to bully a competitor instead of fostering
| sustainable progress. Or if your market is unregulated you
| can decide to use more severe methods.
| [deleted]
| qsort wrote:
| > people who are intrinsically motivated
|
| People who are intrinsically motivated are going to do
| their thing regardless of the boundary conditions.
| There's no way to give someone intrinsic motivation and
| there's no way to take it away from them. You would have
| had to physically handicap Michelangelo to prevent him
| from sculpting or Maradona from kicking balls and so on.
|
| Incentives definitely aren't everything, but they _do_
| work, and when you talk about systemic problems you have
| to think statistically.
|
| > You might just be hiring lawyers to bully a competitor
| instead of fostering sustainable progress. Or if your
| market is unregulated you can decide to use more severe
| methods.
|
| I'm talking about competition, not laissez-faire. If
| you're saying that competitive markets have to be
| fostered and don't just magically happen, then we are
| just vehemently agreeing.
| [deleted]
| krelian wrote:
| >As a European, I can only hope that our culture doesn't
| degrade itself to that degree.
|
| The question is whether Europe will be able to maintain its
| wealth - which is the main thing that makes possible the
| luxury of having a more relaxed lifestyle - in the long term
| while falling behind economically. Most of Europe's wealth is
| based around old world economy.
| dgb23 wrote:
| European economies are very diverse and I'm not concerned
| with wealth as the most successful countries with high
| living standards also have relatively low debt in
| comparison to gdp.
| hef19898 wrote:
| We already see a wealth gap between the North and South and
| the West and East. Also between the old and young. Not sure
| what that means for the future.
|
| Europes wealth is based, to a large extent, on hardware and
| a huge number of wealthy citizens. As long as hardware is a
| thing (not talking electronics but stuff like cars and so
| on), and we manage to _not_ cut of the poorer 20-30% of
| society, Europe should do fine.
| nudgeee wrote:
| Even in the electronics space EU has some big players --
| NXP, ST, Infineon, Bosch, Philips, ASML, Orsam, etc.
| arp242 wrote:
| > We already see a wealth gap between the North and South
| and the West and East.
|
| This has always existed; or at least has in modern
| history. It's hardly a new development, although the EU
| and Euro has brought this more to the forefront.
|
| These kind of things ebb and flow anyway; if you look at
| the last few hundred years then concentrations of wealth
| have shifted all over the place. Some locations have gone
| from very wealthy to very poor and back to very wealthy
| again.
| wyager wrote:
| > a "third world country with a Gucci belt" (as someone put
| it) for everyone except the 1%
|
| The median American is much richer than the median European.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| While also spending more money on various things, or having
| to spend them on privatised health care etc. It's not
| directly comparable. My point also discussed things like
| infrastructure and public services, which are often very
| neglected compared to their European counterparts.
| hardolaf wrote:
| Yeah, that statement made zero sense by the other person.
| Sure, on paper, us Americans at the median have more
| money. But after you pay for a single visit to the ER or
| urgent care, or after you have a kid, or any expenses,
| Western Europeans are far better off. I know, I've been
| near that income level before. It's not a fun experience
| over here.
|
| That said, now that I've moved into a job that pays at
| least $225K per year, you know, life in the USA is
| amazing for me. And everything everywhere else in the
| world is so cheap! Why can't my fellow country men just
| pull themselves up their bootstraps and get a high income
| earner job? It's so easy! You just go to the job tree and
| get one /s.
|
| But more seriously, we need to completely restructure our
| society in the USA before the poor and middle class
| violently rise up against the government and make us into
| what Mexico was 120 years ago.
| wyager wrote:
| Most Americans have employer provided health insurance.
| Fewer than 10% have no health insurance. Hardly anyone is
| paying out of pocket.
|
| > we need to completely restructure our society in the
| USA
|
| The specific primary reason the USA is rich is that we've
| resisted the temptation to do harebrained projects like
| this.
| hardolaf wrote:
| Most Americans pay a shit ton of money before their
| insurance kicks in to pay for the majority of their non-
| preventative care. I personally need to spend $3,000
| before I only pay 10% of the bills that insurance
| receives until I hit $6,000 in a calendar year after
| which I pay nothing else.
| odiroot wrote:
| Maybe if you only take San Francisco and New York City in
| consideration.
|
| USA has famously cheaper life than EU (especially gas and
| food). Not that I would trade places.
| kazen44 wrote:
| mind you gas prices are heavily subsidized in the US. The
| same goes for food.
|
| Also, from experience i have found vegetables to be
| ludicrously expensive in the USA, the same goes for beer
| and wine.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Statements like this are ambiguous, because "European" can
| mean many different things. Over 40% of Europeans live in
| former communist states, so the median European in the
| literal sense does not tell much about the standard of
| living in the traditional first-world European countries.
|
| I did a comparison between Finland and the US some time
| ago. My conclusion was that the median households were
| about as wealthy in both countries, but the average
| household was 3x wealthier in the US. The biggest caveat
| was that household wealth includes retirement savings but
| not pensions, making the median Finn wealthier than the
| median American. I estimated that the crossover point for
| the standard of living was somewhere around the 80th
| percentile, depending on things such as local costs of
| living and whether you have kids or not.
|
| After a few years in America, nominal salaries seem low in
| Finland. On the other hand, Finns have fewer major
| expenses. Their out-of-pocket costs for education,
| childcare, and healthcare are much lower. The concept of an
| emergency fund does not really exist in Finland, largely
| thanks to income-dependent benefits. Pension contributions
| are mostly paid by the employer on top of the nominal
| salary, making saving for retirement much less important.
| ex_amazon_sde wrote:
| The "median citizen" is an absurd concept given the income
| distribution. It completely fails to capture income
| inequality.
|
| Also access to free education, free healthcare and so on.
| wyager wrote:
| I think you're confusing median and mean. Median actually
| does account for the long tail.
|
| Over 90% of Americans have health insurance.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| As another European, I'd rather say the problem is in
| execution. On the flip side, having too much importance on a
| permanent contract creates incentives for other overheated
| markets to require a permanent contract before being able to
| continue the transaction (under the guise of "risk
| reduction"). See renting in the Netherlands. Additionally,
| employers have absolutely no qualms using this status to
| their advantage anyway. It just means playing the market a
| little differently, like making a 2 month leave notice
| mandatory. This doesn't consider the fact many people in
| markets much worse for employees than IT, these employees end
| up in situations where they cycle between companies since
| none of them will give a permanent contract anyway, or these
| companies try their worst to circumvent the law.
|
| Ultimately, it still comes down to execution, laws, the state
| of a market and personal preferences. Both forms can be
| toxic.
| jollybean wrote:
| Median wages in the US are still much higher than in Europe
| and it's always been 'bad' to be at the 'bottom' in the US.
|
| It's been that way for 150 years at least (read the stories
| of relatively well paid American GI's in UK WW2), no signs of
| changing just yet.
|
| I wonder if it's a culture problem or a scale problem or
| both.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| GP's phrasing is wrong but there is a point there - it is
| much easier to achieve success and then regulate and
| distribute its benefits than to go the other way round.
|
| I am not a fan of unbridled capitalism a la the USA and fully
| agree that more countries should strive to reach European
| levels of worker and civil rights... however, there is
| validity to the statement that Europe is currently coasting
| along on the spoils of centuries of loot and plunder. A
| lavish, comfortable lifestyle was handed to the citizens of
| western europe and many of their older firms have struggled
| to innovate as technology has spread across the globe. There
| is a good reason why a fast moving industry like tech has
| taken root in the US while Europe as a whole is playing catch
| up.
|
| The US will solve its problems, i have full faith in that
| country's ability to rise to the challenge as they have done
| numerous times in the past. Europe's problems with tech
| innovation run deep and go beyond simply vacation days and
| worker rights. Look no further than the current spree of tech
| regulation. I wish more countries did that but there is a
| fundamental problem - the EU is trying to legislate without
| having a good alternative.
|
| My prediction - If the US resolves its immigration system and
| allows more talent to flow in without having to worry about a
| visa, European skilled immigration is toast.
| sime2009 wrote:
| > however, there is validity to the statement that Europe
| is currently coasting along on the spoils of centuries of
| loot and plunder.
|
| oh boy.
|
| Time for you to crack the spine of a history book covering
| the 20th century, me thinks.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Europe is currently coasting along on the spoils of
| centuries of loot and plunder. A lavish, comfortable
| lifestyle was handed to the citizens of western europe
|
| Well, apart from the whole WW2 business.
|
| This is the trouble with generalisations across the
| continent, the closer you look the less well they fit. And
| if you look across a continent and back in time, the
| situation varies even further. Germany used to be "the sick
| man of Europe":
| https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.28.1.167
|
| The overhang of colonial benefit is present in Britain; I'm
| not really sure about France (the disasters of trying to
| hold on to Vietnam and Algeria?). It's not present in
| Germany or Italy which had it taken off them. It may well
| be an issue to Portugal and Spain, which were dictatorships
| well after the war.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Spain was razed to the ground during the Civil War
| (1936-1939) and people were literally eating cats and
| rats off the streets so I doubt that any of our current
| wealth is inherited from our former Imperial glory, aside
| from maybe some intangible, indirect and minuscule
| effects such as "historic capital".
|
| To your point, same goes for Germany indeed... Have you
| guys seen the pics of what cities like Berlin, Nuremberg
| or Frankfurt looked like after the war?
|
| There is a lot of old money in Europe, as some families
| managed to shield it from these crises, then compound
| interest did the rest, but I'd really like to see some
| proof about the sentiment being repeated ITT that
| Europe's current wealth is inherited or handed down,
| because the idea sounds contrary to everything I know
| about the continent's history.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Perhaps not Europe as a whole, but definitely the
| concentrated structure of land ownership, e.g.
| https://www.businessinsider.com/why-hugh-grosvenor-duke-
| of-w...
|
| To some extent I think the social structures produced by
| inherited wealth are anti-conduicive to innovation.
| Where's the innovation in the US? Most would say it's
| concentrated out west, in a state that didn't exist until
| 1850. The social structures of concentrated wealth in the
| South from the slavery era make it less innovative. And
| the northeast centers on money-making-money and property
| ownership.
|
| The real sweet spot, of course, is cashing out: finding
| how to get the old money and oil money to invest in your
| new innovation. The success of WeWork, for example.
| kgwgk wrote:
| "Spain was razed to the ground during the Civil War [...]
| same goes for Germany indeed"
|
| I wouldn't say that Spain was "razed to the ground"
| compared to Germany.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Yes, it is an exaggeration while in the case of Germany
| it's literal (though in Spain, a few towns _were_ razed,
| and many were heavily shelled)
|
| People eating cats and rats off the streets is not an
| exaggeration however - there is abundant oral testimony
| to support that.
|
| The point is that the damage hardly justifies talking
| about economies who live off inherited wealth, in either
| case.
| anthk wrote:
| There is an old saying in Spain meaning "they scammed
| you": Te han dado gato por libre (They gave you cat
| -meal- as hare). So, yes. after the civil war and
| Francoist repression Spain was utterly crushed down.
| sime2009 wrote:
| > Well, apart from the whole WW2 business.
|
| Let's be clear. By the time the last bullet was fired in
| WW2, Europe was basically destroyed, rumble, from the
| North Sea cross to Moscow. Brittan, although not
| occupied, was also hopelessly broke after the war. This
| weakness in Europe was one of the prime reasons why the
| colonies could break away from their European overlords.
| Europe was in no condition to do much about it either.
| They had more important things to worry about like food,
| and hoping that the Americans would come through with
| their Marshall Plan.
|
| That's just counting the western half of Europe which
| wasn't under new (communist) management.
|
| The loot and plunder was truly gone.
| kazen44 wrote:
| people from the US seem to underesti
| kazen44 wrote:
| the destruction of world war two was absolutely insane,
| especially on the eastern front.
|
| for instance: Belarus lost a quarter of it's population
| many villages and cities where utterly destroyed. also,
| don't forget world war 1 (and the other conflicts sparked
| after, like Russian civil war, breakup of Austria
| Hungary, Greco Turkish war etc) was only 25 years prior..
| hef19898 wrote:
| I was at university, back when Germany was the sick man.
| And I was truely worried about getting a job. Well,
| things turned out _very_ differently.
| xeromal wrote:
| WW2 could be taken as a benefit for Europe in the macro
| sense.
|
| * Influx of funding and loans from the US to rebuild
|
| * Able to rebuild legacy systems that were destroyed in
| the world (roads, buildings, new code standards, etc)
|
| * Reduced population means each individual is more
| valuable (See rising wages after plagues in the middle
| ages)
|
| * Increased interdependency to combat Russian and US
| pressures
|
| * The UN, NATO, etc
| egman_ekki wrote:
| I wonder if we should perhaps bomb some nations every
| once in a while for their benefit... /s
| sime2009 wrote:
| This is the "broken window fallacy" on steroids. There is
| no net benefit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_windo
| w
| xeromal wrote:
| Ok
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| How so? It's pretty axiomatic that destruction and
| rebuilding cycle that follows a continental-scale war
| lead to widespread investment and an economic boom.
| aliasEli wrote:
| How about Germany after WWI?
| adwn wrote:
| That's not what "axiomatic" means. Maybe you meant "self-
| evident"? But that's not true either: Not every country
| ravaged by war goes on to become an economic powerhouse.
| pvaldes wrote:
| * And random effects over nature also, some negative, but
| other beneficial. The war submarines acting as a new top
| predator and the deploy of sea mines were a bless for
| fisheries, for example.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Some of which applies to SV as well. The US Navy:
|
| - taught a huge number of people enough electronics to do
| field maintenance of radio and radar
|
| - had a further more theoretical education for radar
| operators
|
| - at the end of the war, sold off a huge amount of kit
| cheaply; some of this is _still_ kicking around the ham
| community in California. See e.g.
| https://mightyohm.com/wiki/resources:surplus and the
| geographic distribution
|
| The US picked up a lot of refugees
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)
| , Intel founder Andy Grove etc).
|
| There's all sorts of odd little path dependencies.
| Shockley and Fairchild semiconductors were in California
| because Shockley himself wanted to live near his mother
| and managed to recruit people to move across the country.
| xeromal wrote:
| I find it very interesting how it all played out to make
| society today. Thanks for sharing these articles. I'm
| gonna check them out
| thiago_fm wrote:
| People will take my phrasing to their preferred way, I was
| aware of it when I wrote it. It's the internet.
|
| I'd need to be a great philosopher and writer, to write a
| boring book with the same opinion that wouldn't hurt them.
| Unfortunately, I am none of those two. Those who want to
| take it in the wrong way will and I'm ok with that.
| [deleted]
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > The US has those things and it's turning into a "third
| world country with a Gucci belt"
|
| I get the distinct impression that people who liken the US to
| a third world country are from one particular spot on the
| political spectrum. This seems like political rhetoric, not a
| summary of some level-headed analysis. Inequality, crime, etc
| in the US are certainly problems, but that seems like a low
| bar for the "third world country" label (with or without the
| 'gucci belt' modifier). At best it's unhelpful, but I think
| it's probably just inaccurate considering how many people
| from _actual_ second and third world countries are risking
| their very lives to get in, not to mention divisive.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| America's problems are numerous and have been discussed
| elsewhere at length. Suffice to say that sometime between
| 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, America has not been
| keeping up with other economies in terms of what makes a
| first world country worth living in. Biden may change that,
| or he may not. In any case, America has a lot of catching
| up to do if they want to overtake Europe (and some other
| places) in anything besides profit.
| hardolaf wrote:
| Poverty has been increasing rapidly here in the states
| and people just keep ignoring it. My employer isn't,
| we're gearing up to make tons of money on the next crash.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > America's problems are numerous and have been discussed
| elsewhere at length. Suffice to say that sometime between
| 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, America has not been
| keeping up with other economies in terms of what makes a
| first world country worth living in.
|
| Maybe. Or maybe the media is just peddling negativity
| such that we are overexposed. I moved to Europe a decade
| ago and have since returned, and plan to go back
| occasionally. When I went, I definitely had the
| impression that Europeans had it together and that Europe
| was some kind of liberal Utopia. And it was neat and
| European countries have political ideas worth borrowing,
| but it turns out that Europeans are also just people with
| their own distinct problems. They aren't more enlightened
| as American liberal media would have you believe. Europe
| has some really cool cultures, but they aren't "better"
| than American culture(s). IMO what Europe does have that
| America lacks is a deep, vibrant history (pre-Columbian
| American history is relatively impoverished for a variety
| of reasons).
| [deleted]
| sschueller wrote:
| Generally I define a 3rd world country as a place that has
| a lot of inequality, corruption across the board, poor to
| no worker protection, failing and antiquated
| infrastructure, no free access to health care, high
| incarceration rate, persecution of journalists, a large
| working poor population with no ability to move up the
| social ladder, etc.
|
| Which one of those does the US not have?
| [deleted]
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Those are all relative and obviously cherry picked. If
| you need to cherry pick and exaggerate wildly it's not a
| very convincing argument IMO.
| handoflixue wrote:
| The US has worker protections and social mobility, so
| you're flat-out wrong on two of your points. And actually
| the US has free access to health care via a variety of
| programs, it's just not universal, but I'll concede
| that's being pedantic.
|
| Every country is going to have inequality, corruption,
| antiquated infrastructure, and persecution of
| journalists, so those are meaningless unless you provide
| some sort of comparison point.
|
| "High" incarceration is at least attempting to articulate
| a comparison but only because I actually know the numbers
| there.
| amilios wrote:
| Comparing all of these points against Western Europe, the
| US is objectively behind. There's your point of
| comparison. Western Europe has far more expansive worker
| protections (just look at "right-to-work" states, you can
| get fired for any reason whatsoever), far more
| encompassing free healthcare (not just for the poor and
| older individuals, Medicare and Medicaid is what you're
| referring to I presume right? There are no other programs
| for free healthcare in the US), far freer press
| (according to the World Press Freedom Index, the US is
| 44th, most Western European states are higher),
| infrastructure is not crumbling in Western Europe in the
| same way it is in the US, far lower inequality (this is
| obvious, check any inequality index), less corruption, on
| what point exactly of these is the US better than Western
| Europe?
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Being behind first world countries in a few cherry picked
| regards doesn't make one a third world country.
| jollybean wrote:
| Developing countries are ahead of Europe and even the US in
| some very, very narrow things. In some places mobile and online
| banking penetration.
|
| But to lift up the nation, you need regulations, competence at
| all levels.
|
| 'Google' is a tiny project relative to America. Most countries
| are 99% about the basic things: roads, bridges, hospitals,
| carpenters, governance, food etc..
|
| There are enough groups of ambitious people to form networks of
| that. In Paris and London people move, it's the same in most
| countries.
| [deleted]
| jiofih wrote:
| You just broadly painted all of Europe as lazy. Maybe you
| should reconsider your attitude?
|
| > Corporations and regulations will just drive your small
| company out of the market no matter what
|
| Has this happened to you?
|
| Plenty of small business where I stand, and this lifestyle fits
| them perfectly, there is no desperation to survive. Not every
| business has to be about growth.
|
| I think what you're seeing is the result of policies that
| increase quality of life. So Germany has to import someone like
| you, from a third world country, that will accept the pay and
| have "ambition". It goes both ways.
| opportune wrote:
| I have met many ambitious European people in the US. Europe has
| ambitious people, they just don't make it easy for them to do
| their thing; it's better for ambitious people to just go to the
| US than to take on the monumental task of changing the culture
| in Europe or to swim upstream and try to start a business
| anyway.
| odiroot wrote:
| > It is quite rare to find a [G]erman software developer on
| Startups.
|
| Because they probably already left for Switzerland or North
| American, where they can get paid much better salaries.
| kelvin0 wrote:
| I spoke with many French who moved to Canada (there are many in
| the last decade or so). And 99% mention that North American
| culture is much less rigid than French culture and there are
| much more opportunities over here.
|
| They mention it's very hard to change careers in their country
| with a more 'hierarchical' and rigid culture and mobility is
| limited.
|
| Totally different when they move and appreciate the mobility,
| freedom and opportunities.
| jiofih wrote:
| In addition, people now tend to equal consumer services in tech
| to "innovation", but if you look closely a disproportionate
| amount of the real innovation in energy, industry, food
| production, finance and "real word tech" happens in Europe -
| _because_ a lot of people have the freedom to do things that
| matter with their lives and not spend their time being a growth
| hacker.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I assumed that it was the other way around. Can you point me
| to further reading?
| pfortuny wrote:
| Philips, siemens, bosch, just three.
| kazen44 wrote:
| also, many small companies which are world market leader
| in a very tiny and specific thing.
|
| For instance, there is a company in germany which is able
| to produce very high quality lead sheeting to a unusual
| size, which allowed mythbusters to create a lead balloon.
|
| No company in the US was able to achieve this
| thickness.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h70kbIzPgig
| Zababa wrote:
| > At least for the strong countries in west EU, lifestyle is
| very relaxed and any ambitious is frowned upon, it is extremely
| demotivating, not to mention bureaucracy. Corporations and
| regulations will just drive your small company out of the
| market no matter what.
|
| My brother works long hours for a company that recently raised
| 20 millions, all of that in France. Europe is composed of many
| people, and many of them have a big growth mindset and
| ambitions. Ambition is not frowned upon, at least not in my
| circles. Bureaucracy is surprisingly easy to deal with.
|
| The other thing is that people from Europe already know that if
| they want to work hard and earn lots of money, they can just go
| to the USA. But things are changing and now people build things
| in Europe. I think you have a very reductive vision of European
| people. I'll also add that "Europe" doesn't have a culture as a
| whole. I'm French, I'm surprised by how Italians do things,
| same with Germans. We are composed of different countries with
| rich histories and culture. Grouping everything as "European"
| is the same as saying "African", it hides most of the reality
| and complexity of the world.
| [deleted]
| wreath wrote:
| I have a similar perspective mostly (we live in the same city
| and both are foreigners so we are seeing from a similar
| lense,fwiw). What i disagree with is that people here are not
| ambitious. I think its more like the regulation and laws and
| red tape in general that makes starting a business a non
| attractive endeavor compared to being an employee considering
| all the benefits employees get in most of EU. In the US, i
| would imagine the difference in terms of risk of quitting your
| job to start a business is not as wide as in EU.
| mmarq wrote:
| Software development and other tech jobs were low-status
| professions in Europe (the UK being a partial exception) up
| until a few years ago. Once a friend told me some thing like
| "it is not fair that you make more money than I do, I have a
| degree in literature and, with all due respect, you are just a
| guy that works with computers". This was not an absurd
| conversation to hear anywhere in continental Europe in the
| early 2000s.
|
| For a brilliant 20 year old German in 2005 becoming a primary
| school teacher or a pencil pusher in a random government office
| would have been a better option than working in tech. With
| "better option" I mean double salary, double pension, better
| healthcare, more holidays. So it shouldn't surprise anybody if
| foreigners are overrepresented in tech jobs in Germany, and it
| has nothing to do with European lazyness (had you said risk-
| aversion I could have agreed).
| [deleted]
| opportune wrote:
| This is something I've noticed working with European people
| and also traveling.
|
| I think there is a cycle here where because working with
| software is considered low status, many good software people
| leave, and lots of smart people probably do not go into the
| field at all unless they truly love software. This would tend
| to drive the talent pool down, IMO, which keeps away good
| software jobs, keeping it low status.
|
| In the US for example writing software is usually considered
| wholly different from "IT" whereas in Europe IT encompasses
| both. That's probably another thing bringing its status down.
| You are grouping software engineers with people plugging in
| printers and solving Karen's support ticket (no offense IT
| people).
| kazen44 wrote:
| > In the US for example writing software is usually
| considered wholly different from "IT" whereas in Europe IT
| encompasses both. That's probably another thing bringing
| its status down. You are grouping software engineers with
| people plugging in printers and solving Karen's support
| ticket (no offense IT people).
|
| oh boy, if you think IT is just pluggin in printers and
| fixing easy support tickets you are easily mistaken.
|
| What about network and system engineers? Those who keep the
| cloud and global internet running? Those are considered IT
| (atleast in europe) and are definitely not low quality,
| easy to learn jobs.
| ElViajero wrote:
| >In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible
| working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing
| lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
|
| False. Sweden is in the top 10 competitive nations in the
| world. And it is because it has a relaxing lifestyle, support
| for children and parents, etc.
|
| If desperate people was more innovative or productive, the list
| of successful USA entrepreneurs would not be filled with upper-
| class or rich businessman.
|
| Easy of mind, education and time creates opportunity.
| Desperation only leads to bad decisions.
|
| Late years Sweden in going down because it is moving towards
| more neo-liberal policies, thou.
| mediascreen wrote:
| I think it is very hard to say if it is because if or in
| spite of its policies that Sweden has been somewhat
| successful.
|
| And I would say that going from the world's highest tax rates
| (% of GDP) to the world's fourth highest rate does not make
| Sweden neo-liberal. We have also had a Social Democrat prime
| minister since 2014 and a government that relies on support
| from the former Communist party, so we are not quite a neo-
| liberal utopia yet.
| wdb wrote:
| Could be that their scarcity of software developers in Germany
| that requires foreign work or alternatively foreigners ask a
| lower salary
| csunbird wrote:
| The question needs to be asked here is: Why there is a
| shortage of developers in Germany, while people having access
| to free education?
|
| One reason is that I can be paid three times more in the US,
| and with the extra disposable income, I can live a better
| life, even without the legal protections.
|
| Second reason is that, why should the kids even bother
| studying computer science for 4-6 years to earn 3k per month?
| A plumber here can charge 100 per hour and does not require
| any formal educational training.
| hef19898 wrote:
| A plumber needs formal education, at least in Germany.
| Three years of it, to be exact. And then some more to run
| his own shop.
|
| Also, 100 an hour sounds great. That is without taken
| taxes, social security, operational costs, fix costs an so
| into account. Those plumbers getting wealthy are running
| their own shops, small legit enterprises.
|
| Final note: Any decent developer job I know of pays at
| least 3k, net, after taxes, social and medical
| insurance,... Enough to live a comfortable live. One
| without student debt, I might add.
| mnouquet wrote:
| > A plumber needs formal education, at least in Germany.
| Three years of it, to be exact. And then some more to run
| his own shop.
|
| Here's Europe's problem.
|
| The same way you don't need 5+ years university education
| to put together whatever piece of hardware / software
| together, the same way I don't need studying hydraulic to
| put together hydraulic implements.
| kazen44 wrote:
| mind you the german education system is very different
| from the US/English one.
|
| Germany (and many other european countries) has the idea
| of a trade school, in which one learns a trade. Usually
| these are combined with working experience in the form of
| apprenticeships. In my experience, continental europe has
| far more emphasis on early work experience compared to
| ango-saxon countries. An internship usually lasts a
| couple of years, people get payed a wage for the work
| they do and it is combined with schooling.
|
| A plumber would be a prime example of the vocation which
| is using this kind of system.
|
| people finish secondary education at an earlier age then
| in the US (16 or even 15 in some cases), then they
| transfer into tertiary education in a fachschule.
| odiroot wrote:
| > operational costs, fix costs an so into account.
|
| These are tax deductible.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| 3K net is not _that_ much. The whole point of working in
| IT in the US is that you shoot into the upper middle
| class levels of compensation. You are no longer a peer of
| a shopkeeper or a public official, you are now next to
| doctors and lawyers. You no longer have to balance your
| monthly budget, you manage your savings.
| xputer wrote:
| Why did I have to scroll so far to find this? Tech jobs pay
| almost an order of magnitude more in the US. Cost of living
| is of course higher and you likely still won't be able to
| but a house any time soon, but still the difference is
| stark. Europe severely underpays its tech workers, so the
| US is able to attract all the smartest people.
| tester756 wrote:
| you know what makes people work hard harder than ""culture""?
|
| poverty
|
| >a less relaxing lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
|
| all I see is `""hackers"" sitting 10h a day working while
| believing they're saving world`
| Jiejeing wrote:
| > In order to be innovative and compete, we need very flexible
| working laws, people with a big growth mindset, a less relaxing
| lifestyle and AMBITIOUS people.
|
| There needs to be a source for this.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Necessity is the mother of invention. But that doesn't need
| that the must humane way up induce invention is to
| purposefully create the necessity in the first place.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I'm a European, living in Europe, developing software. Lack of
| imagination is not our problem. It's so good that we supply our
| best talent to the US where it does extremely well
| revolutionizing AI, designing hardware for Apple, developing
| games, stream online music, etc. E.g. Amazon's CTO is Dutch.
| Basically the person that has been running AWS. The people and
| the education system are fine.
|
| Europe does have a few issues that make it unnecessarily hard to
| build successful startups here. People do start companies here
| but more often than not success is followed by US investment and
| before you know it the company is headquartered in the US. There
| are many reasons for that but a big one has to be that raising
| similar amounts of money in Europe is super hard. Investors drag
| their heels, founders have to take on more risk, etc.
|
| A second reason is simply that the US as a big homogeneous market
| is a nice one to tackle for European companies as well. And often
| that means having a (big) presence in the US. The EU is basically
| many markets unified by really complex rules, bureaucracy, etc.
| There is free traffic of people but companies have a harder time
| dealing with local variations in legislation, hurdles for billing
| and taxation (e.g. VAT), banking, bureaucracy, etc.
|
| That's much less of a thing in the US (though it is a bit of a
| thing there too between states). And that's before you consider
| language and cultural differences. Simply put, the same company
| in the EU will have a very hard time growing compared to doing
| that in the US. Being successful in the US market, means having
| the deep pockets to go international. Doing the same from a small
| country means you barely have enough to expand to another small
| country. Going international is hard work. Not something you do
| with your MVP. It's not very scalable either: you need to worry
| about cultural differences, bureaucracy, localization,
| understanding the local market, ramping up sales, marketing, etc.
| Especially with SAAS companies this is super expensive.
| ik22kkKK3i wrote:
| European bureaucracy is deadlier for businesses than cobra's
| venom.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My favorite European tech company is Atmel (Norway), which
| developed the AVR-8 microcontroller which is in the original
| Arduino (Italian).
|
| Particularly, Atmel made the last 8-bit microprocessor which
| was just a bit more carefully thought out than everything else
| on the market and carefully positioned to give a lot of bang
| per buck.
|
| Atmel got bought by Microchip (San Jose, USA)
|
| Today when I think of Europe I think of those annoying popups
| which (I think) were a "normalization of deviance" for annoying
| and harassing UI elements on web sites... I mean, this one is
| required, virtuous, etc. so it is OK to nag people to get their
| email address, open a new window every time you click on a
| search result (Bing) so you'll accidentally click on an ad when
| handling way too many tabs
|
| There was something anti-user about the GDPR popup that "broke
| the dam" for other bad practices, as well meaning as it is. It
| might pour sand into the wheels of the data economy, but it
| made it impossible to be an advocate of the user in most
| organizations. (e.g. if you can't reject that one, what can you
| reject?)
| pkaye wrote:
| Unless I'm mistaken Amtel was founded in the US. However the
| AVR was developed in Norway.
| lioeters wrote:
| > Atmel Corporation was founded in 1984 by George Perlegos,
| a Greek-American computer scientist. Atmel was an acronym
| for "advanced technology for memory and logic".
|
| > In 1996, Atmel formed a design team in Trondheim, Norway
| to develop the Atmel AVR line of RISC microcontrollers.
| This team combined technology of former students at the
| Norwegian University of Science and Technology with Atmel's
| expertise in flash memory. ..The AVR chip is the basis of
| most Arduino open-source development boards.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmel
| dmitriid wrote:
| The absolute vast majority of "GDPR popups" are actually
| illegal under GDPR.
|
| Unfortunately, law enforcement has been asleep at the wheel.
| nickpp wrote:
| Unfortunately the law was so bad even its creators can't
| implement/understand/respect it.
| franciscop wrote:
| I believe the article means "lack of imagination from
| business", for which I'll strongly agree as a European who
| migrated a while ago. In my personal experience you have either
| wannapreneurs trying to break through with minimal budgets, or
| large investments in established companies. They don't seem to
| mix though, business people go for safer things than trying to
| build the next Google. Raising money for a prototype, even if
| it's making some money, is almost impossible or at the very
| best will land you with very bad terms.
| b20000 wrote:
| I moved roughly 10 years ago to the US from europe. In my
| experience, raising small amounts of money is possible in
| Europe and not too hard. Once you need more money, it becomes
| extremely difficult or nearly impossible, unless you can spend
| all your time networking, which is not going to happen if you
| are busy building a product.
|
| I would say that banking in Europe is much better developed
| than in the US. In the US, we still have checks and you need to
| pay for wire transfers (what???). Doing taxes in the US is 10
| times more complicated than it is in Europe, and CPAs are only
| interested to doing them for you if you are a cookie cutter
| case and easy to make money off. Otherwise, good luck getting a
| call back. That doesn't happen in Europe. You hire an
| accountant, he does his job.
|
| Entrepreneurship in the US is not easier than it is in Europe,
| IMHO. Raising money or scaling might be easier.
|
| In my experience, I've been dealing with constant
| discrimination in the US. It is claimed that where are from or
| what your social status is, doesn't matter, in silicon valley
| (or California in general). People are nice, they smile, but
| it's mostly fake. You remain a foreigner, who should still work
| for less pay than those who grew up locally and went to an ivy
| league school, even though you have the same credentials and
| graduated at a top school in Europe (in my case, I have an ivy
| league degree on top of that).
|
| All this sounds brutal, and maybe hard to take, but I just say
| it like it is, and I prefer to be honest and straightforward
| and share my first hand experience.
| misterbwong wrote:
| A second reason is simply that the US as a big homogeneous
| market is a nice one to tackle for European companies as well.
| And often that means having a (big) presence in the US. The EU
| is basically many markets unified by really complex rules,
| bureaucracy, etc. There is free traffic of people but companies
| have a harder time dealing with local variations in
| legislation, hurdles for billing and taxation (e.g. VAT),
| banking, bureaucracy, etc.
|
| Seems like this would be a really cool idea for a startup (that
| might already exist?). Stripe stripe/shopify for EU?
| dgaaaaaaaaaa wrote:
| True. But I think the problems are more nuanced. It is just
| harder to scale across EU than US. You'll need localization,
| marketing, customer support separately set up for different
| languages/countries.
| zerkten wrote:
| As a data point, per user support costs (financial and
| other) are often much larger for European customers
| compared to the US or Asia. In my experience, it tends to
| be lower bump for consumer. Once you get into B2B or
| enterprise, European customers are significantly costlier
| to support than US equivalent.
|
| It's a combination of requirements specific to markets (EU
| mandates like GDPR are easier train a support team on and
| build an escalation process), cultural expectations around
| handholding, not wanting to hear no for an answer unless it
| is delivered by an exec (and EU support teams
| inconsistently delivering the same message that a US would
| because they fear the response), and general language
| barriers.
|
| In some ways, it is better to deliver arguably lower-
| quality support via the US with special treatment for a few
| key customers just to avoid having to setup support in
| Europe. Once you invest, you have to go all-in.
| kazen44 wrote:
| as a european, this has not been my experience at all.
|
| > It's a combination of requirements specific to markets
| (EU mandates like GDPR are easier train a support team on
| and build an escalation process), cultural expectations
| around handholding, not wanting to hear no for an answer
| unless it is delivered by an exec.
|
| in my opinion, very little european teams (mostly
| italian, czech and german teams) care about hearing the
| answer from an executive. Also, what do you mean about
| handholding?
| fvdessen wrote:
| It goes far beyond that. If you are in Italy and want to
| expand to Germany you need to hire german speaking people and
| that means opening a Sales Office in Germany, and dealing
| with different labour regulations etc.
| unknownOrigin wrote:
| And just to add to this, from a certain level (revenue)
| that's not that high (and depends on idividual states) you
| need a presence (VAT registration) and a business bank
| account in the country you're selling your services/goods
| in, even if you're not actually located there. E.g. a
| medium sized online shop based in the Czech Republic that
| is shipping to Hungary. Now imagine this if you're shipping
| to many EU states... not great.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I don't believe that's the case.
| emj wrote:
| Might have been true at some point, but nowdays even
| smaller payments are easy to send between EU banks. VAT
| payment is done in your home country, and you can deduct
| the VAT. The social aspect is harder; the amount of work
| to get a consistent revenue stream from another EU
| country can be enormous compared to doing buisness in
| another city in your own country.
|
| There are people who specialize in sales between EU
| states, but for a small team without capital it was hard.
| That said most of the 100+ tech companies I know of have
| offices around EU to get talent from other countries.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Plain incorrect for consumer VAT. You have to charge VAT
| based on the origin of your customer. Different
| percentages, different ways to figure out the origin of
| your customer. For businesses you can do reverse VAT, and
| you'll have to ask and check that.
|
| Bank payments are easy yes, but credit cards are not
| ubiquitous, online payments are different in all
| countries, direct debit is not always supported across
| countries.
| boruto wrote:
| Can attest to this. We maintain different sales channels
| for all EU countries.
| pyb wrote:
| This is inaccurate for VAT.
| stefanfisk wrote:
| none of this is true.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > you need to hire german speaking people and that means
| opening a Sales Office in Germany
|
| No you don't need that. You can have your German speaking
| people move to Italy and work from there. That's the whole
| point of the EU.
|
| The same for VAT, you can register in one country and have
| that sent to multiple countries according to your sales. No
| presence needed
| lesto wrote:
| As EUropean living in a different country for work, is
| not that easy at all. Try to do your taxes in Swedish or
| German or French.. Or try to have a social life with
| people that while could speak English will probably
| switch to their own language when in more than 2-3
| person. Yes of course you can learn the language, but
| dont think you can be proficient in a couple of year,
| especially if working 40h/week, and still you will be
| proficient in a country at max
| varispeed wrote:
| > will probably switch to their own language when in more
| than 2-3 person.
|
| That's just rude and why would you want to socialise with
| such people. I had some great experiences and even when I
| was the only person not speaking the local language,
| everyone spoke English in my presence. There is plenty of
| people that have standards and if you cannot find them at
| a given time, just focus on something else.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| That's certainly an option, but moving to a different
| nation is a lot to ask for an employee. Despite both
| countries being in the EU it's still a massive change on
| an individual level.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Yeah, Just imagine sending kids to a school in a totally
| different language.
| rapsey wrote:
| While all this is true, a huge reason is also the lack of
| available funding. This is the worst problem imo.
| usaar333 wrote:
| Given the small country issue, a better comparison would be
| Israel. It has a thriving startup scene while only having 10
| million people.
| fvdessen wrote:
| I'm working for a thriving startup in a European country of
| 11 million people. We had 100% growth per year until we had
| basically everybody in our own country and then it got
| massively harder. If we had started in the USA, we would have
| reached that point being 30x bigger, making billions of
| dollars, and much better prepared to conquer foreign markets.
|
| So maybe Israel is doing quite well, but I know from
| experience that it would also do massively better if it had
| the size of the USA.
| hardolaf wrote:
| Most of the super successful companies in Israel are either
| doing things for the state or working for American
| corporations (or the American government).
| mikevm wrote:
| Most Israeli startups target the US anyway. The R&D center is
| in Israel while sales/marketing are in the US HQ.
| WYepQ4dNnG wrote:
| > raising similar amounts of money in Europe is super hard
|
| This.
|
| I am European but live and work in US. Simply put, US wins
| hands down because they:
|
| - have resources, read $$$$
|
| - take risk
|
| - have the right entrepreneurial mindset
|
| Europe? let's just say they are not even close.
| mnouquet wrote:
| In Europe, everybody wants to be a manager because mere
| developers is not high enough status. In the US, a 45yo DB
| engineer is akin to highly skilled wizard.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Yep.. you get paid shit as a dev here unless you run your
| own business.. has always been like that, will always be
| like that. Europe will never be big in software. We have
| nice livable cities, and we have old cultures, that's about
| all what's good here
| varispeed wrote:
| Developers are the modern bricklayers that just sit by the
| computer and find what to copy and paste from
| stackoverflow.
| tored wrote:
| What country is that? Germany? France?
|
| In Sweden it is the opposite because 1)
| more responsibilities 2) salary increase too small
| (and taxes too high, you can end up in the wrong bracket)
| 3) flat hierarchy (Du reform)
| jfax wrote:
| As much as I partly agree with this article, I find it painful to
| read because it shoddily reengineers bits of Free (as in freedom)
| software discourse. Specifically that proprietary software
| subjugates users with malicious features to make money - the US
| is more creative at doing this than European ones. But yes I
| agree, the US is better at it, for better or for worse.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| Although the EU is a marketplace of 27 countries, it is not a
| digitally homogeneous marketplace. Adoption and acceptance of
| digital tools varies by country. Language is also important - the
| tech giants localise their apps and tools. But many software
| companies in larger European countries (France, Germany, Italy,
| Spain etc) concentrate on their home country first before they
| focus on international reach. That makes sense. In smaller
| countries, where the software market is also smaller, software
| companies have a more international outlook.
|
| I am struggling to think of European success stories in the
| traditional desktop app space - apps that have _international
| reach and name recognition_. I can only think of a handful
| desktop apps:
|
| - _Sketch_ (Netherlands)
|
| - _Affinity Photo /Designer/Publisher_ (UK)
|
| - _Cinema4D_ (Germany)
|
| Who else enjoys international success for their desktop apps?
| What about SaaS?
|
| The apps above specialise in a particluar field (design and 3D
| animation), but missing are any apps in the "office productivity"
| category which seem completely dominated by tech giants like
| Microsoft and Google.
|
| Note: I purposely did not mention SAP because no-one looks to SAP
| as a source of inspiration. Their enterprise apps are expensive
| and clunky.
| notanormalnerd wrote:
| I want to highlight this.
|
| There is always talk about a european market, but it is more
| like 27 markets with one access ticket.
|
| You have 27 languages, 27 cultures, 27 political systems, 27
| markets, 27 levels of development and infrastructure. Although
| you have a market of 300 million consumers, they all have
| different spending habits, different spending power, different
| needs...
|
| America is one market of 300 million people, with roughly the
| same culture, the same language, the same laws and political
| system and has been exporting it's language and power through
| out the last 100 years, so your market is probably double the
| size of your population.
|
| There is also success stories of european players: Zalando,
| Delivery Hero. Sap has some very innovative departments, but
| their Reputation all in all is shite, yes.
|
| Also most of souther europe doesn't have the get rich quick
| mentality. They live by "dolce vita" - the good life. Nobody is
| gonna be bending over backwards here to become a millionaire
| anytime soon. They happily live with 20kEUR a year and their
| families and Relationships.
|
| I still hate the shitty software we make here in europe/germany
| but we are working hard here to improve that. And if a european
| company tells you they offer a API or Service, they probably
| wont shut it down because it went out of falvour this month.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >You have 27 languages, 27 cultures, 27 political systems, 27
| markets, 27 levels of development and infrastructure.
|
| If I look at most of my European sales they are in Germany,
| The Netherlands and Scandinavia. The UK was in that list
| until Brexit.
|
| I don't think you need to target all 27, at least not until
| you are well established.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| And suddenly your 300m market is only 100m people
| mmarq wrote:
| > Also most of souther europe doesn't have the get rich quick
| mentality. They live by "dolce vita" - the good life. Nobody
| is gonna be bending over backwards here to become a
| millionaire anytime soon. They happily live with 20kEUR a
| year and their families and Relationships.
|
| Sometimes it seems that Northern Europeans think that the
| southern European is the noble savage of the developed world.
|
| I'll speak for Italy, not having direct experience of other
| southern European countries. Taxes are very high, bureaucracy
| is omnipresent and openly hostile. A friend of mine once won
| a price for an invention, ~5K euros. The money was barely
| enough to register the company (not to pay for an office,
| just to register a company, a procedure that in the UK would
| cost 20PS). The process took months. Salaries are much lower
| than in other European countries and people work longer
| hours, people of my age have been employed at-will for almost
| their whole careers. Unpaid overtime is the norm. Companies
| are small, do not provide chances to grow professionally and
| do not invest, productivity is low and unpaid overtime is
| often a means to compensate. At least once in everybody's
| life, your boss would come to you saying that there isn't
| enough money to pay your salary this month. Working hard
| simply doesn't matter, many software developers and
| translators and designers and whatnot earn as much as
| janitors. I don't come from southern Italy, where I suspect
| the situation is even worse.
|
| In this context, you don't "happily" live with 20K euros per
| annum, you just have to accept that. And you have to live
| with your family because you can't afford otherwise. If you
| are lucky enough to get a government job or to retire early
| (which since the 70s have been the government's favourite
| ways of tackling unemployment), you may get a chance of
| enjoying this "dolce vita" of yours.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >You have 27 languages, 27 cultures, 27 political systems, 27
| markets, 27 levels of development and infrastructure.
| Although you have a market of 300 million consumers, they all
| have different spending habits, different spending power,
| different needs...
|
| i was thinking about that.
|
| that's 27 smaller markets compare to one US or China market.
| you have to deal with 27 regulations and cultures. is that
| even worth the time and efforts?
| dharmaturtle wrote:
| PG has a related essay: Why Startups Condense in America
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html
|
| He actually has several essays on how to try to create a Silicon
| Valley in other geographic areas, but this seemed the most
| relevant.
|
| tldr:
|
| 1. The US Allows Immigration.
|
| 2. The US Is a Rich Country.
|
| 3. The US Is Not (Yet) a Police State.
|
| 4. American Universities Are Better.
|
| 5. You Can Fire People in America.
|
| 6. In America Work Is Less Identified with Employment.
|
| 7. America Is Not Too Fussy. (If there are any laws regulating
| businesses, you can assume larval startups will break most of
| them, because they don't know what the laws are and don't have
| time to find out.)
|
| 8. America Has a Large Domestic Market.
|
| 9. America Has Venture Funding.
|
| 10. America Has Dynamic Typing for Careers. (Compared to other
| industrialized countries the US is disorganized about routing
| people into careers. For example, in America people often don't
| decide to go to medical school till they've finished college. In
| Europe they generally decide in high school.)
|
| 11. Attitude (There's one item conspicuously missing from this
| list: American attitudes. Americans are said to be more
| entrepreneurial, and less afraid of risk. But America has no
| monopoly on this. Indians and Chinese seem plenty
| entrepreneurial, perhaps more than Americans. Some say Europeans
| are less energetic, but I don't believe it. I think the problem
| with Europe is not that they lack balls, but that they lack
| examples.)
| imNotTheProb wrote:
| I think the point about the workforce being flexible is
| tremendous.
|
| I had an engineer tell me- in America people don't care about
| your title, they care about how much money you have. In Europe
| it's all about titles. In Japan it's about seniority.
|
| I've had no problem picking the job that pays the highest and
| it changed me from chem engineer to programmer.
|
| My peers that are obsessed with a title have fallen behind,
| making 80k a year as a 30 year old. I think these people have a
| significantly harder time finding a new job, where as being a
| programmer and engineer, I'm able to work in any industry.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| The first point didn't age so well. _All_ developed countries
| have an easier immigration path for skilled workers than the
| US. Yes, even Japan.
| Nursie wrote:
| > Americans are said to be more entrepreneurial
|
| There seems, from my experience mostly in the UK but also
| talking to people from round Europe, to be a big regulatory and
| mental impediment in most places to setting up your own
| business. Being an employee is safe, you get a lot of rights,
| your paycheck arrives the same day every month and it's
| actually really hard to lose that, if you are going to lose it
| that's a huge tragedy, and you've probably had several months
| notice anyway.
|
| A lot of the middle classes in the UK would never consider
| trying to start a business, even though the social safety net
| would catch them to some extent on failure, in reality it may
| save you from the street but it's not likely to be much better
| than that. Best stick to that safe PS50k a year. Which,
| incidentally, is considered pretty decent pay but won't leave
| you much to put aside to actually kick off that business idea
| later. Starting a business is for high flyers, finance types,
| other people.
|
| You might be right about it not being lack of energy, but I
| think the entrepreneurial spirit in the UK is pretty
| suppressed. And in the EU from what I can tell it's similar,
| with an added side of "and the state is going to make this very
| difficult too".
| tzs wrote:
| I remember reading a similar article a very long time ago, back
| when "reading an article" usually meant reading it on paper so
| have no recollection of where or how to cite it, and it had a
| similar list.
|
| One that stood out was that in Silicon Valley having your
| company go under was not really much of a setback, if at all.
|
| In many other places in the US that looked like they had the
| ingredients to be a Silicon Valley if you led your company to
| bankruptcy, that was what did them in. The money folks would
| not be interested in financing you again, and you'd stop
| getting invited to the social and business events that the
| successful people get invited to so your ability to network
| would take a huge hit.
|
| Startups in those places tended to be focused on safe things
| like trying to do something slightly better in an already well
| established area.
| gspr wrote:
| As a European, I do think he hits several marks correctly. But
| I don't at all understand point 10. If anything, it's been my
| experience that the US is _more_ focused on people having "the
| right" education for the job. Could anyone elaborate on what he
| might possibly mean?
|
| (Also, I think point 4 is very field-specific. While the US may
| have a few institutions that are universally recognized as
| excellent, there are also many European ones that are
| phenomenal within a given field. Having a truly exceptional
| group within field X does not give your a university the name
| recognition of Stanford, but it serves the same purpose when it
| comes to training people in field X.)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > If anything, it's been my experience that the US is more
| focused on people having "the right" education for the job.
|
| What are you thinking of here? Big US companies like Google
| will let you get a high-level job with no college education
| whatsoever. Most traditional European companies would not
| consider doing that.
|
| > While the US may have a few institutions that are
| universally recognized as excellent
|
| "a few institutions"? The US absolutely dominates the top
| universities. You have to go down to the 40s to find your
| first EU institution.
| gspr wrote:
| > What are you thinking of here? Big US companies like
| Google will let you get a high-level job with no college
| education whatsoever. Most traditional European companies
| would not consider doing that.
|
| But Google isn't a "traditional US company" either. So I
| don't think that comparison holds.
|
| > "a few institutions"? The US absolutely dominates the top
| universities. You have to go down to the 40s to find your
| first EU institution.
|
| Good point. Is should not have used the word "few". But my
| point still holds: the overall excellence of the university
| (which is admittedly stellar in the US) doesn't matter much
| if the university happens to be magnificent and world-
| leading in exactly your field. This is part of the reason
| why such university rankings are a bit silly. If I'm in
| (making stuff up here) biochemistry and my European
| university has a world-leading lab for that, what do I care
| whether an equivalent US university can boast a magnificent
| English and aerospace engineering department?
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I don't think any of those matter. America has distribution and
| is unapologetica about marketing and people heavily hustling
| and pushing their product. EU countries have so far tended to
| place obstacles instead because of mentality.
| ramboldio wrote:
| The EU should just pay anybody who makes Open Source
| contributions.
|
| Problem solved.
|
| Europeans get their own tech stack. Can compete again with US
| companies, as the all the cost for building infrastructure is
| externalized.
| golergka wrote:
| I understand the intention behind such a proposal, history of
| unintended consequences of government intensives should stop
| any sensible person from implementing anything remotely like
| that.
|
| Do you remember how one company promised people a free shirt
| for open source contributions, and how it resulted in an epic
| shitstorm of garbage patches? Just a few months ago. Now,
| imagine this, but with actual money instead of T-shirts.
| erwald wrote:
| it could take other forms though, for instance you could
| identify people who are already maintaining or creating
| significant foss projects and pay them while they keep
| working on them. probably it makes sense to limit this to the
| most productive/driven few. it should be really
| straightforward (though time-consuming) to see if someone is
| cheating, because all the work is there in public view in the
| form of git commits.
| ramboldio wrote:
| This is for public policy people to figure out. They do stuff
| like that all the time.
|
| Of course it's not easy. But if it works, can be tremendously
| effective.
|
| Maybe a starter would be to give some maintainers of already
| successful projects a salary, if they want. Impossible to
| game.
| arp242 wrote:
| Actually you can receive (modest) grants for this, for
| example from NLnet. I've been writing open source software
| full-time for the last two years funded partly by this.
|
| There are also other grants I believe, but I'm not really
| an expert on this. I just know there are actually
| possibilities.
| ramboldio wrote:
| In fact, it is way easier to spot fraud in Open Source
| projects than in government subsidies literally in any
| other sector.
| goodpoint wrote:
| EU is already the biggest contributor to Open Source.
|
| And I fully agree that FOSS should be paid collectively like
| civil infrastructure.
|
| But we need to be careful with the freeloaders. Big companies
| coopted FOSS into unpaid labor: anything released with
| permissive licenses can be proprietarized by SaaS/Cloud
| companies. Almost always US based.
|
| This would turn European financial contributions to FOSS into a
| gift for FAANGs.
|
| This is why the European Union Public Licence is copyleft and
| compatible with GPL. But it's not enough.
| cryptica wrote:
| That would be a great strategy and probably wouldn't cost much.
| Pay open source project authors to maintain popular projects.
| Right now, technologists in Europe are starved of capital. We
| have 0 surplus capital to take any risks or to innovate; we're
| too busy chasing the next paycheck to think about building
| infrastructure.
|
| Even when we do build infrastructure, there is 0 government
| support; governments or tech companies don't make any effort to
| bring any attention to EU open source projects.
|
| All other countries have protectionist structures but EU
| imports all its tech, even though there is more than enough in-
| house talent to build it - They'd rather give out contracts to
| US and Chinese companies and have their EU citizens working for
| these companies as employees instead of giving their citizens a
| chance to actually run the companies.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| Right. Last I read, Hacktoberfest created a huge amount of spam
| for Open Source contributions, and all that was on the line
| there was a t-shirt. You seem to be suggesting that real money
| should be involved - do you think the outcome will be different
| than Hacktoberfest?
| kaba0 wrote:
| Yes? Like donating money to a well-established project is
| very different than sending a t-shirt to whoever creates a
| repo with 2 commits or what..
| benlivengood wrote:
| If the goal is trustworthy software then just write and host
| trustworthy software.
|
| If the goal is to have a thriving economy based on writing and
| hosting trustworthy software then it's going to need subsidies;
| it costs more to pay for high quality software written by
| engineers protected by strong labor laws than it does to pay
| Silicon Valley rates with RSUs complicit in large-scale data
| gathering and exploitation.
|
| Ironically in economic terms Europe (the EU and Ireland
| specifically) already hosts a huge fraction of FAANG profits and
| IP ownership/licensing due to double-Irish arrangements. They
| just offshore the development to the U.S. So mission accomplished
| I guess?
| elric wrote:
| At least in Belgium, a very large fraction (perhaps even the
| majority) of software developers works for the government or for
| banks. It goes without saying that neither governments nor banks
| are exactly known for developing great software, or for marketing
| it ...
| oytis wrote:
| > The remaining non-trivial challenge is how to turn such EU
| funding into quality software
|
| This is not a trivial challenge though. It's basically about
| creating a business climate that would allow startups grow fast
| and capture dominating positions on both European and worldwide
| markets.
|
| Funding, with all its importance (look at what DARPA funding has
| enabled) can only give a first impulse, help a team create a
| prototype of something innovative. The rest is on legislation,
| investing culture, taxation etc.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Tech innovation, once it has resulted in sufficient financial
| advantage becomes a 'winner takes all' game, where the people
| that won the previous round have a better than average chance of
| winning all subsequent rounds as well until there is some outside
| imposed limit. They are either able to throw more resources at
| the same problem or they can afford to buy out the successes
| elsewhere and claim them as their own.
|
| The same argument could be made about the European film scene
| (check out how many Hollywood blockbusters are remakes of great
| European movies), the European music scene and the European
| literature scene to greater or lesser degree.
|
| But you know what? It's fine. There is plenty of quality software
| in Europe, and as long as those companies don't get bought out by
| the handful of runaway American successes they can grow and do
| just fine. They tend to be better at customer service, they tend
| to be better at addressing multi-lingual markets at an earlier
| stage in their development than their American counterparts and
| they are active in important fields.
|
| The thing that America excels at is advertising and simply making
| money. But there is more than that in this world.
| [deleted]
| MichaelRazum wrote:
| Living in EU. Can only say, the main reason is in my perspective
| regulatory and taxes. Some points
|
| - It is difficult to issue equity and get equity (tax)
|
| - Each EU country has different taxes. You are taxed lower in
| Netherlands than in Germany.
|
| - Each country has different regulation rules. If you do
| something exciting. Wow let's say a social network. You would be
| killed by regulation and data privacy rules. Autonomous driving
| the same. Blockchain forget it.
|
| - Ideology driven investments. Maybe just a feeling. But nearly
| on each event green energy seems to be the hot topic. It is kind
| of political driven. Like everyone should jump on the green
| energy train. It is harder to get funding for more exotic
| topics...
| pvaldes wrote:
| Not to mention the VAT (Value Added Tax) that is a big weapon
| of market selfdestruction.
| jahsis wrote:
| This! Companies from smaller countries even can't grow, just
| because local market is big as it is and if you want to grow,
| you need to sell goods/services in other countries, which means
| you need lawyers to get into all tax and other legal nuances.
| Just by fixing this issues for small companies would boom
| growth of tech and other companies.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| > Autonomous driving the same. Blockchain forget it.
|
| There's plenty of both in the EU. And blockchain is more useful
| as a counter-example of innovation than anything.
| raverbashing wrote:
| There are a couple of self-driving and blockchain companies in
| Europe, but curiously enough they don't find it as difficult as
| some random internet commenter
|
| "killed by regulation and data privacy rules"
|
| Funny to see the same people that bemoan the privacy rules
| being now forced to follow them due to Apple and Google. Seems
| like they'll have to actually sit and think how to do instead
| of complaining.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Czech here. In my opinion, Europe lacks the venture capitalist
| culture that formed the Silicon Valley.
|
| Actually, most of the U.S. lack it as well, but having one
| Silicon Valley is much better than having zero of them.
|
| European startups struggle to raise any money at all. (And I mean
| on the order of 100,000 eur, much less millions.) Our banks are
| extremely risk-averse and if they spend money at all, it is on
| projects that the _political_ sphere supports. These tend to be
| duds.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| Needs a corresponding article called <<the US anti-trust
| problem>>, of course american companies are bigger when they can
| just buy up the competition while continuing to run the actual
| service into the ground (facebook, twitter and youtube/google all
| fits here) since there's no alternative...
|
| Or maybe it should just be called <<the US Social Media
| problem>>...
|
| (There's also the tax issue, but that's mostly on countries like
| Ireland and The Netherlands being tax havens (UK too, but they
| left, kinda...))
| Guid_NewGuid wrote:
| Another "poor Europe, too scared, too insular, too antiquated"
| article. I wish my trends site still worked since this seems to
| be a bit of a theme recently.
|
| Something is out of whack about the priorities here. Yes America
| has FANGS and is at the cutting edge of slinging ads and casino
| style VC culture. But have you seen the state of US banking and
| payments infrastructure? Plaid is pretty much cutting edge for
| god's sake. The US is so far behind in banking and actual useful
| technology it's quite funny.
|
| Things like GDPR and OpenBanking point to an alternative way of
| doing technology, that to my value set is better than the ability
| to inflate ridiculous Uber/WeWork/etc. valuations with no
| correlation to real world value.
| zepto wrote:
| > The US is so far behind in banking and actual useful
| technology it's quite funny.
|
| I see this said, and it was true two decades ago, but I'm not
| aware of any way it's true now. What banking can you do in
| Europe that you can't do in the US?
| Bayart wrote:
| Instant bank transfers over SEPA for one, without third party
| payment processor involved.
| zepto wrote:
| Right, that's the only one I've ever heard, but what does
| 'without third party payment processor involved' bring in
| practice?
|
| I have a European bank account and a US one, and I don't
| experience any meaningful difference, indeed the third
| party processors in the US are generally far more feature
| rich than the bare bones European bank options.
|
| Hardly: "The US is so far behind in banking and actual
| useful technology it's quite funny."
|
| More: An irrelevant implementation detail that doesn't
| impact end users.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Not supported everywhere
|
| Direct debit not supported everywhere. Important for saas
| toomuchredbull wrote:
| Canada has a lot of the same problems, it is finally getting a
| bit better but we still have a long way to go.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| The author's explanation for the lack of european tech companies
| is that almost all software relies on business models other then
| charging money, and for various reasons european companies aren't
| able to use these business models. This doesn't seem sufficient.
| For three of the five big US tech companies - Microsoft, Apple
| and Amazon - the main business model is charging money. If the
| author's explanation is correct, these companies could could just
| as well have been founded in europe, yet no company even
| approaching their power and influence has been.
| thu2111 wrote:
| Microsoft Apple and Amazon date from a time before saturation
| internet access, Amazon being created right at the start. Back
| then internet advertising wasn't a plausible business model.
| Even when Google was new it wasn't taken seriously in America.
| Google tried to sell to Yahoo for $1M and they said no because
| everyone knows you can't monetize web search.
|
| Once it became clear that ads were a bit more profitable than
| that, the success of Google/FB led to a tidal wave of VC
| capital searching for opportunities that looked just like
| those. So suddenly everyone is trying to give their service
| away for free and make it up on {ads, volume}.
|
| I guess I feel very mixed about this, being a European who is
| now starting his own software company (taking a break from
| coding for a few mins at the moment). I remember when I was in
| my early 20s, before YouTube was acquired, my mother pointed at
| it and said, "Why couldn't you have made that?". My response
| was to laugh and say, mum, look, you can't pay for video
| streaming using banner ads. Streaming is expensive and banner
| ads don't earn much money.
|
| Was I right? Wrong? I still am not sure. YouTube may or may not
| be profitable. It was extremely ambiguous to what extent
| Google's businesses outside of web and content ads made money
| when I was working there, although that was years ago, so of
| course it may be very different now. Obviously the YouTube
| founders did very well out of it, but their business model was
| basically "sell the company to someone who can save us, or die
| trying". Whether it's European culture or parental expectations
| I don't know, but deep down I didn't and still don't feel like
| that is a truly honourable way to create and run a business. I
| would feel guilty and bad if I were hiring people to a company
| without having the foggiest idea of how to ever pay their
| salaries, nor would I feel comfortable pitching to investors a
| firm whose business model was clearly unworkable. Yet, this is
| the standard business strategy in the Valley.
|
| Years later I found myself in the offices of a16z. I wasn't
| there to pitch, although the receptionist assumed I was. I'd
| been invited to discuss an app I'd written that had attracted
| their attention. I told them the app was open source and I
| wouldn't take their money because I had no idea what its
| business model could be.
|
| A mistake? Maybe. European? Very.
|
| I could now go raise funds for my new venture, and maybe at
| some point I will. Plenty of investors have expressed interest.
| But, fundamentally, I still don't want to. It feels somehow
| like "cheating" to create a business that doesn't really make
| money. Or if not cheating then at least somehow not quite
| something you can be proud of. Certainly, the American way of
| creating a startup _that loses money for years_ would not at
| all impress my friends, family or fiance. They would in fact
| see that as failure, not success.
|
| And I'm OK with that. So I'm probably destined to create
| another small European software company that may or may not one
| day sell to a bigger US firm. Don't get me wrong. I dream big.
| But deep down I know that if I attract too much attention I'll
| always be at risk of being steamrollered by a "success is
| failure" US VC backed company that has no idea how to become
| sustainable, but might somehow stumble onto a plan anyway and
| if it doesn't, well the VCs will force one of their other
| investments to make an acquihire and somehow it'll work out so
| that everyone can save face. Bankruptcy is after all, basically
| unheard of in the Valley, and spending other people's money for
| a decade is lionized.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > Microsoft Apple and Amazon date from a time before
| saturation internet access, Amazon being created right at the
| start. Back then internet advertising wasn't a plausible
| business model.
|
| That doesn't explain why even that time, no such companies
| were founded in europe. I guess your thoughts on
| profitability are an attempt to explain that? I can't find
| data on when these companies became profitable, but at least
| for Microsoft it seems likely that they became profitable
| after three years[1].
|
| [1]: https://www.quora.com/When-did-Microsoft-become-
| profitable
| thu2111 wrote:
| Yes, Apple and Microsoft are from a different generation
| when the rules of business still applied. Even Google is
| from the tail end of it, although they needed vast VC
| injections in the beginning and didn't really have a
| workable business model (but they knew it and saw it as a
| problem, hence their attempt to sell to Yahoo).
|
| But there were lots of tech firms founded in Europe in the
| 1980s. ARM is the descendent of Acorn Computers which was
| the UK's attempt to compete with Apple, and that was just
| one of many examples. Acorn developed its own computers,
| its own RISC OS and so on.
|
| If you look at the history of Acorn and the interviews with
| its founders, one of the things that killed them off was a
| small home market, very limited ability to sell into Europe
| and it being too difficult/slow to expand into the USA due
| to a variety of factors. So a lot of what you see discussed
| elsewhere on this thread.
|
| And obviously Finland produced Nokia which ruled the roost
| for a long time in mobile, but again, most Americans don't
| realize that because Nokia managed to dominate everywhere
| _except_ the USA, where a variety of structural barriers
| hindered growth.
|
| SAP dates to that time too, I think. Possibly even earlier.
| semiconduction wrote:
| I think the +55% tax rates on net revenue may have something to
| do.
|
| Choose either of:
|
| - VAT + capital income tax + personal income tax on dividend 1-
| (0.8) _(0.8)_ (0.6) = 61 cents per euro go into taxes
|
| - VAT + Social security + personal income tax on labor income =
| 1- (0.8) _(0.9)_ (0.6) = 56c per euro go into taxes
| barbarbar wrote:
| I think there is some guy in Europe that made an OS some years
| ago - Linus or something. So there is at least one with some
| imagination.
| cletus wrote:
| Hot take: the problems here are cultural.
|
| Consider these data points:
|
| 1. The US is a country of migrants (ignoring the blight of
| slavery for now), whether those be those seeking a better life
| from Europe originally, later China and later still Central and
| South America. These are all people who uprooted whatever lives
| they had and legally or illegally migrated to the US. IMHO you
| still see echoes of this "pioneering" culture and I think it's no
| accident that the peak of the frontier, the Wild West, and
| homesteading in general have been deeply mythologized.
|
| But look at TV shows like Gold Rush or Deadliest Catch. Whatever
| creative license is taken here, you still have people who will
| take the risk of working a dangerous and dirty job for a share of
| the proceeds.
|
| The average American just seems to have more of an appetite for
| risk than at least anywhere I've been in Europe.
|
| 2. The much-discussed "Protestant work ethic". As exploitative as
| it is (and it is exploitative), the willingness of Americans to
| work all the time has an effect that I don't think you can
| dismiss.
|
| 3. Being comfortable makes you more risk-averse, even lazy. We
| all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of vacation, 35
| hour work weeks, universal health care and a year of maternity of
| leave to some extent. These are all good things. The upside of
| not having those things, if there is one, is that (IMHO) people
| have a greater motivation. Again, I'm not saying this is a good
| thing. It just... is.
|
| 4. 330M people most of whom speak one language (English
| obviously). You can't argue that this doesn't make things easier.
|
| 5. The barrier to education that is cost with a legacy admissions
| system led to the endowment system that created venture capital.
|
| For the record, I'm Australian not American and the above isn't
| intended to extol the virtues of American culture. For example,
| the fact that a near-majority of the US thinks it's acceptable
| that a trip to the ER can bankrupt a significant portion of the
| population is cruel, even reprehensible.
|
| EDIT: corrected less risk-averse to more risk-averse.
| MisterPea wrote:
| What's interesting is that India (which has many languages
| throughout the country) pretty much adopted English as the de
| facto business language.
|
| Are EU countries not the same? Genuinely don't know how English
| is perceived in these countries.
|
| Although this is probably much easier for India since it is one
| country.
| mnouquet wrote:
| > Are EU countries not the same?
|
| Do you mean 21 voices each with their own culture and
| chauvinism ?
| cletus wrote:
| The status of English is... complicated.
|
| So all the languages of EU members are officially recognized.
| This has become increasingly unwieldy as you need translators
| in the EU Parliament for every combination and there probably
| aren't that many people who can translate Portugese to
| Estonian, for example.
|
| There have been proposals over time to instead translate into
| a particular language. This has been resisted heavily by the
| French in particular because everyone knows that intermediate
| language would be English.
|
| English really is the lingua franca at this point.
|
| Additionally the presidency of the EU rotates every 6 months
| (IIRC), which has created its own problems. For example, when
| potential new members were negotiating the then-French EU
| president wanted to negotiate in French but (IIRC) new
| members tend to default to English.
|
| If you look at number of proficient speakers, English is by
| far the most spoken language followed distantly by German,
| French and Italian (in that order). And this is still true
| even after the UK has left the EU.
|
| English, French and German are the procedural languages of
| the European Commission.
|
| English has clearly won here but there is a lot of resistance
| to this linguistic hegemony (as many see it). The French have
| a ministry to find new words for things to stop English loan
| words seeping in. Many people in many EU member states don't
| want to lose their culture and language. And I can understand
| that.
|
| But, going back to the original point: people need to
| communicate. English is the natural means for that. As a
| result many people spend a lot of time and effort trying to
| preserve the status quo. This is another facet of conformity,
| in this case conforming to historical traditions and
| languages.
|
| People who obsess about preserving language and culture
| aren't the people who start massively disruptive businesses.
| kazen44 wrote:
| > English really is the lingua franca at this point.
|
| a good thing to point out is that Continental Europeans
| seem to talk a slightly different english compared to
| americans and the british.
|
| Usually more direct, with less complex vocabulary etc.
|
| I wonder how long it will take for this to become somewhat
| standardized. especially now that britain has left the EU.
| pier25 wrote:
| As a European I kinda agree with this.
|
| The US as a country was founded on very high risk. It makes
| sense that this remains in the culture today.
|
| I don't think that European policies (vacation, universal
| health care, etc) are the cause of Europe being more risk
| averse. I think it's the other way around. We have those
| policies because we have a more risk averse culture compared to
| the US.
|
| This isn't a bad thing per se. The problem is that we live in
| an age where technological innovation is fueling the global
| economy, and there is no innovation without risk.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >Being comfortable makes you less risk-averse, even lazy
|
| Do you mean more risk-averse? Anyway, to comment on this point.
| Non-Europeans, get quite a few things mixed up.
|
| >We all joke on here about Europe with its 6-8 weeks of
| vacation, 35 hour work weeks, universal health care and a year
| of maternity of leave to some extent.
|
| The bigger problem is two-fold and has to do with your second
| point:
|
| 1. Europeans have very set schedules, which has only started to
| erode with younger generations. Summer for vacation. Evening
| and weekend for relaxation. Weekdays for work. This encompasses
| almost every hour of a person's life, each year. If you have an
| idea you can execute alone and deviate from this pattern,
| great. If you don't and need someone else, good luck finding
| like-minded people, as you're already a very unique individual.
| If you can somehow accumulate enough wealth or get an
| investment, you could hire people instead. Yet, that's tough
| for younger people to do, and older people will slowly settle
| in their ways. Also, related to point 1, Europeans typically
| don't venture very far away from their childhood friends and
| family unlike Americans having no qualms uprooting their past
| lives.
|
| 2. Europeans don't universally have 6-8 weeks of vacation and
| 35 hour work weeks. Most of the younger middle class or upper
| middle class is likely to work 40h weeks and has 3-4 weeks of
| vacation, as well as some loose mandatory holidays. Loose
| mandatory holidays kinda suck to work with for bigger projects,
| at best you can weave them together with your PTO. Even working
| 32h weeks, which a lot of Europeans started doing, still leaves
| your head with the job 4 out of 7 days and mentally complex
| things require pretty big context shifts. The structure of this
| free time is more positioned as "regular bigger breaks from
| work" rather than "now I can take time off from my job for a
| long time and focus on my own stuff". Either way, nothing beats
| just taking a year off to work on yourself or your own ideas.
| cletus wrote:
| > Do you mean more risk-averse?
|
| I do. Thanks. Corrected.
|
| > Europeans have very set schedules
|
| That's another way of describing conformity, in this case to
| cultural norms.
|
| The best way I can describe it is like this: in the UK (and
| the US), the default position is that things are allowed
| unless they're specifically forbidden. In continental Europe,
| it's the reverse: everything is disallowed unless it's
| specifically permitted.
|
| This was evident to me from the time that I lived in Germany
| and Switzerland at least.
|
| Disruptive businesses aren't created by conformists.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I wonder about the UK. When I created my business I started
| by contracting and using the inevitable downtime to get my
| products off the ground. Thanks to IR35 I would find that
| very difficult now.
|
| Then you have stuff like workplace pensions which are an
| administrative mine field.
| mnouquet wrote:
| > The best way I can describe it is like this: in the UK
| (and the US), the default position is that things are
| allowed unless they're specifically forbidden. In
| continental Europe, it's the reverse: everything is
| disallowed unless it's specifically permitted.
|
| Only in rural North America, otherwise, everybody has the
| mentality as the Europeans. Otherwise, I wholeheartedly
| agree. Europeans don't know the meaning of the word
| "Freedom".
|
| The only difference with the Uber and such is that people
| have no fear to break the Law.
| tester756 wrote:
| > Loose mandatory holidays kinda suck to work with for bigger
| projects, at best you can weave them together with your PTO.
|
| those are like a few days per year
|
| it's maybe relevant once or twice a year
|
| >Even working 32h weeks, which a lot of Europeans started
| doing
|
| ? first time I hear about this in Eastern EU
| adreamingsoul wrote:
| The Gold Rush show has very little to do with reality. It's a
| scripted show that had the primary motivation of making money.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Am I the only one who thinks this is not a problem but just how
| things should be in general? Why should people be pushed to work
| themselves to death due to societal/financial pressure? If the
| work culture in Europe provides less stressful life and better
| work-life balance, barring those who are career
| driven/ambitious/enjoy the associated challenges, it should be
| perfectly ok to embrace the former without being guilt-shamed by
| the latter. I don't have stats but I think the percentage of
| people who enjoy their work but not as much so as to slow-march
| to their deaths to the tunes of never-ending deadlines, isn't
| insignificant.
| Scarblac wrote:
| > Why should people be pushed to work themselves to death due
| to societal/financial pressure?
|
| The article isn't about that at all?
| ganzuul wrote:
| Nokia is not dead!
| durnygbur wrote:
| Nokia is a shade of past itself. Its telecom software divisions
| in EU are sweatshops.
| larsnystrom wrote:
| Neither is Ericsson. In fact they are #2 and #3 when it comes
| to market share in networking equipment. Since Huawei is banned
| in many European countries now, I bet most sold networking
| equipment in Europe right now is European.
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