[HN Gopher] Philips and the death of Europe's last electronics g...
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Philips and the death of Europe's last electronics giant [video]
Author : redbell
Score : 179 points
Date : 2023-03-11 09:28 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| permo-w wrote:
| what about Nokia?
| hef19898 wrote:
| Still exists, well and kicking. They just don't make phones
| anymore themselves. And their mobile network business used to
| be part of a joint venture with Siemens.
| arp242 wrote:
| I grew up in Eindhoven, the birthplace of Philips. It was
| everywhere in the city back then. My entire family worked for
| Philips: dad, grandfather, uncles.
|
| I don't really think it's a bad thing what happened to it. Many
| viable components have been spun off and sold in various ways;
| the business is essentially fine, just not under the Philips name
| and management. Does that really matter? I don't think it does.
| And giant companies are not a good thing: the bureaucracy in
| Philips was legendary and giant companies don't tend to be good
| for consumers.
|
| It is hard to underestimate how much influence Philips has had on
| the history of Eindhoven; it turned a small medieval town to the
| city it is today (technically its had city rights since
| 12-something, but it was really just a small town until 1920).
| It's also easy to be romantic and look back with rose-tinted
| glasses, or to transpose activities from the past to today.
| wallaBBB wrote:
| I found this video quite flawed.
|
| What happened to Phillips is something that proved beneficial in
| the long run.
|
| Legacy of Philips is now ASML, NxP, pretty good startup scene in
| Eindhoven, and a few other companies. The only victim here is the
| name. If Philips tried to move as one company they would have
| probably dragged down their chip related businesses by siphoning
| money into the fields they were losing.
|
| Of course one could argue that the company under Philips name
| should have chose different direction and spun off consumer or
| medical market, but at the end of the day it's just a name.
|
| I believe in hindsight this will be a way better outcome for
| everyone than the one we'll see from big tech if they're not
| broken up. There are already too many examples of them killing
| competition by leveraging their monopolies or buying it up and
| killing it off.
| COGlory wrote:
| Phillips also helped spawn FEI, which was then bought by Thermo
| Scientific and have a near monopoly on Transmission Electron
| Microscopes, as well as being competitive in other EM fields.
| Without Phillips Electron Optics, most cutting edge structural
| biology couldn't be done.
| eecc wrote:
| Well, no it's not flawed. For one, he did mention that ASML and
| NXP flourished when freed from the bad management of Philips.
| detourdog wrote:
| Maybe it's flawed because Siemans still exists.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens
| quonn wrote:
| Siemens has recently split into different companies so it's
| questionable if it still exists.
| ranguna wrote:
| It did?
|
| They merged with Gamesa in 2016 (more like Gamesa merged
| into Siemens).
| quonn wrote:
| Maybe they stopped after splitting of Energy:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/siemens-supervisory-
| board-e...
|
| My understanding was that they will completely split into
| many small parts, but it seems that they came to their
| senses.
| [deleted]
| stefan_ wrote:
| Siemens is essentially a hedge fund, they invest one
| place, divest another. You might not find the label on
| your fridge but its still a $80B revenue business.
| wallaBBB wrote:
| But it also makes a point that it was a mistake to do so.
| somedude895 wrote:
| Quite likely for them it was a mistake, letting promising
| companies go lest you smother them with your inertia. Like
| parents letting their children leave to live to their full
| potential. Not that businesses do or should have that as a
| goal per se, but it seems to have been for the greater
| good.
| lashkhi wrote:
| [dead]
| pvaldes wrote:
| Another mark for the VAT kills list
| eecc wrote:
| or the sweet tax havens that make it easier for management to
| pull profits out of thin air?
| mrbadger wrote:
| In fact, VAT is what facilitates the operation of the EU single
| market. Meanwhile, in the US:
|
| https://fsi.stanford.edu/events/why-europe%E2%80%99s-single-...
| nivenkos wrote:
| The street-level sales tax in the US is a nightmare.
|
| But the EU's 25% VAT is absurdly high, 5% would be more
| reasonable.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| State level percentage sales tax is simple enough, but the
| US has gone overboard with every jurisdiction implementing
| its own form of sales tax, and implemented using asinine
| calculations.
|
| Sometimes percentage, sometimes flat, sometimes
| combination, sometimes based on the volume, sometimes based
| on the mass of an ingredient, sometimes based on time of
| year, and on and on it goes.
|
| And it could be from federal, state, county, city, transit
| region, federal agency. I look at my mobile phone bill or
| hotel receipt and there are 4 to 10 (literally 10) itemized
| taxes, and I have no idea if I am being scammed or not.
|
| And the items applicable to sales tax and exempt from sales
| tax is constantly changing. And the entities exempt from
| sales tax and the documentation requirements, placed on
| merchants, is always changing.
|
| This is just the website for US federal diplomat sales tax
| exemption instructions.
|
| https://www.state.gov/sales-tax-exemption/
|
| This type of complexity exists for federal employees, for
| 50 different state employees, and on more local levels.
|
| I can only assume there is massive amounts of under and
| overpaid sales tax, with all these avenues for corruption
| and mistakes. And how much of the country's productivity is
| wasted on calculating and auditing all of this?
|
| Edit: this turned into a long rant, but just look at what a
| simple merchant is expected to know or implement in its
| systems to sell trivial consumables:
|
| > In addition to the specific text, each tax exemption card
| bears one of four animal symbols indicating the specific
| type of tax exemption of the cardholder:
|
| * Owl: mission tax exemption cards with unrestricted tax
| exemption.
|
| * Buffalo: mission tax exemption cards with some degree of
| restriction.
|
| * Eagle: personal tax exemption cards with unrestricted tax
| exemption.
|
| * Deer: personal tax exemption cards with some degree of
| restriction.
| hef19898 wrote:
| VAT as in Value Added Tax? How so?
| bluepizza wrote:
| China also uses VAT..
| zeristor wrote:
| Strange, my Dad worked for Philips for 30 years, well Mullards,
| which was a subsidiary. Reminded me of the newsletters, the
| employee discounts, the calendar type thing to celebrate 100
| years.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| > "Complete failure in semiconductor industry"
|
| Isn't this disingenuous? Phillips owns a 24% stake, or 99 million
| shares, in ASML. Philips is granting the underwriters an option
| for up to nine million shares. Philips also still holds about 1.3
| billion TSMC shares, representing approximately 5.0 percent of
| TSMC's issued stock.
|
| ASML is a monopoly that is literally the only supplier for most
| cutting edge equipment used by semi-conductor fabs globally
| (TSML, Intel, etc). They make it all possible. In this regard,
| Phillips has become more of a holding company than an electronics
| operation itself.
| sct202 wrote:
| They sold off the last of their stake in ASML in 2004. They
| also sold off the remainder of their stake in TSMC in 2007. If
| they had kept both stakes, they'd be worth like $140b instead
| of $15b.
| pavlov wrote:
| ASML, a Philips spin-off, is worth about $250 billion today. They
| make the machines used to manufacture high-end semiconductors
| everywhere.
|
| In that sense Philips's legacy still underpins every smartphone
| and computer today.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| Not mentioned in the video is that Philips Ventures is
| effectively buying up MedTech companies with proven tech, and
| hovering up the IP into their portfolio as an 'innovation'
| strategy.
|
| Effectively it's a zero risk venture for big corp companies that
| depend on innovation, they don't have to sink money in research
| projects in their own R&D labs. Just find someone with something
| interesting which has already been de-risked, with proven
| feasibility, buy them out and develop for manufacturing.
|
| For clarity all big MedTech companies are doing this not just
| Philips.
| tetrep wrote:
| > Not mentioned in the video is that Philips Ventures is
| effectively buying up MedTech companies with proven tech, and
| hovering up the IP into their portfolio as an 'innovation'
| strategy.
|
| Why is that bad? Unless there's something underhanded about the
| sale, it sounds like it's exactly what a lot of startup
| founders want: make an MVP, get noticed, get bought, take your
| pile of money and make another business or go sit on a beach or
| whatever you want to do.
| esel2k wrote:
| I agree all big MedTechs do this and I wonder what other
| (better way exist)? Typically these giants have more cash and
| heavy process instead of small nimble engineers who can freely
| use their potential.
|
| PS: I work directly with two ex-venture Philipps people, thats
| why I ask.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| I mean there probably isn't much of a way out. It all comes
| down to funding.
|
| It is very rare for MedTech startups to have funding to
| actually establish themselves in mature market, most of them
| will have funding to get pass regulator hurdles or just
| create an IP moat around the business, then the VC's
| expectation is that another giant will buy them out who will
| then have the purse to take products to market at scale.
|
| My worry is that more and more the bigger companies are
| buying or owning parts of startups sooner and sooner in the
| technology readiness pipeline. That will probably limit how
| much we actually innovate, both from the startup side that
| now has oversight and from the internal R&D ranks at big
| corp, that become glorified PMs and strategists rather than
| researchers.
|
| The only way forward is for VC's to stay for longer horizons,
| but specially in MedTech if you are selling something that
| involves a widget or hardware it will probably never scale in
| a way that would make it an interesting business for VC's.
| Perhaps the exception now is MedTech with SaaS type business
| models or cloud based services.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Perhaps the exception now is MedTech with SaaS type
| business models or cloud based services.
|
| This should pan out because the body has to (at least with
| current technology) do a variety of things periodically
| with high frequency to survive.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| IMO where Philips went wrong is selling off their name for
| everything they weren't interested in to cheap brands, totally
| undermining their name. TVs (Philips CRT tubes) were legendary in
| the 80s, now they're made by a budget OEM from Hong Kong. Pretty
| much all home electronics in the end. Very bad strategy, with
| minor short-term rewards and killing the brand long-term.
| trabant00 wrote:
| I think they started selling off their name after and because
| they where in trouble, not the other way around.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Philips knew that they couldn't compete with LG or Samsung.
| Nobody else could. Getting out of electronics was the right
| decision.
| polyamid23 wrote:
| Yes! I stopped buying Philips products and have actively
| advised people to avoid the brand after owning 2 different
| products with questionable quality. At this point I wouldn't
| buy any of their products, so it's hard for them to convince me
| again, even if they improve. Sad.
| sogen wrote:
| Had a philips cassette player. stopped working exactly 1 day
| after the guarantee expired.
| eecc wrote:
| Weren't Sony Trinitron sets the most iconic and best quality
| CRTs?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Trinitron had the annoying wires, very noticeable when the
| monitor was moving a bit.
|
| But there was probably also a chauvinist aspect to it because
| I'm from the Netherlands.
|
| Many other brands used Philips CRT tubes though.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Yes, but rare in Europe. Philips TVs were great, but maybe
| not as crisp picture. On the other hand, NTSC looks bad on
| any tube.
| yourusername wrote:
| Yes but in Europe Philips Matchline were seen as comparable.
| flakeoil wrote:
| > IMO where Philips went wrong is selling off their name for
| everything they weren't interested in to cheap brands, totally
| undermining their name.
|
| I'm curious, to which companies/products has Philips sold their
| name to?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Mostly chinese OEMs. Japanese brands are doing it too. If you
| buy a Toshiba LCD TV, it's not actually a Toshiba.
| yread wrote:
| Sharp TVs are also made by hisense
| cf100clunk wrote:
| The name game with Philips goes back many decades because there
| was once a vacuum tube manufacturer in the U.S.A. named
| ''Phillips'' (two ls), so they were forced to adopt new trade
| names for the lucrative North American market: the Norelco name
| for consumer appliances and the Maganavox name for consumer
| electronics. Their reputation for quality was excellent back
| then. Oddly, Canada's Bell Telephone subsidiary Northern
| Electric did not push Philips away from using the Norelco name.
| Nowadays those names have almost no connection to their
| original organization.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Weird, the Dutch brand is a given name, I thought these were
| always allowed especially because the spelling is different.
|
| But I've never heard of Norelco. Magnavox yes, it was a bit
| of a B-brand in Europe, similar to Aristona.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| It's not only Philips that has bitten the dust, there's been a
| succession of other large Western electronic companies that have
| either gone out of business or that are now only a shadow of
| their former selves. Here's a partial list:
|
| Pye Industries, UK
|
| EMI (Electric & Musical Industries), UK
|
| Marconi, UK
|
| AWA (Amalgamated Wireless Australiasia), Australia
|
| Telefunken, Germany
|
| Thompson CSF, France
|
| HP Hewlett Packard, USA
|
| Kodak, USA
|
| Polaroid, USA
|
| Varian Associates, USA
|
| Ampex, USA
|
| General Radio, USA
|
| Philco, USA
|
| Admiral, USA
|
| RCA (Radio Corporation of America), USA
|
| Philips, NL - as mentioned
|
| I used to work for RCA and back then it was the largest
| electronics company in the world and Philips was second. When RCA
| failed, Philips became the biggest but unfortunately its time at
| the top was short-lived.
|
| There's several things that seem to characterize many of these
| failures, the first is that when founders leave or die companies
| often seem to lose drive and direction, and second companies
| become too big and diversification seems to kill their
| R&D/innovation.
|
| For example, RCA lost its direction and fell apart when its
| founder David Sarnoff died and his son took the helm. Similarly,
| another spectacular failure was Hewlett Packard when its last
| founder died.
|
| That said, there are exceptions such as Apple--but then it may
| not have been in existence long enough to tell, it hasn't been
| around anywhere near as long as say, Philips has. Moreover, it's
| highly dependent on Asian manufacturing, in the long-term, that
| may be Apple's Achilles's heel.
|
| Still, I think that's only part of the problem. Manufacturing and
| innovation in Western countries are now in a state of malaise and
| they're being quickly overtaken by Asian countries such as China.
| Like it or not, the West generally is in a state of decline.
| Daub wrote:
| There have been many books written on why companies
| succeed/fail. The general observations that you make all concur
| with agreed wisdoms on this matter: small startup = mobile,
| creative, innovative and fast moving. Estabslhsed blue-chip
| company = the opposite.
|
| So... how does a large monolith renew itself? One solution with
| a reasonable track record is to 'replace from within', much as
| a cuckoo replaces its host.
|
| 1. Set up a small unit within your (monolith) company.
|
| 2. Staff it with your best and brightest.
|
| 3. Physically separate this unit from the rest of the company,
| but not so much that they forget 'who they belong to'.
|
| 4. Establish a line of direct communication between this unit
| and a high-level manager, bypassing middle managers.
|
| 5. XXXX
|
| 6. Profit!
|
| XXXX is the problem part. How to graft the young onto the old?
| Failure to capitalize = Kodak (invented the digital camera but
| could not make it 'happen'), Palm and its development of WebOS
| (could have been a contender, but let down by poor hardware and
| other stuff), Palo Alto and Xerox ('nuff said).
| pirate787 wrote:
| This is how Sony launched Playstation over the resistance of
| traditionalists in Tokyo not interested in making "toys" --
| they set up an independent company in Europe.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| This was actually the play that IBM did when it created the
| PC. They opened a facility in Florida far from their
| corporate headquarters in New York.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| In Boca Raton. I think they moved the whole facility to
| Austin by now, but it was a very interesting campus when I
| did an internship there in 1995. The office I had used to
| be occupied on Microsoft who just stopped working with IBM
| on OS/2. Also, it being Florida and me being only 20, no
| one carded us when we went out for drinks.
| [deleted]
| arp242 wrote:
| > Manufacturing and innovation in Western countries are now in
| a state of malaise and they're being quickly overtaken by Asian
| countries such as China. Like it or not, the West generally is
| in a state of decline.
|
| China is pretty good at manufacturing, and pretty terrible at
| everything else. Research and innovation in particular are very
| much China's weak point.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| > "* Research and innovation in particular are very much
| China's weak point.*"
|
| Then why in most scientific papers often at least one author
| has a name of 'Han' origin?
| pb7 wrote:
| Because they have 1.4B people? China != people of Chinese
| ethnicity. Your name doesn't change when you immigrate
| somewhere.
| gregoriol wrote:
| > For example, RCA lost its direction and fell apart when its
| founder David Sarnoff died and his son took the helm.
| Similarly, another spectacular failure was Hewlett Packard when
| its last founder died. > That said, there are exceptions such
| as Apple--but then it may not have been in existence long
| enough to tell
|
| Apple would be about the same story: it hasn't created anything
| really meaningful since Jobs, it mostly lives on the legacy
| that has been set. Luckily for Cook the company has a good
| storytelling and aura, but major innovation hasn't been there
| for a long time, and when the wave slows down it may well end
| up like the others you listed.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Apple Watch is an entirely Tim Cook creation. Apple Silicon,
| too.
|
| Apple TV is the only non-scummy streaming box. It doesn't
| sell your viewing data to advertisers (though individual apps
| may).
|
| Apple TV+ has the highest signal-to-noise ratio of any non-
| niche streaming service. I don't think there's a close
| second.
|
| The latest HomePods and software iteration has made an
| appreciable positive difference in the quality of my life --
| the intercom feature in particular is huge. This may not be
| unique to Apple, but it's well implemented.
|
| You can kvetch about bugs, declining software quality, etc
| (we certainly did when Jobs was running the place) -- but
| "meaningful"? Apple is more meaningful to more people than
| ever before.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Apple Watch is an entirely Tim Cook creation. Apple
| Silicon, too.
|
| PA Semi was acquired before Tim Cook became CEO (2008). I
| wouldn't say Apple Silicon is _entirely_ a Tim Cook
| creation. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-
| s-M1-Pro-M1-Max-chips-ar...
| gboss wrote:
| That is just not true. Apple is the most valuable company in
| the world, with the largest market cap. Steve Jobs died
| twelve years ago. The Apple Watch and Air Pods have been huge
| successes, so has their push into services. They also have
| the largest profit margins of any manufacturer. They are
| incredibly well run and have not lost their way. They also
| didn't have to have massive layoffs as they didn't over hire
| in the pandemic.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Apple became the company with the highest market cap in the
| year Steve Jobs died. They haven't screwed it up yet, but
| they haven't really been tested yet. GE was the darling in
| the 90s and their fall (excluding market-wide events)
| didn't really come until two decades later in ~2017. The
| question for Apple is what happens when they're on the back
| foot.
|
| Suppose Intel regains a process advantage over TSMC, so PCs
| have a major performance advantage over Apple Silicon.
|
| Suppose TSMC remains dominant, so AMD stays ahead of Intel,
| and releases something successful in the phone market.
| Something _open_ , unlike Qualcomm. Now you can get a high
| end phone that runs the latest stock Android for unlimited
| years. Qualcomm gets pushed down market so their current
| high end becomes available at lower prices. Each of these
| hack away at Apple's market share.
|
| Microsoft has a competent hardware division. Suppose they
| get over themselves and release an Android handset. Quality
| hardware and no OEM crapware other than Microsoft services
| integration. A Windows tablet that can directly run Android
| apps. Apple then has another major competitor in their
| biggest markets and it's the company that nearly put them
| out of business the first time around.
|
| The test is what happens when they face competent
| competition. Qualcomm sucks and Google only cares to the
| extent that they want to control the device to keep people
| on their services. That's been true since the end of the
| Jobs era but it isn't necessarily permanent.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Suppose Intel regains a process advantage over TSMC, so
| PCs have a major performance advantage over Apple
| Silicon.
|
| That would be great to see, but doesn't seem to be
| happening.
|
| Apple's big competitive advantages are here: 1) they
| control the OS and the app tools, so they can make
| switching more seamless and painless and 2) where it is
| painful, people are for some reason willing to take the
| pain from Apple where they wouldn't from others.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > That would be great to see, but doesn't seem to be
| happening.
|
| Intel is making bold claims, but they always do that. We
| don't find out until we find out.
|
| > Apple's big competitive advantages are here: 1) they
| control the OS and the app tools, so they can make
| switching more seamless and painless
|
| Everybody controls the OS and the app tools. Microsoft
| released ARM devices and nobody wanted them because the
| vast majority of new Window devices were still amd64 and
| developers had no reason to target the six people who had
| Windows RT.
|
| Apple typically succeeds with hardware architecture
| changes because they only do it when the new architecture
| has a big advantage, at which point everybody buys it and
| understands it to be the future and developers port their
| apps.
|
| They could switch back to Intel pretty easily, because
| people are still releasing Intel apps and Apple still
| sells Intel Macs, but then they've stranded everyone who
| bought Apple Silicon or spent effort to support it and
| harmed their reputation. They might not want to do that
| just because Intel is 10% faster. But then Intel is 10%
| faster and the highest margin customers who just want The
| Best are going to the other team.
|
| It's choices like that which can break companies because
| neither option is good but it's not obvious at the outset
| which bad option is worse.
|
| > and 2) where it is painful, people are for some reason
| willing to take the pain from Apple where they wouldn't
| from others.
|
| This is the thing where their competitors are jackasses.
| When Apple does something customer-hostile like making
| batteries or memory non-removable or not publishing
| driver documentation, their competitors copy it
| immediately, because hey, Apple is making so much money,
| shouldn't we do what they do? When they support their
| devices for a long time or don't put ads in their OS,
| their competitors take the "screw the customer" option
| again.
|
| So Apple has a strong reputation because the likes of
| Qualcomm and Microsoft are _awful_. But what happens if
| anyone ever shows up who offers the market the things
| people like about Apple and not the things people don 't?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Everybody controls the OS and the app tools
|
| This isn't relevant to what I'm commenting on, which is
| that Intel might leapfrog Apple with a big new change.
| Intel do not control the OS and the app tools.
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| Apple has managed to position itself as a lifestyle
| product as well. It's not just the functionality, it's a
| _brand_ in the way that Microsoft tried (and failed) to
| be with Surface. Samsung positions itself in a similar
| way in the cellphone world, but for Apple it 's
| everything they make.
|
| People will put up with more bullshit because it's also a
| fashion statement.
|
| And on top of that they have very good interop between
| the different parts of their ecosystem, and make going
| outside of that ecosystem painful, so you need a very
| good reason to jump ship once you've gotten into it.
|
| They have a pretty good moat, and that buys time for any
| missteps to be corrected.
| ralusek wrote:
| Apple silicon is biggest innovation in mainstream personal
| computing in at least a decade. Their upcoming move into
| AR/VR indicates that they're at least maintaining a presence
| at the frontier.
| nl wrote:
| > Apple would be about the same story: it hasn't created
| anything really meaningful since Jobs, it mostly lives on the
| legacy that has been set.
|
| Try telling that to everyone who has an Apple Silicon laptop.
|
| I haven't had a performance boost like that since the move to
| SSDs.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Seriously. I literally can't think of anything I don't like
| about my MacBook Pro M1.
| Dig1t wrote:
| The west, particularly the USA, sacrificed so many industries
| on the alter of globalization. We gutted our workforce and told
| ourselves we were keeping the best jobs for ourselves. The loss
| of all those jobs and economic activity has contributed
| significantly to the wealth gap IMO. I don't think that having
| lots of cheap trinkets available on Amazon has been worth it,
| to be honest.
| no_wizard wrote:
| While others have tackled the thesis as whole here, and I
| generally agree with the overall sentiment that the value chain
| just moved and manufacturing electronics is a really global and
| competitive business that makes it hard to differentiate, I
| want to poke specifically at Kodak.
|
| Kodak patented and had provable manufacturing runs of _fiber
| optic, flexible printed motherboards for computers_
|
| This, as I understand it, is (was?) the "next moment" for
| computing because fiber optics can dramatically increase the
| bandwidth of hardware components.
|
| Yet, it went nowhere, and to this day, I don't understand why.
| Never was able to find follow up about it other than the
| original demos in a news broadcast
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| yvdriess wrote:
| It might be a lack of a system or willingness to stick with
| it until it gets good.
|
| The manager championing it moves, Business shows a low TAM,
| there is a bad quarter and the CEO needs to appease
| investors, etc.
| brwck wrote:
| > Like it or not, the West generally is in a state of decline.
|
| Europe is in a state of decline. The US is doing fine. The
| difference between the US and Europe is that we went up the
| value chain ( Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix,
| Nvidia, etc ). Europe did not.
|
| Consumer electronics is relatively low level tech. It was
| "gifted" to the japanese and then the koreans and eventually
| the chinese while we moved up the chain to the more valuable
| internet, social media and software development.
|
| Where is europe's microsoft? Their apple? Their facebook? Their
| google? There is no "the West". No more than there is "the
| East".
|
| Edit: Also, it isn't consumer electronics that's the issue.
| It's the future ( the next rung up the value chain ) - AI, big
| data, quantum computing, bio-tech, green energy tech, etc. Will
| europe even participate because currently it looks like it will
| be only the US and China competing.
| [deleted]
| sschueller wrote:
| All of these things require microchips and without ASML they
| wouldn't exist.
|
| I don't agree that Europe is on the decline. They are just in
| a different industry than the US.
| duped wrote:
| Electronics (consumer or otherwise) isn't "low level tech."
| This isn't a game where there's a definitive tech tree.
| Electronics design and manufacturing is not a solved problem
| and innovation is getting wild these days (esp in consumer
| devices, like wearables, XR, IOT, etc).
|
| Something to keep in mind is that consumer electronics are at
| the leaves of the industrial tree - AI, big data, energy,
| quantum computing, etc - those are branches.
| oezi wrote:
| This is just strange thinking to equate decline with some
| sort of technological leadership.
|
| Counterpoints:
|
| - The US is still at a trade deficit with Europe despite the
| strength in dominating Internet technologies.
|
| - US society is much more polarized than Europe both in
| economic equality and political affiliation.
|
| - Europe has some tech unicorns. Some like Spotify or Arm
| might ring a bell. But then again does it really matter where
| something is incorporated? Financial markets are very
| globalized anyway. So a European citizen can buy Apple stock
| and profit in the same way as an American one. Some holds the
| other way. The German car makers raking in billions each year
| are owned by international investors all over.
|
| Last on Greentech: there are players such as Vestas and
| Siemens very much involved in renewables.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Depends how you define "Europe."
|
| I look at a lot of articles from _The Guardian_ and I 'd
| say the UK seems to be in full on disaster mode, whether it
| is the government trying to criminalize dissent because
| everyone from labor unions to schoolchildren to right wing
| anti-immigrant folks are protesting. Inflation is really
| out of control, fresh veggies are missing from the
| supermarket, the "small boats" situation makes any concern
| people have about the border in the US seem like nothing.
| youngNed wrote:
| Added to that, the country is literally shitting[1]
| itself. Its really weird living here at the moment, its
| like some kinda of cautionary fable about the monster
| that made everyone impose trade-sanctions on themselves,
| but none of the towns-people are allowed to to talk about
| it or discuss it.
|
| [1] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/uk-beaches-
| sewage-eng...
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-
| environment-62813573
|
| [1] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/uks-most-
| polluted-beac...
|
| [1] https://news.sky.com/story/huge-increase-in-raw-
| sewage-relea...
|
| [1] https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/sewage-britains-
| rivers-...
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| Europe is a diverse continent. The North will endure the
| South will turn into a depopulated desert.
| _n_b_ wrote:
| The Guardian comes with a certain bias for disaster-
| mongering, especially (but not exclusively) at the
| expense of Tories; all of those things are real problems,
| but take it with a grain or two of salt.
|
| Source: I live in the UK and still eat fresh veggies.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" The Guardian comes with a certain bias for disaster-
| mongering"_
|
| Perhaps so. But from my perspective of Australia the UK
| looks as if it's on the slide (I'm not smug when saying
| that as I reckon things here aren't much better, we've
| always been a mob of ostriches).
|
| My family/cultural heritage is mostly UK so I have no
| pleasure in watching the decline. I've also relatives in
| the US and France and I've lived and worked in both
| Europe including the UK and the US so I view what's
| happening from a broad Western perspective and I'm very
| gloomy about what I see.
|
| It's too complicated to give a quick summary of the
| problems but if forced to do so in a sentence then I'd
| say it's cultural. The West is being driven apart by
| widening ideological views, there's less cohesion, fewer
| common values and aspirations now than there once was.
|
| On the other hand, the exact opposite is happening in
| Asia, people there know their time has come and that
| confidence and optimism drives cohesion and common
| values.
|
| BTW, I worked in Asia for a while so I've some feeling
| for what's happening there.
| lazyeye wrote:
| "I look at a lot of articles from The Guardian and..."
|
| "I watch a lot of Fox news and.."
| brwck wrote:
| > This is just strange thinking to equate decline with some
| sort of technological leadership.
|
| Technology is one of the best indicators of power,
| progress, societal dynamism and hope for the future.
|
| > - The US is still at a trade deficit with Europe despite
| the strength in dominating Internet technologies.
|
| Who cares? The US has trade deficits with mexico too.
|
| > - US society is much more polarized than Europe both in
| economic equality and political affiliation.
|
| Last I checked, there isn't a war in the US and the US
| didn't lose a member like europe did with brexit.
|
| > Some like Spotify or Arm might ring a bell.
|
| Arm is owned by nvidia. Spotify?
|
| > So a European citizen can buy Apple stock and profit in
| the same way as an American one.
|
| Is that what we are talking about? Trading stocks
| internationally?
|
| Man, there are quite a few people here really hoping europe
| stays weak and stagnant - especially technology-wise.
| Wonder why. I guess trading apple stock is the same thing
| as being able to create apple.
| b3orn wrote:
| The takeover of ARM by Nvidia was cancelled over a year
| ago, it still belongs to SoftBank.
| barrkel wrote:
| Europe moved further up the value chain into luxury products
| ;)
| rayrey wrote:
| Too strict of labor laws that stifle innovation
| franczesko wrote:
| How labor laws are connected with innovation and how they
| stifle it?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| It's also the sheer amount of laws and regulations around
| opening and running a business that makes it really hard
| for small organizations to get started. There's a LOT of
| paperwork around the EU, and as soon as you want to sell to
| the neighboring countries it's a lot of additional
| paperwork, red tape and regulations (it's better than it
| was still).
|
| A founder from Europe explained the 4th person to join the
| company as the 2nd employee (their first hire was an
| engineer) was a non-technical person whose job was mostly
| to fill out grant application forms. There are hundreds of
| different grants for companies with a long list of
| criterions. For example, they could have the countries
| government (so the taxpayer) foot the bill for a fraction
| of an employee's salary if he or she was a refugee from
| certain target countries. Of course, the local government
| had a similar scheme with a completely different
| application process and slightly different criterions.
|
| None of the grants had anything to do with their tech or
| how viable the business was by the way.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Nonsense. Europe simply doesn't have venture capital.
| Neither do most countries and regions, hence they move to
| Silicon Valley.
| p1esk wrote:
| Why VCs don't want to invest in European startups? Or are
| there no European startups to invest in?
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| There are.
|
| Most of them move to the US, though.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The industry is a lot "closer" than people expect; it
| runs a lot more on handshakes and people going to the
| same parties than on cold numbers, so not only do
| startups have to be in the US they have to be
| specifically in SV.
|
| Two decades ago at a UK chip design software startup, the
| founders started a US branch and migrated there for just
| this reason.
|
| (The SVB bank run shows how strong the "being in the
| right whatsapp group message chat" is)
| outside1234 wrote:
| It's not the whole story but it isn't nonsense. You
| literally can't restructure a company in Germany without
| doing a year long song and dance with the worker's
| council. This is not agile enough for a startup.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _"...without doing a year long song and dance with the
| worker 's council."_
|
| Germany is no exception, much of Europe and the UK are
| the same. One can argue over which European country is
| worst or best but it's small crumbs. Look at France and
| the current arguments over retirement age, it's all part
| of the same cultural problem I mentioned elsewhere.
|
| Europe is an old society with old traditions, the US less
| so and its west coast even less so, so it's not an
| unexpected problem for Europe. The West's real problem is
| how to deal with it.
|
| Asia, on the other hand, has even older cultures but
| having largely missed the old Industrial Revolution
| they've also missed the cultural baggage and artifacts it
| imposed on the West. This has allowed Asian countries to
| jump over these hurdles, that's why they are doing so
| well now.
|
| I feel far from optimistic that the West can overcome
| this cultural baggage easy. But I hope I'm wrong.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| You don't have that problem in Canada, and you have many
| of the same advantages but you don't have nearly the
| amount of startups and definitely almost no big ones.
|
| It's really Winner-take-all market.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Yep, Canadian tech companies either get bought out by
| American firms or self-sabotage into oblivion
| (Blackberry, Nortel).
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| The problem (and opportunity for US investors) is Canada
| has almost no VC, and the few they have are extremely
| risk averse.
|
| One one side they held back economic and social growth of
| ~1/3rd of the population for more than a century through
| systemic racism and discrimination. On the other side,
| the government has created little incentives for capital
| owners to take more risks thanks to policies that
| artificially propped up real estate (enormous immigration
| quotas, lax laws on foreign money entering the country,
| no market correction post 2007 crash).
|
| Why invest in hard to understand and uncertain tech when
| you can simply build luxury houses and sell them to
| wealthy foreigners?
| Archelaos wrote:
| > This is not agile enough for a startup.
|
| As of 2018, only 5% of German companies of 5 to 50
| employees had a worker's council.[1] And even if a
| council exists it is just max. 3 members at this size.
|
| I can imagine that in some cases the council makes
| necessary restructuring more difficult, but in the crises
| of the last decades, works councils and trade unions in
| Germany were much more willing to compromise than in many
| other European economies where this so-called "social
| partnership" is not so pronounced, for example in France.
| All in all, it seems that worker's councils in Germany
| are a quite successful institution to mitigate conflict
| between employees and management.
|
| [1] https://www.iab-forum.de/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/05/BAA00031... (in German)
| ajross wrote:
| > Where is europe's microsoft? Their apple? Their facebook?
| Their google? There is no "the West". No more than there is
| "the East".
|
| One place to start looking would be their local Apple, Meta
| and Google offices.
|
| This is true, in a sense. Big tech giants are headquartered
| in the USA because the USA made a bunch of choices that make
| it easy to start a tech company there. But as they grow, they
| become multinational giants. There is a *ton* of FAANG
| revenue moving into and through Europe in all directions.
| Europe is just fine.
|
| I mean, this is like asking why California fell so far behind
| Delaware in startup valuation. It's true, but not meaningful.
| some_random wrote:
| They have offices in Europe to tap into the low cost talent
| in the area, nothing more.
| nine_k wrote:
| Didn't they do the very same thing in Asia 15-20 years
| before?
| ajross wrote:
| And why are their headquarters in silicon valley except
| to exploit the local talent pool? With the exception of
| actual manufacturing, _every_ site decision in a tech
| company is about labor availability.
|
| So Europe gets value from tech in proportion to its
| concentration of talent, same as everyone else. Is Europe
| falling behind on tech talent? Clearly not. So it'll do
| just fine (where conversely the bay area is largely
| tapped out at this point, there's no place to put more
| talent even if it could find it).
| some_random wrote:
| Companies expand from where they are founded to reach new
| labor markets, but that's not the only consideration for
| where they begin. Startups are founded in SV (and other
| tech hubs both in and out of the US) because it's an
| intersection of high quality talent, permissive laws that
| make it easy to do business (although that doesn't appear
| to be the case in SV anymore), capital that's willing and
| able to fund startups, and network effects of being next
| to loads of other tech companies. Europe is missing
| pretty much all of that outside talent, and many would
| argue that even that is questionable because of the
| typical European work ethic.
| ajross wrote:
| "Founding" and "located in" are rather different though.
| I take this discussion to be about "Does Europe get a
| reasonable share of world tech revenue and activity?".
| And, duh, yes it does. It just doesn't have the
| Googleplex or Apple's weird circle thing.
| mejutoco wrote:
| An additional reason for the location could be that
| vcs/founders are located there.
|
| I have seen a similar pattern, where a company has an
| office in an unusual place because one of the founders
| lives there, and does not want to relocate.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Switzerland is definitely not low cost. And it's where
| the majority of innovation happens at FAANG Europeans
| office.
|
| Truth is, these offices are mostly there to be able to
| use L1 visas.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| Low cost? Amsterdam? I wish.
| BossingAround wrote:
| They have offices in Sillicon Valley to tap into the
| desire of the locals to work themselves to death by the
| age of 35, so that they can hopefully retire before they
| die in order to reclaim back the health they lost while
| trying to "make it." Nothing more.
| _ph_ wrote:
| That is definitely true for most large European cities,
| and that is where lots of the offices are.
| sohtym wrote:
| The FAANG companies are 25 years old at this point, they
| aren't that relevant to today's situation. Europe has had
| many large companies going, but most got acquired by their US
| competitors. In part because they could use offshore assets
| and also avoid taxes once acquired.
|
| But that is also only partly relevant, because the same is
| true of the US. If the US is doing so well by that metric
| where are the next US FAANG companies? The reality is that
| neither Europe nor the US moved up the value chain but
| sideways to primarily offer services.
|
| That isn't because of manufacturing. Many think so because
| they don't know much about manufacturing. It is because of
| the cost of living. Western economies can't support a
| knowledge based ecosystem. I can have things made in Europe,
| or China. It doesn't matter. Where can I go and develop a
| product for years, or work my way up in a product company, or
| eventually hire a hundred people to do it, all without
| suffering? The answer is nowhere because the market is
| dominated by service focused companies that require less
| start time and have a less variable success rate. In China,
| its almost in every decent city.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > they aren't that relevant to today's situation
|
| They're definitely relevant in that they (plus a few others
| such as Red Hat, Salesforce, LinkedIn, etc etc etc) are the
| highest canopies in the US tech forest, meaning it's harder
| to grow as tall as them without being acquired by one of
| them. Possibly OpenAI could be one if it keeps doing well,
| and isn't swallowed by Microsoft.
| [deleted]
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| Nokia, Ericson, cars, oil sector ++ dont worry
| marvel_boy wrote:
| Ericsson (with two 's'): just a integrator of third party
| equipment, European cars: they will not outlive the EV
| paradigm. Yes, Europe is dying.
| riffraff wrote:
| > European cars: they will not outlive the EV paradigm
|
| and yet WV sold >800k electric vehicles in 2022,
| Stellantis sold >500k and BMW sold >400k.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Yeah, that's an odd take.
|
| I would probably peg Japan as most likely to be left
| behind by EV, to the point where Toyota is spreading FUD
| in Japan about EVs being a dead-end in favor of hydrogen
| fuel cell cars.
| scriptproof wrote:
| Maybe you bury europe before it dies. There are sectors still
| successful: - Airbus. - Space. - Nuclear. - Trains. -
| Startups. - Lithography. - etc...
| sdze wrote:
| Very nice list of examples why people should stick to index
| investing for a pension plan.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| And why relying on an employer existing and being financially
| capable in 30+ years makes defined benefit pensions not make
| sense.
| zeristor wrote:
| On reading up about Pye, I found an interesting story about the
| valve EF50:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF50
|
| Used for TV, and then for radar in WWII.
|
| Added:
|
| http://www.r-type.org/articles/art-021.htm
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| This is something to think about.
|
| The research that went into things like this was so intense
| and demanded very rare individuals to become deeply engaged
| in the applicable aspects of natural science, that key
| progress was made in scattered areas after leaving the rest
| of the world's equally-qualified technologists in the dust.
|
| The companies were built as manufacturers of consumables,
| based on cheap materials, labor, and mass production.
|
| All this had occurred with wartime stakes and urgency.
|
| With the arrival of transistors, a new generation of
| researchers was deployed and the vacuum tube people continued
| their momentum not that much longer.
|
| Different kinds of fabrication facilities were needed for
| transistors, and mainly for supplying OEMs, these were also
| not consumable like bulbs in sockets.
|
| The strong urgency could not be re-established and I think a
| lot of the manufacturers had difficulty navigating technology
| migrations like this. A number of pivots did not include
| continued component manufacturing.
|
| Interestingly, a big vacuum chamber is where they make the
| semiconductors, carefully vaporizing solid-state materials in
| the process. And when the silicon comes out, you can make a
| radio without needing the little bulbs containing your own
| personal vacuums.
|
| Take a look at the comments here for some 21st century
| readings of an EF50:
|
| https://www.radiomuseum.org/tubes/tube_ef50.html
|
| Another decade of advances gave us things like the EF96
| (6AG5/6186) for much higher frequency use:
|
| https://tube-data.com/sheets/093/6/6AG5.pdf
|
| Well I'm not a radio man but these are great for audio, even
| though they're a preamp their internal structure is a bit
| like a beam power tube:
|
| https://www.radiomuseum.org/tubes/tube_6186.html
|
| So pentode, triode, tetrode they are tasty and the sockets
| are not too unobtainable.
| rayiner wrote:
| > Still, I think that's only part of the problem. Manufacturing
| and innovation in Western countries are now in a state of
| malaise and they're being quickly overtaken by Asian countries
| such as China. Like it or not, the West generally is in a state
| of decline.
|
| It's also worth connecting this to the economic stagnation in
| Western Europe since 2008. GDP per capita has not budged in the
| UK, France, and Italy in more than a decade.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| I think you mean Real GPD per capita, not GDP per capita
| alone as the former is also adjusted for inflation.
|
| GDP per capita definitely grew, but once you subtract
| inflation, it's close to zero for some countries or even
| negative for countries like Greece, Italy compared to their
| pre-2008 numbers. Ouch!
|
| Most of the growth has been in Eastern Europe and the very
| wealthy ones like Netherlands, Luxembourg, etc.
| zx8080 wrote:
| How does the GDP per capita been rising, especially
| considering young generation has been leaving in mass right
| since the EU association signing and borders open?
| rapsey wrote:
| > Still, I think that's only part of the problem. Manufacturing
| and innovation in Western countries are now in a state of
| malaise and they're being quickly overtaken by Asian countries
| such as China. Like it or not, the West generally is in a state
| of decline.
|
| Not really. China is low end manufacture and has not moved
| meaningfully out of that niche at all. In fact they are losing
| their advantage with no alternative to fall back on. Chinese
| assembly is not nearly as cheap as it was and their playbook is
| being copied by other countries (India, Vietnam).
| Incipient wrote:
| I'd be very interested to see some data on these trends.
| Without numbers it's impossible to say.
|
| I'd be fairly confident in some rough generalisations, but
| the specifics and magnitude I have no idea on:
|
| - for the last few decades the west has moved bulk value add
| manufacturing to China, and we've grown their
| economy/influence accordingly
|
| - China is definitely doing more high tech manufacturing,
| wafers and EV tech - basic manufacturing is definitely moving
| in part to cheaper countries
| vincentdm wrote:
| Here's a relevant article about it:
| https://www.economist.com/business/2023/02/20/global-
| firms-a...
|
| Some quotes:
|
| "under a weighty combination of commercial and political
| pressure, foreign companies are beginning to pluck up the
| courage if not to leave China entirely, then at least to
| look beyond it for growth. Chinese labour is no longer that
| cheap: between 2013 and 2022 manufacturing wages doubled,
| to an average of $8.27 per hour (see chart). More
| important, the deepening Sino-American techno-decoupling is
| forcing manufacturers of high-tech products, especially
| those involving advanced semiconductors, to rethink their
| reliance on China."
|
| "This alternative Asian supply chain--call it Altasia--
| looks evenly matched with China in heft, or better (see
| map). Its collective working-age population of 1.4bn dwarfs
| even China's 950m. Altasia is home to 155m people aged
| between 25 and 54 with a tertiary education, compared with
| 145m in China--and, in contrast to ageing China, their
| ranks look poised to expand. In many parts of Altasia wages
| are considerably lower than in China: hourly manufacturing
| wages in India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and
| Vietnam are below $3, around one-third of what Chinese
| workers now demand. And the region is already an exporting
| power: its members sold $634bn-worth of merchandise to
| America in the 12 months to September 2022, edging out
| China's $614bn."
|
| "Altasia will certainly not replace China soon, let alone
| overnight. In January, for example, Panasonic announced a
| big expansion of its Chinese operations. But in time China
| is likely to become less attractive to foreign
| manufacturers. Chinese labour is not getting any cheaper
| and its graduates are not getting much more numerous.
| America may yet realise that reducing its reliance on China
| in practice requires closer ties with friendly countries,
| including membership of the cptpp, the precursor of which
| collapsed after America pulled out in 2017. And as a
| budding alternative to China, Altasia has no equal."
| trabant00 wrote:
| Just in the tech world Xiaomi and Huawei invalidate your
| position. I have personally own several Xiaomi products from
| smartphones, smartwatch, robot vacuum, electric scooter, etc,
| and they are both better and cheaper than their western
| competitors. Not copies either, they come with their own
| designs and features. The most surprising for me where the
| vacuum robot who navigates better at 200$ with only a front
| facing infrared sensor that 1000$ western products with 360
| degree laser.
| lahsuk wrote:
| They are cheap but the amount of advertising in their
| products atleast from where I am makes it is a turn off for
| me.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Look on the back of your iPhone or MacBook. Where does it say
| it's manufactured?
|
| Apple and others don't build their stuff in China anymore
| because it's the cheapest option. Far from it. The
| electronics supplier I used to have as a customer would
| assemble stuff in Ukraine(pre-war) because the worker wages
| there were lower than in China. But they didn't assemble
| iPhones there or anything close to that quality, complexity
| or volume. If you just need a country to assemble pre-made
| components as if it were LEGOs, that's not dealing with super
| high volumes and high complexity, like white goods for
| example, then even Eastern Europe is cheaper than China.
|
| They build stuff in China because of the entire supply chain
| supporting the manufacture and assembly of such cutting edge
| devices in high volume. Stuff like machining millions of
| small aluminium/steel frames, batteries, tiny screws, custom
| flex cables or connectors. It's much easier to ramp up
| production of iPhones when a lot of these parts (outside the
| semiconductor chips which need to be imported) are developed
| and manufactured right next door to the final assembly and
| testing plant, instead of another country. Also, it makes
| your prototyping much faster since you can have the next
| iteration of a part on your doorstep in less than 24 hours.
|
| Now China is already gaining significant market share in
| cutting edge OLED display market to muscle out Samsung and
| LG. Look up BOE. Apple used their displays in the iPhone 14
| series and will use even more in the iPhone 15. China was
| also pushing strong in cutting edge chip manufacturing but US
| & allies made sure to knee-cap them in time to slow them
| down.
|
| Scuffing off China as just a country for cheap manufacturing
| is a gross underestimation that hasn't been true in over 10
| years.
| flakeoil wrote:
| > China is low end manufacture and has not moved meaningfully
| out of that niche at all.
|
| Eh, just about everything is manufactured in China. It's hard
| to find anything that cannot be manufactured there. It's
| however easy to find things that cannot be manufactured in
| Europe or America anymore (at least at scales above lab
| volumes).
| rapsey wrote:
| China imports huge amounts of German machinery to run their
| factories.
| flakeoil wrote:
| Well, Kuka for one, is not German anymore. It's owned by
| a Chinese company.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| > Like it or not, the West generally is in a state of decline.
|
| I don't like it! I think the first indicator of the west's
| downfall was our declining production of bricks. My parents
| warned me of how poor I would one day be because our steel
| production was in decline. Now I prepare my children to live in
| the poverty of the United States where they have no hope of
| ever working in a radio factory.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I think Siemens fits in the list as well.
| rippercushions wrote:
| Siemens is still huge in all sorts of markets not readily
| visible to the general public: electricity generation and
| transmission, industrial automation, medical equipment,
| rolling stock (trains etc), and much more.
| Daishiman wrote:
| Siemens is an enormous high-tech conglomerate and their most
| visible consumer arm is quite irrelevant next to they
| production of precision manufacturing tools, nuclear
| reactors, etc
| hef19898 wrote:
| The whole home appliance business is now owned by Bosch (it
| used to be a joint-venture between those two companies
| previously).
|
| Consumer electronics so, everything from cameras to radios
| and TVs, was eaten in the 80s by Japanese companies. Then
| Korean companies stepped in, with actual manufacturing being
| outsourced across East Asia, from China and Taiwan to Vietnam
| and Thailand, and everyone between, left and right. Now
| Chinese companies entered the market not just as suppliers,
| but as actual brands, e.g. Huawei.
| varjag wrote:
| German Leica is still one of the few remaining digital
| camera manufacturers (and now world's largest film camera
| manufacturer).
| hef19898 wrote:
| Few digital camera manufacturers? Besides Nikon, Canon,
| Fujifilm, Sony, Panasonic and virtually every smartphone
| manufacturer in the world?
|
| Leica glass is top notch, the real Leica glass, not the
| branded smartphone crap lenses. And Leicas are, and
| always have been, incredibly over priced for what they
| are, a little bit like Apple and Tesla. They are great
| cameras to use so, I had one for a project 20 years (too
| scared to actually count) ago. Great camera, even greater
| lenses. But now way near as much better as Canon or Nikon
| as the price would suggest.
| varjag wrote:
| It's strange you didn't mention Konica, Pentax, Minolta,
| Olympus, Hasselblad oh right that's because they are dead
| or a virtual brand only. And the rest are pale shadows of
| themselves 10 years ago. The market is dead, dedicated
| digital cameras are at these point feel more obsolete
| than film.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Come again? Hasselblad still is, and always has been, a
| photographers dream. A niche product, desired and out of
| reach for most. That didn't change. Olympus is one of the
| current mirrorless brands, an isn't doing to bad, at
| least their cameras seem to be good from what I hear.
|
| The entry level and point-and-shoot camera market is more
| or less dead so. That segment was completely taken over
| by smartphones, for valid reasons.
| antiterra wrote:
| Hasselblad's current digital offering is only really
| interesting in the commercial space where you only really
| need one if you're getting paid enough to rent one on the
| first place. Plenty of alternatives exist as well when it
| comes to digital backs. The old film cameras are of niche
| interest, but Hassleblad isn't making money off that.
| hef19898 wrote:
| With medium format like Hasselblad, the back are anyway
| seperate from the body. Hasselblads are great cameras,
| Leicas as well. Objects of desire both.
|
| I did some middleformat work as a teenager, not with
| Hasselblad so. But this whole looking down into the view
| finder to see a mirrored picture makes you think a lot
| more about composition and so on. I liked it, but film is
| just to much work for me at the moment. And digital backs
| for medium format way too expensive. I loved medium
| format in black and white so. Damn, now I have to find
| time to go through my dad's archive with him!
| nradov wrote:
| Olympus sold off their digital camera business to a
| private equity firm. It's now a shadow of it's former
| self with no expectation of growth.
|
| Sony makes the sensors for Hasselblad. The sensor is the
| heart of modern digital cameras so Hasselblad isn't
| adding much beyond a brand name. Eventually Sony will
| probably eat their lunch.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Late day SLR makers, full-frame that is, was basically a
| duopoly between Nikon and Canon. As was early DSLRs, so
| you had some more brands then. If anything with
| mirrorless there seem to be more camera makers around
| than before, and being on par with each other. As opposed
| to SLRs or the early DSLR market were it was basically
| just Canon and Nikon.
| antiterra wrote:
| Sony had a pretty solid hold on a chunk of that DSLR
| prosumer/enthusiast market as well. Fuji and some others
| started making headway right before mirrorless started
| taking off.
| zirgs wrote:
| Minolta didn't die - they sold their camera business to
| SONY. SONY still makes cameras.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Minolta cameras almost changed names to Sony cameras, one
| can say.
| paganel wrote:
| I had a Siemens-labeled (and I guess Siemens-manufactured)
| desktop PC in the early 2000s, crazy to think about it now.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I think that part of Siemens ended up with Fujitsu. No idea
| so what happened to them.
| jabl wrote:
| We had Fujitsu-Siemens PC's at a previous job. I think at
| some point they dropped the "-Siemens" part of the name
| so I guess Fujitsu bought out the shares and went all
| alone.
| amelius wrote:
| There are very small companies building PCs nowadays, see
| Framework, Pine, Purism, etc. So a much larger company can
| do it too without even thinking if they should. Also they
| are more B2B oriented, and the consumer part was probably a
| side effect. Further they were probably using headless PCs
| in their industrial systems too. It's not at all strange.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| "seem to lose drive and direction", thats what happen to the
| company I work (until they close our factory by the end of
| 2023). For several years, there had been many ideas what to do
| and to change. But really just ideas, nobody did really decide
| and said "ok, let's do it". For years I used to say we have no
| idea where we like to go with our company. Now I know, our
| factory get closed be the end of 2023.
| vasco wrote:
| Including Australia is weird, what does western mean in this
| context?
| gruturo wrote:
| Australia is politically aligned with the "western" world
| (USA's sphere of influence) rather than with russia's
| ("Eastern bloc" at least until it fell apart) and it's quite
| typical to see it listed as such, despite its location on the
| planet.
|
| As we're discussing manufacturing, the opposite of the
| western world nowadays would be China (and India, Vietnam,
| etc)
| 3np wrote:
| Some people even include Japan and Korea in "the West".
| Unqualified, it's an ambiguous term.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I include Japan and South Korea in "the west", they share
| political and economical ideologies and military
| alliances with the USA.
|
| The term itself is an artifact of geographical
| considerations from the Cold War era, with Europe and
| Russia being west and east of the other respectively.
|
| Nowadays with Russia increasingly demonstrating their
| ineptitude, China is starting to fill "the east" shoes.
| Maursault wrote:
| > The term itself is an artifact of geographical
| considerations from the Cold War era, with Europe and
| Russia being west and east of the other respectively.
|
| Not so much, no. The concept of the "Western World"
| originated in the actions of the Roman emperor Diocletian
| who divided the Roman Empire in 286 into two halves, each
| with its own separate capital, government, and church.
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| Vietnam and the US are weirdly close considering what the
| US did to them. In 20 years, I expect relations with VN to
| look like our relationship with SK.
| throw2311 wrote:
| Rich. It means rich. Before Japan in the 80s it also meant
| white.
| quonn wrote:
| I call bullshit. The west has much more to do with economic
| and political systems and the associated beliefs.
|
| Poland, for example, is not as rich as China, yet Poland is
| part of the west and China is not. And there are many
| examples like that.
| throw2311 wrote:
| Poland is _not_ part of the West.
| Claude_Shannon wrote:
| As a Pole all I can say to your comment is "lol".
| hef19898 wrote:
| Poland is an EU and NATO member. You aren't getting any
| more West than that.
| skissane wrote:
| At the UN, "the West" officially means the "Western
| European and Others Group" (WEOG). Poland is not a
| member, it is a member of the Eastern European Group
| instead. Of course, many consider the UN Regional Groups
| to be a bit of a Cold War relic. But still, it goes to
| show that whether or not Poland is part of "the West" all
| depends on how you choose to define "the West"
| edgyquant wrote:
| Who cares? The way normal people use the term "the west"
| includes Poland. Some bureaucracy saying it doesn't is
| irrelevant.
| skissane wrote:
| I think your assumption that "normal people" all use the
| term "the west" in the same way is highly questionable.
| Many "normal people" don't really think about what the
| boundaries of "the west" are and either don't have an
| opinion on whether or not Poland belongs in it, or else
| have a different opinion from yours.
| mejutoco wrote:
| "the West" does not officially mean anything, other than
| vaguely refer to Cold war sides. This is why it is not a
| very useful model (like left and right in politics).
|
| Poland is definitely Western aligned, as Japan or
| Australia, which shows the absurdity of this model.
| throw2311 wrote:
| [flagged]
| quonn wrote:
| Yes, both Bulgaria and Cyprus are without any doubt part
| of the west. Both are even part of the European Union.
| Claiming that they are not part of the west is laughable.
| Bulgaria is adjacent to Greece which is also part of the
| west. Culturally large parts of the Balkans are also part
| of the west.
| throw2311 wrote:
| That's news to my family in Cyprus who very much think of
| themselves as living in the middle east.
| quonn wrote:
| Since you also think that Poland is not the west this
| does not surprise me that your family thinks so.
|
| This thread speaks for itself. So I'll leave it at that.
| throw2311 wrote:
| Yes, it really does. It's not like the Warsaw packt was
| named after a town in Poland or anything.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Poland very much is part of the West, and is actually on
| course to become one of the richest countries in Europe
| over the next twenty years as measured by GDP per capita.
| throw2311 wrote:
| Over that same period Europe is projected to become
| poorer than Asia in gdp ppp for the first time in 500
| years. I'm sure I won't be hearing Poles making the case
| they are actually part of Asia within those 20 years.
| edgyquant wrote:
| What... does this have to do with anything? You said
| Poland isn't part of the west, it is.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The whole west/east dichotomy is an artifact of the Cold
| War. Countries aligned with the US and Europe are "west",
| countries aligned with the Soviets (now Russia) are
| "east".
|
| Nowadays China is taking the helm of "east" from Russia,
| but either way it's a geopolitical concept and remnant.
| Maursault wrote:
| > The whole west/east dichotomy is an artifact of the
| Cold War.
|
| Stop saying this because it isn't true. It is an artifact
| of the Tetrachy of the Roman Empire.
| scottLobster wrote:
| You're confusing cause and effect. The West is defined by
| embracing enlightenment values, democracy, and capitalism.
| The "East" is defined as those powers that embraced
| authoritarian rule and communism.
|
| For a while there was legit economic competition, Soviet
| GDP outpaced the US for a time in the 50s, but eventually
| the economies of scale and efficiency produced by the
| capitalist West out-competed the Soviets and won the Cold
| War.
|
| Saudi Arabia is rich, it is not "Western"
| quonn wrote:
| Australia has always been part of the west. It feels
| culturally like a mix of US and UK. "The west" has never been
| geographical. It is named like that because the center of
| gravity has is western Europe and the US and perhaps more
| importantly in was named in opposition to the Soviet union
| and so looking from Europe is looks like "the west".
| Maursault wrote:
| > "The west" has never been geographical.
|
| Except in its origins, which referred to Rome as opposed to
| Constantinople.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Like it or not, the West generally is in a state of decline.
|
| "In 2000, Europe had 41 of the biggest 100 companies. Now it
| only has 15. A 63% decline in just two decades. The Economist
| says the "most striking" reason is the lack of successful
| startups.
|
| 63% declines are something you can't repeat too many times
| without creating the kind of situation historians give names
| to. Two more such periods, and Europe only has 2 of the top 100
| companies."
|
| https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1400777576965185539
| raverbashing wrote:
| I'm not sure this is a very good measure. It is worrying, for
| sure, but the top 100 is cramped
|
| I'd argue the total market cap (or maybe revenue, etc) of
| top-500 might be a better measure. Surely it has gone down
| but maybe by less
|
| Also China's growth was the exceptional thing here
|
| (but yeah European management of those classic big companies
| fumbled _a lot_ )
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Market cap wise Europe looks equally worse. The market cap
| of the US top tech companies is greater than EU's tech
| sector combined. Ouch!
|
| Europe's biggest tech companies leaders in the field are
| Airbus, SAP and ASML.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Market cap is, IMHO, not the best measure so. Revenue or
| market share seems a bit better. As an example, Japanese
| companies used to have _huge_ market caps in the 90s,
| today not so much. Those companies still exist so, and
| are quite large players in their fields.
|
| And to be honest, Google is more ad-tech then anything
| else, Netflix is entertainment. Amazon is, depending on
| how you measure it, 50% retail / logistics and 50% AWS.
| Which leaves MS and Apple as true tech companies, while
| Facebook is social media.
|
| Retail, as in eCommerce, was ground breaking tech when
| Amazon started. Today, comparable tech is available from
| vendors like Shopify (web shops) and WiseTech (logistics
| and fulfillment). Social media was ground breaking when
| Facebook and MySpace came along, now it is more about
| selling ads then anything else. Streaming was ground
| breaking when YouTube and Netflix came around, now there
| are countless streaming services. And some of the older
| ones, looking at you Amazon, resembles traditional TV a
| lot. After all they sell ads now _between_ streaming
| (FreeVee or what 's it called) and broadcast new episodes
| on specific days, looking at you Amazon and Disney.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| The problem is not that big corporations fail - they
| inevitably will and they arguably _should_. The problem is
| that there are no new ones, or at least not enough to make
| up for the losses.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yes, however there are a couple of spin-offs and
| rearrangements that happen before the "main company"
| failing
|
| Even in the case of Philips it spun off NXP (which is not
| going great neither to be fair), ASML, Signify (lightning
| business etc)
|
| Siemens also dug their own hole in severe mismanagement
| ("old people" running the show) and I think there's not
| much more left there
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> NXP (which is not going great neither to be fair)_
|
| Out of curiosity, why do you think that?
| raverbashing wrote:
| I stand corrected, maybe I had read a slightly older FY
| results https://media.nxp.com/news-releases/news-release-
| details/nxp...
|
| (though Qualcomm has aprox 3x the quarterly revenue)
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| QUALCOMM sells phone modems which is a much more
| lucrative business than NXP selling automotive chips and
| generic ARM microcontrollers.
| raverbashing wrote:
| And NXP sold those (up to 3G models IIRC).
| https://www.nxp.com/products/no-longer-
| manufactured/3g-singl...
|
| Why are they not selling anymore?
|
| https://www.nxp.com/products/wireless:WIRELESS-
| CONNECTIVITY
| ogogmad wrote:
| Does anyone think they know the cause?
| brabel wrote:
| Let me try: once you've reached a certain level of
| development, your priorities change. You don't care
| anymore about making more money than everyone else, you
| care about living a life you enjoy, even if that means
| you're no longer number 1 on something.
|
| Other countries that are still on the first phase and do
| prioritize beating everyone else, to the detriment of
| their health and personal life, will start overtaking
| you... with time, they too will start giving some
| importance to a healthy life and will start falling
| behind (China may already have reached that point, as we
| now see some other Asian countries taking some pieces of
| the cake - helped no doubt by the West's antagony to
| China and its authoritarian government)... and so the
| cycle continues...
|
| The countries that reach the top level in qualify of
| life, like USA, Australia and most of Europe, tend to
| still stay quite wealthy, it seems... as they still have
| a highly educated population capable of creating value
| for the country and their fellow citizens... so this
| story seems to be going well so far.
| OnuRC wrote:
| Probably real answer is aging.
| eecc wrote:
| Hmm, not so sure about that. You don't need to lose your
| health while inventing and riding the waves of progress.
|
| I tend to blame myopic capitalistic class, more
| interested in punishing trade unions, looking for '800s
| production organization before anything else.
| nradov wrote:
| The lack of any major threat since 1991 has allowed them
| the political luxury of being able to make policy
| decisions based on ideology rather than objective
| reality. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and resulting
| energy crisis has demonstrated the failure of that
| approach so now they have to pivot. Expect a new wave of
| innovation led by the energy and defense sectors.
| mejutoco wrote:
| The green ones are being attracted to the US already.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| Until a Republican gets in power again. If we've learned
| anything from Trump it's that America is not as
| politically stable as it seemed.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| I've talked to people involved in energy/climate/ESG
| policy decision making. I wouldn't get my hopes up. Their
| religion (some might call it ideology) overshadows
| everything.
| geysersam wrote:
| This measurement is relative. Does it indicate decline in
| Europe or development in Asia?
|
| It's unreasonable to expect a region with 1/16 of the world
| population to have 4/10 of the largest companies in the long
| term.
|
| Also, is "company size" really that good a measure of
| economic success? Seems like it could have to do with the
| local conditions encouraging smaller economic entities.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| AnonMO wrote:
| why is HP on the list? its revenues are on par or slightly
| below competitors in the sector and if you add the enterprise
| revenues its more of a 1 to 1. Hp consumer revenue 60 billion,
| HP enterprise revenue 30 billion in comparison to dell 100
| billion and lenovo 70 billion in annual revenue the two include
| enterprise revenues which isn't spun off like with HP. All
| three are at peak revenues. Aside from that cisco, ubiquiti,
| nvdia, amd, intel(ish),LAM, AMAT, micron are the best in their
| fields honestly its seems like EU companies are in shambles not
| US take a look at ericsson vs huawei idk if the US has any real
| competitors in telecommunication hardware cisco is more of a
| networking company nowadays.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| The current HP is a tiny slice of their former glory. Most of
| the company is gone.
| AnonMO wrote:
| Hows so? aside from not having FAANG clout Its literally
| the only company on that list that still grows yoy and its
| revenue has all but recovered since the down trend after
| the 2008 crash if you include the enterprise. Even the
| number of patents given has been growing
| Maursault wrote:
| > How so?
|
| It have been pretty deviating in Nov. 2015 when HP lost
| _ewlett- ackard_.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They're missing Agilent, Keysight, their IC and LED fabs
| and other peripheral businesses.
| [deleted]
| Aloha wrote:
| Here are some others - Zenith, and Motorola too - both exist in
| some form, but are shadows of their former selves. Also,
| notably - Western Electric.
|
| Zenith was quite successful, and was making TV sets in the US
| until the early 90's - but eventually the lower cost of
| overseas manufacturing caught up with them.
|
| Motorola and Western are the saddest though, Motorola made
| everything, soup to nuts used in their products, and then bit
| by bit sold off the bits util they were left with two way
| radios (Motorola Solutions is the survivor of the original
| Motorola Inc). Western never really figured out divestiture,
| there are bits of pieces of it left, if anything Avaya is the
| closest to a spiritual successor to it (part numbering styles
| and engineering style).
| bluedays wrote:
| I had a Zenith tv growing up. I beat the hell out of that
| thing. It was indestructible. I was always hooking and
| unhooking my game systems to it and I'm told often you would
| hear loud crashes as it went slamming into the ground but it
| never broke. Eventually we changed over to flat screens and
| we got rid of the tv, and I'm not sure what happens to that
| tv. Someone might still be using it today. I wonder if the
| downfall of Zenith is that they made their products too well.
| Aloha wrote:
| I bought a Zenith System III 21 inch table top set made in
| 1982 in 2000 or 2001 for 5 dollars at a yard sale. It
| lasted another 18 years.
|
| TV's were expected in that time period to last 20+ years,
| they were a major investment.
|
| The other interesting thing about Zenith is, its not
| uncommon to buy an older Zenith table top radio and have it
| work out of the box (and by older, I mean, tubes), they use
| mostly Mica Capacitors, and they seem to last forever.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| ridgered4 wrote:
| I had a Zenith from the 1980s that I eventually had to just
| throw out as I didn't really have space for it and the 20"
| size had been obsolete for some tie. The thing wouldn't
| die. It actually had a better picture than some later TVs
| I'd owned before I inherited it from my parents. I still
| have mixed feelings about letting it go.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Here's a GREAT IEEE article about the death of Zenith. Was on
| HN a while ago.
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/zenith-tv
|
| Delves deeper into the "lower cost of overseas manfuacturing"
| as cause of death for the US TV industry, with a focus on
| Zenith. Zenith saw this coming and tried to avoid it by
| investing in technology and R&D - and unfortunately chose to
| invest in technically superior but unpopular or
| uncommoditizable technologies like Betamax, digital signal
| transmission standards, and early analog HDTV. Heck, they
| paid to develop the standard for stereo TV broadcast audio,
| then gave it away royalty-free.
| Aloha wrote:
| I enjoyed that. I disagree with some of the suggestions in
| there, RCA went to PCB's early (so did Philco, who went
| even earlier), and the reliability of their products
| markedly suffered for it. As I mentioned in a parallel
| article, it's not uncommon to find older (60's era) Zenith
| electronics that still work as new from the box. Zenith
| waited until the mainstream use of transistors to move to
| PCB's because it solved the primary issue of PCB's - heat.
| There (still) is no reliable way to put tubes on a PCB and
| have it last, and this was particularly true for television
| applications one, because of the amount of heat generated
| by particular tubes used for certain aspects of TV design,
| and because of the sheer number of them. Zenith went to
| PCB's for the Transistorized sections and kept point to
| point wiring for the tube portions in hybrid sets. It's
| part of why they had a good reputation for quality - one
| that persists today.
|
| Interestingly enough, there is still a small rump of Zenith
| humming along in Illinois, mostly doing R&D and Technology
| Licensing. LG owns them now, I've often wondered if LG ever
| introduced US Television production, if they'd do it under
| the Zenith brand name.
|
| https://zenith.com
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > There's several things that seem to characterize many of
| these failures, the first is that when founders leave or die
| companies often seem to lose drive and direction, and second
| companies become too big and diversification seems to kill
| their R&D/innovation.
|
| The latter is the downfall of most conglomerates. Kodak
| invented the digital camera and then failed to capitalize
| because they were afraid it would cannibalize their film
| division. Which was _true_ -- it _did_ -- but then the digital
| camera business went to someone else. Leadership needs to be
| able to make hard calls like that before it 's too late.
|
| Which founders tend to be better at than MBAs.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Manufacturing and innovation in Western countries are now in a
| state of malaise and they're being quickly overtaken by Asian
| countries such as China. Like it or not, the West generally is
| in a state of decline."
|
| I think this has a lot to do with ever stricter environmental
| regulations; construction is hitting the same roadblock,
| environmental assessments are onerous in many places of the
| West. As a result, manufacturing moves to Asia and housing
| doesn't get built at all.
|
| Software, which doesn't face the same hurdles, flourishes in
| the West. A typical consumer combo is Asian hardware with
| European/American software. I don't think we are out of
| innovative _spirit_ just yet, we rather have to prune the
| regulations a bit, because well-intentioned or no, one can
| regulate himself to complete stagnation.
| techdmn wrote:
| I think you are on to something, but I would phrase it a
| little differently. Trade policy has clearly been designed to
| allow large multi-nationals to take advantage of lack of
| regulation in developing countries - little to no labor,
| environmental or other restrictions. (You know, the things
| that generally make western life bearable.) It was clear what
| the result of this would be: A lot of money being made off
| the decline of the West. I view it similarly to the way a
| C-Suite can bleed all the investment out of a successful
| company, making money hand over fist while they drive it into
| the ground. (G.E. & Sears come to mind.) Turns out you can do
| the same things with a country, or even a group of countries.
| A huge amount of wealth has been transferred to powerful
| individuals by extracting the decades of investment that
| built the world-leading economies of the West.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| My previous comment is obviously unpopular. Somehow, many
| people in the software industry, which is one of the least
| regulated activites on the planet, theoretically love
| regulatory burden placed on _other_ people, as if "more is
| better". No, more isn't always better.
|
| But yes, I might have phrased my point obscurely.
|
| As an example of what I mean. I moved into a new building
| here, in Czechia, twice in my life. For the first time in
| 2008, for the second time in 2022. On both occassions, I
| received the full documentation stack (in paper) for the
| building.
|
| The 2022 stack is almost three times as thick as the 2008
| stack. Endless reams upon reams of certificates,
| medaillons, permissions, test results etc. Is the 2022
| building three times as ecological as the 2008 one? Not
| even remotely, the 2008 building was just fine in all
| parameters I could judge, a nice middle-class home with low
| energy footprint.
|
| Somehow, the bureaucratic documentation requirements
| tripled in 14 years, surely not overnight; more likely, a
| new regulation came into force every fortnight or so,
| adding a page or two to the total stack. Each of those
| steps was probably seen as insignificant by the
| authorities, but their aggregate effect must be
| significant. People spent time and resources achieving all
| those certifications; at the end of the day, it was me who
| paid for all that work.
|
| And for what gain precisely? The law of diminishing returns
| is strong in this regard. Most of the really important
| regulatory stuff was probably already in place by 2008. We
| didn't live in mud huts with outhouses and didn't burn
| dirty oil for heat in that building.
|
| This is the kind of red tape running amok that leads to
| stagnation and high living costs in the West.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That just sounds like arbitrage, and absent laws preventing
| trade, if business A does not take advantage, then business
| B would.
|
| And if country A prevented trade, then country B would take
| advantage and reap the benefits (at least short term,
| although the short term can be decades long).
| mschuster91 wrote:
| To add to that list two iconic German brands: AEG and Grundig.
| yawniek wrote:
| also olivetti, Italy who brought to market the very first
| personal computer.
| LeanderK wrote:
| what about Bosch or Siemens? They still product things like
| dishwashers or vacuums.
| rbanffy wrote:
| My uncle used to work for Philips in Brazil at its peak. They had
| just completed building a data-center (we didn't call them like
| that back then) in the 70's, IIRC, to host the many very large
| IBM mainframes they operated. It was a thing to behold - the
| whole company connected via 3278 terminals, running e-mail and
| other productivity applications on IBM PROFS (later to be called
| OfficeVision).
|
| The building now hosts the biggest datacenter of one of the
| largest Brazilian hosting companies.
|
| Too many companies moved from making things to licensing
| technology and brands, forgetting that the best way to get
| valuable technologies and brands is by making things.
| teekert wrote:
| Don't we consider ASML a tech giant? A spin-out of Philips btw,
| as is NXP for example.
|
| Edit: Should have watched the movie first. To answer my question:
| I guess we don't. And, it's electronics not tech indeed,
| otherwise it could have included Siemens for example.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It's very important in the tech market but as a company it's
| not a giant.
| seper8 wrote:
| Lol.
|
| Has a market cap of twice that of netflix but not a giant?
|
| Where do you draw the line?
| paganel wrote:
| ASML is a geo-political play.
|
| When the Chinese will be able to duplicate what ASML is
| doing its share price will go back to "normal", i.e. to 8
| to 10 times less what it is today (that was the level until
| relatively recently).
| seper8 wrote:
| When indeed.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Public perception and whether or not they pay FAANGM
| salaries? Just a wild guess.
| seper8 wrote:
| They absolutely do pay these salaries and for anyone
| aware of what asml does the public perception is very
| positive...
| illiarian wrote:
| 30 000 employees
|
| 21 billion euros revenue, 5.6 billion net income, 50% gross
| margin
|
| 224 billion euro market cap
|
| Not a giant.
| acd wrote:
| I have a old Philishave Philips shaver who is made in the
| netherlands. Replaced the old shaver with a newer Philishave
| shaver made in China. Turns out the old shaver is better than the
| new. The old shaver shaves more closely to the skin for a better
| result more smooth shave.
| Zetobal wrote:
| Western European would be right... there are some eastern
| companies that do fine... Beko etc.
| mothsonasloth wrote:
| Beko is a Turkish company, not Eastern European.
| ibz wrote:
| Beko is Turkish though...
| coldtea wrote:
| Well, Beko is Turkish-owned, so wouldn't exactly qualify as
| "Europe's".
|
| Also not exactly a Phillips level giant (Phillips does 4-5
| times as much revenue today, and was doing even more compared
| to Beko in better days).
| DeathArrow wrote:
| The West is done. A combination of greed, bad politics, poor
| education, degraded culture makes us live the last days in which
| the West matters.
| quonn wrote:
| Agree on greed and education, disagree on everything else.
|
| At least the US still has programmers - in Europe nobody wants
| to program anymore - too much work. The big car companies
| create software centres in Munich and hire thousands on Indians
| on visas there, because there are no Europeans available.
|
| I have recently talked to many young people about ChatGPT and
| their conclusion is that technical skills are irrelevant and
| they should focus only on soft skills.
|
| Well - soft skills are the most basic level - it's just what
| makes us humans. Some day the non-european people doing the
| work will figure out that they can do the managing and talking
| and buzz wording just as good - but that we can't do their work
| because we have given up on learning the skills.
| jen20 wrote:
| Perhaps there are fewer Europeans available because they are
| doing the same thing in the US: making actual money instead
| of the pittance offered by employers in HCOL cities like
| Munich?
| mciancia wrote:
| ...what
|
| I think you are mixing up "nobody want to program in Europe"
| with "nobody wants to program for peanuts in Europe"
| quonn wrote:
| 100k or more are not peanuts in Europe. But it's true that
| this may be part of the problem.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I am making far less than 100k.
| wil421 wrote:
| I've seen a lot more sub EUR100k programmers respond with
| salaries on HN and Reddit than ones close to EUR100k.
|
| A quick google search says the average is 65k in Berlin
| and around 60k in the UK. London is probably higher for
| sure.
| zirgs wrote:
| You can get 50-60k EUR in Eastern Europe these days if
| you know what you're doing. Sure, it's not a FAANG level
| salary, but cost of living is low here. So I would
| definitely not migrate to London if they offered 60k.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Yeah but 60k is not 100k.
| zirgs wrote:
| You can buy an apartment for less than 100k in those
| places though.
| quonn wrote:
| In Munich 90k+ seems to be common. Berlin on the other
| hand has lower costs of living.
| wil421 wrote:
| That would explain it, I should've looked at Munich. I
| thought Berlin would be higher.
| wil421 wrote:
| > I have recently talked to many young people about ChatGPT
| and their conclusion is that technical skills are irrelevant
| and they should focus only on soft skills.
|
| This is a hilarious take. I can reason with a junior
| programmer and walk through the steps to get a result. I
| can't lead of team of ChatGPT bots. The only thing going for
| ChatGPT is it's hubris.
| quonn wrote:
| It's not my take - I'm just describing what people have
| told me. I completely disagree with those people which is
| sort of my point.
| nivenkos wrote:
| The US is doing fine - the Inflation Reduction Act will bring
| back a lot of industry and make the business owners even
| richer.
|
| Of course as the USA's economic dominance is threatened, it
| really ramps up the cannibalisation and exploitation of its
| puppet states in Europe, etc.
| jug wrote:
| Death? Depends on how you look at it.
|
| Check out the end user ratings and product diversity on Prisjakt,
| the main price comparison site in Sweden.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/A2j7mYi.png
|
| That is a very high bar.
|
| Sure, they sold out their production but their brand name is
| pretty strong.
| hobbes78 wrote:
| But it's not really Philips anymore... It's the same with some
| TVs with the Grundig brand, which is also very strong. It's
| just some Chinese factory licensing the brand name... Grundig
| went bankrupt a few years ago...
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| Every time we have one of these threads, it fills to the top with
| denial. Maybe it would be healthier for the EU if people would
| accept the stats and consider how to _improve_ the situation? It
| 's certainly possible - consider Massachusetts turnaround after
| the 90s, same with Pittsburgh, Colombia etc.
|
| Inertia kills economies, dynamism drive them. I see a lot of
| cultural acceptance of "the way it's always been done" here.
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