5 ms·

In search of a European Google

65 points by SandB0x 11y ago

x5n1 11y ago
Europe needs an investment culture similar to the Capitalist American culture. Without that there is no hope for anyone. There need to be investors and technical people in one hub that feed off each other, network with each other, and empower each other. How many American startups are a result of a pissed off employee working at a successful company going off and creating the same thing his or her employer did but better? And this cycle feeding on itself. Or university students with an idea getting all the financial, technical, and managerial support necessary to create the next big thing. You have to understand the process and then try to replicate the process. And each component of the process is as important as the other. You need the whole pie. Not a piece for it to succeed. You can seed this with massive capital expenditure, tens of billions basically poured into private coffers of Caplists, but the process has to be very similar for it to actually work.
- kwhitefoot 11y ago
  > How many American startups are a result of a pissed off employee working at a successful company going off and creating the same thing his or her employer did but better? Some numbers might make your point more convincing.
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    Easily googable and not news Intel started like this. See the companies founded by ex-Googlers
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - xiaoma 11y ago
    All of them, arguably. Google "the traitorous eight".
knz42 11y ago
“The combined value of the top three internet companies in the Americas – so, basically, in America – is around $0.75tn (£0.5tn). In Asia, it’s around $0.5tn. In Africa, it’s $50bn. And in Europe, it’s just $25bn.” In Europe, we have wealth redistribution. A few companies with so much concentrated financial power is not healthy.
- apsec112 11y ago
  Europe has plenty of big companies - Total, Volkswagen, ING, Daimler, Fiat, Siemens, Tesco, BMW, HSBC, Nestle. The problem is that it's very difficult to make new ones. "Mergers aside, the youngest firm in the CAC 40, [France's] main stock index, was founded in 1967."
- dogma1138 11y ago
  Sorry to burst your bubble but "In Europe we have X" is more often than not a "myth", Europe is much more closer to the US it in's overall outlook than most European would think. And as far as educated professionals go then Europe is actually considerably poorer than the US, so unless you're a low skilled worker I would not take so much pride in that.
- adventured 11y ago
  Europe has far more stagnant wealth than America does in fact. Europe's dynasties do not tend to give away their wealth, instead they pass it down through families for generations. Most of Europe's largest companies and fortunes are controlled through family dynasties. American billionaires always dominate the list of most philanthropic.[1] It's also why Europe sees such a low rate of turn-over among their billionaires, and why such a high proportion of their billionaires are derived inherited wealth. [2] [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2013/11/18/the-50-philanthropists-who-have-given-away-the-most-money/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2013/11/18/the-50-ph... [2] http://i.imgur.com/cvTR3q1.png http://i.imgur.com/cvTR3q1.png
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Is an operating business well described as stagnant wealth?
knz42 11y ago
“The combined value of the top three internet companies in the Americas – so, basically, in America – is around $0.75tn (£0.5tn). In Asia, it’s around $0.5tn. In Africa, it’s $50bn. And in Europe, it’s just $25bn.” In Europe, we have wealth redistribution. A few companies with so much concentrated financial power is not healthy.
CM30 11y ago
Personally (as someone from Europe), I'd say the general reasons we don't have an equivalent tp Google or Silicon Valley or any of that sort of thing are more that: 1. European laws are too restrictive. It's especially notable with stuff like the hilariously stupid online tax laws the area has (having to apply different tax rates based on the location of the user rather than the business makes it hugely more complex than it has to be) or the right to be forgotten, but it just feels we're too restrictive here in general. 2. Culture. People in the US seem more ambitious and more willing to risk everyone for the small chance of becoming a millionaire/billionaire at the end of it. People in European countries on the other hand seem to be encouraged to avoid risk and avoid anything that might lead to less job security in the short term. Probably because failure in the US is seen as a minor bump in the road, whereas failure in Europe is seen as the worst possible thing imaginable. 3. Money. Not just in the form of venture capital (though that's a huge reason), but also because US startups tend to pay their employees more, whereas their European equivalents stick to the average local wages. Hence the best programmers, designers and other such people usually either find employment in a more stable company (read, one where there's a work/life balance) or move to the US to work in Silicon Valley. If we want a 'European Google' or European startups in general, we need to become less risk averse, more willing to reward the types of people needed to work in those companies and less obsessed about regulations. Oh, and fix the issues certain areas have with internet connection speeds. The fact that a lot of areas in large cities like London can't get fibre internet and the likes is not helping our tech businesses compete with their US counterparts.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Also: Different languages to cater to right from day 1, better job security so less of a drive to be independent, education tends to prepare for a job rather than for running a company or being a founder.
  - jryle80 11y ago
    > education tends to prepare for a job rather than for running a company or being a founder. This is an interesting point. Can you elaborate?
vlehto 11y ago
"de facto platform, it’s hard to control and even harder to dislodge" There is a Finnish service called irc-galleria.net. It's a service that was created to let irc users to share pictures of themselves to other irc users. It got really big in Finland. They even had big screen in center of Helsinki to show new pictures uploaded to the service. They had this paid feature which let you keep a list of friends in there. Everybody talked about irc-galleria stalking. Then Facebook came. The major difference was that facebook let you make friends for free. Year later nobody remembers irc-galleria. Dislodging a platform is easier than ever. It's enough to make better or cheaper product, then just get lucky. Previously you had to also take distribution and marketing into account and then get lucky.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Dislodging a many-billion-euro incumbent is a lot harder than dislodging a funny irc pic sharing site.
  - vlehto 11y ago
    Funny pic sharing vs. funny digital yearbook. Irc-galleria was many million euro behemoth in the context of Finland. Facebook at the time could not spend even 10k to tackle irc-galleria. Tackling many billion-euro incumbent is probably harder than tackling many million-euro incumbent. But it's probably like twice as hard, not 1000 times harder. And it has happened in less favorable situations before. Look up Toyota.
- 7952 11y ago
  I don't think these big platforms will ever be dislodged exactly, just made irrelevant. Photo sharing used to be difficult enough that it could act as the basis for an entire product category. Now it has been commoditized sufficiently that it can be just added to any product with relative ease. Maybe one day it will be possible to add Google style search technology to any product with ease. At that point the opportunity is to have specialist search as an add-on to other products.
  - 11y ago
jacquesm 11y ago
Well, a European Google would still have to abide by the patent minefield that search has become so it has very little chance of getting off the ground without a breakthrough in search engine technology outside of Google or Microsoft. Good luck with that, the head start is tremendous. And the likely outcome of such a thing happening would be an acquisition by... Google or Microsoft.
- frik 11y ago
  Wrong, "Software patents" aren't recognized in most parts of Europe.
  - rwmj 11y ago
    .. unless they also wanted to do business in the US.
randomsearch 11y ago
I think it's a fairly straightforward cultural difference. Americans take more risks and are more ambitious. This is true of both entrepreneurs and VC, although I'd say VC is the heart of the problem. Money goes into safer investments in Europe.
dmoo 11y ago
Just a question, how many people actually benefit from a Google being in their particular country?
- dazc 11y ago
  Google being in Ireland, for example, has likely had a big impact in terms of the local employment/economy but maybe not much else?
  - FormFollowsFunc 11y ago
    I can't speak for Dublin where Google is based, but in Cork you have Apple's European headquarters. As a developer/Apple user you wouldn't know it was there. There isn't an Apple store in the country and all products are shipped/repaired from the UK. Since our taxes are higher and our public services worse than the UK (I used to live there) we're probably not getting a huge amount of corporate tax from the US multi-nationals but we are getting jobs which makes the politicians look good. Saying that, there are a lot of Range Rovers around, so those directly involved with the multi-nationals are getting rich though it's not really trickling down.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  I tried to cover this line of reasoning a bit in an other post in this thread. No deep analysis from me, but very briefly looking at ROI of Google's shareholders one can see it flows to investors worldwide, not the US in particular. Taxes then... very minimal, and are mostly redirected through a Dutch-Irish tax scheme anyway, EU probably profits more than the US. Employment, 50k or so, that's significant for sure. But 40% is outside the US, and compare it say to Walmart which employs literally a couple million, and you'll find tech companies in general don't make large dents in employment figures. As for actual services, there's barely any difference. A European benefits virtually the same from Google's products and services, albeit sometimes say the launch of the latest Nexus happens two weeks later in small European countries like the Netherlands. Mostly I'd say the benefits are related to generating and disseminating your own culture, more political/legal influence in worldwide companies, drawing talent to your country etc. These benefits are significant, but I don't think Europe has anything to be alarmed about. Tech here is great, lots of solid companies with billion dollar valuations, solid infrastructure, but fewer unicorns. And that's no surprise with the EU being, deep down, a fragmented market where the biggest first-language market is German which stands at 18% of the EU population. It's not easy to roll out companies that grow to hundreds of millions of people in Europe, if the biggest language that people speak as a first language is only spoken by 18% of the union. European talent with great ideas that aim very large tend to go English first, and then move to the US at the earliest signs of solid traction. Everyone else stays, and that's how you get lots of solid companies like Supercell with a few billion dollars valuation that are relatively small compared to a Facebook. That's not a bad thing.
lumberjack 11y ago
Not sure how they are related but Qwant is the new Google rival. It's also partly funded by the French government: https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/
- adventured 11y ago
  France has been trying for nearly a decade to build a search engine that matters: http://www.dw.com/en/eu-allows-france-to-bankroll-google-rival/a-3186854 http://www.dw.com/en/eu-allows-france-to-bankroll-google-riv...
sqldba 11y ago
LOL. How about Australia? The lucky country indeed...
ThePhysicist 11y ago
Why are people looking for a second Google in Europe? They should instead look in China, where there already is not only a second Google but also a second Facebook, Amazon, WhatsApp, Stripe, ... So, why did the Chinese succeed where Europe failed? Here are my thoughts: * Regulation: With its strict censorship and great firewall, the Chinese government effectively shut out most American IT companies from their market, giving local companies enough time to grow. * Culture: Chinese culture is much more different from American than European culture is, hence it is also much more difficult to adapt an American IT service to the Chinese market than to the European. * Market size: With 1.3 billion people, 900 million of which speak Mandarin the market size for any IT service is enormous, even taking into account that many people still do not have reliable Internet access or a lot of money to buy services / products online. Likewise, the market growth is much higher than in the US or Europe. Personally I believe that the main competition for American IT companies will not come from Europe but from China. Right now, most Chinese IT startups only follow in the roots of their successful American idols, but with so many well-educated young entrepreneurs this should change soon, and I predict that we will see more and more disruptive Internet startups "made in China" very soon.
- pille 11y ago
  > Why are people looking for a second Google in Europe? Because they are in Europe, not China. It's a British article.
  - ThePhysicist 11y ago
    I just think that by looking at China you can better understand the reasons why there is no European Google.
Scarblac 11y ago
Does booking.com count? Founded in Europe in 1996, still entirely located in Europe, over $1 billion _yearly profit_, but acquired by an American company in 2005.
CM30 11y ago
Also, I'd say the university system may have something to do with it. US unis work more like UK Sixth Form Colleges, where students study a variety of subjects and encounter people with different interests (whereas a UK university education is about one subject with a much smaller group of peers). As a result, the US system is arguably a lot better suited to networking and meeting people with an interest in starting a business. How many tech company founders met at university? Now, how many studied the exact same things? I'd say a lot less of them.
- icebraining 11y ago
  How many tech company founders met at university? Now, how many studied the exact same things? Well, a short search returns: Google: two PhDs studying the same thing. Apple: Jobs and Woz met when the former was in High School; they never attended the same college. Yahoo: two EE graduate students. Microsoft: childhood friends, didn't attend the same college. Oracle: didn't attend the same college, met when working for the same company. Red Hat: didn't attend the same college. Salesforce: met while working at Oracle. At least for the software behemoths, it seems it's not that important to have mixed colleges.
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
One can wonder how valuable these companies really are. Yes, they're valuable to investors, but the investors of Facebook are not American, they're completely international. The return on investment on capital investment flows to investors worldwide, not just US investors because it's a US company. So what else then... Taxes, here tech companies are notorious. Stories of FB paying a few thousand in total taxes in the UK, Apple leaving its cash abroad to avoid taxation, Google channeling its revenues through a royalty-scheme between Ireland and the Netherlands that goes virtually untaxed (Dutch Sandwich) etc... tax wise these companies contribute little to the place of their main business (e.g. the US for the above three companies). Then, employment? Here too, tech companies are known for providing relatively little employment compared to the size of the business, versus other industries. To take an extreme example, walmart (a company which pulls the vast majority of its revenues from the US alone) has up til recently had more store locations, than FB has employees. FB doesn't even have 12k employees, Walmart has literally a couple million. The article mentions Whatsapp as an example, it just had 55 employees when it was sold for almost $20b Compare that with say Vente Privee, a French online retailer that has 2500 employees and close to $2b in revenue and a slightly higher valuation, that nobody talks about. Which would you rather have in your country, creating jobs? You may still (likely) say Whatsapp, but it wouldn't be an obvious answer. Instagram is similar, 18 employees, who cares whether they're in the US or not? It's a meaningless figure for employment alone. And again, ownership wise the billion dollar valued company is in the hands of international investors, and tax wise it's likely little to nothing. So what's the contribution of these US companies to the US then? What is Europe really missing? It profits from all the international innovations (I happily use Google's services), while it taxes the above companies for doing business in the EU. If tech was shitty in Europe, sure, all of this would be alarming. But we have great research (e.g. hadron collider), IT/ICT infrastructure is very solid, if I look at my own country we have digitised and modernised everything from insurance to banking to tax filings, at the supermarket I pay via NFC, as I do in a bus, metro, train or tram. I don't live in some outdated world without technology. There are very obvious counterarguments to make... in particular political and cultural control and influence that large companies like Google have and the power that wields, that Europe thereby doesn't have, can be or become an issue. Reinventing our own industries the next few decades without inspiring tech companies, is trickier. Seeing talent trained at great European universities with great startup ideas fly to the US for various reasons, is an issue. I appreciate all of that, and yet I feel the importance of companies like FB's contributions to the US as opposed to the rest of the world, is overstated, and that we're not missing out all that much by not having a European FB, for example. At the end of the day there are 3 superlarge markets, the US, Europe and China. Then a number of very large ones like India or Japan. But of those first three, the EU is merely a partial economic, political and legal union, with a wide range of languages, laws, cultures and systems. While the US and China certainly have internal diversity, it's nothing like the EU. It's why we have tons of companies with a few billion dollar valuations, that capture a substantial portion of the EU but far from all of it. The biggest first language market in the EU is German, and it stands at 18% of the EU as a first language, see what I mean? In the US or China, you can pretty much roll out tech products nationally in many cases, not without any friction, but in a way that's much more natural than in the EU. That doesn't mean tech sucks here, that we have little value, no jobs or shitty digital/online services, it's just fine here (find me digital/online services that the US has that we simply don't have access to, that's missing in EU markets completely), but we have fewer ultralarge unicorns like Google or Facebook, and I'm not all that convinced that this is as big a problem as it's made out to be.
frik 11y ago
"Quaero was announced by Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder during the French-German ministerial conference in April 2005. [...] Quaero was often described as a European competitor to Google [...] The main source of disagreement was the format of the search engine, with German engineers favoring a text-based search engine and the French engineers favoring a multimedia search engine. Many German engineers also balked at what they thought was becoming too much of an anti-Google project, rather than a project driven by its own ideals." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://www.exalead.com/search/ https://www.exalead.com/search/ The project failed to deliver. Though the Exalead web search engine survived and got bought by Dassault Systems (CATIA 3D CAD). Next time they should open source the public funded projects...
nabla9 11y ago
Biggest Internet companies are in advertising or catalog merchant business that started in late 90's or early 2000's. American Internet startups in these areas had immediate access to markets of 300 million people. Homegrown American, Chinese or Japanese Internet company can have hundreds of millions in revenue before it even starts to think about localization and adjusting to other countries, cultures, languages, payment system and advertising biz. Network effect rules in the Internet business and US based business had huge upper leg in this regard in early 2000s.
- CM30 11y ago
  This is a very good point. European businesses basically have to 'sell internationally' right off the bat, whereas those in larger countries like the US and China can become successful in the domestic market before having to do business abroad. Hence a business from somewhere like the US will already have a large audience by the time it opens in European or Asian countries, whereas a European one doesn't get the same privilege.
- hengheng 11y ago
  Germany has 80 million people, the German-speaking market is 100 million people. The smaller countries are mostly used to everything being in English (Slovenia, Finland), so they don't care. France is 50 million people as well. If your business idea doesn't bootstrap with that market size, it won't work with a factor 6 more either. Also recently, international payment can be considered a solved problem with iban/bic, PayPal and credit cards. Which means you can get by just as well with English, French or German only, and some point down the line you add i18n for one or two other languages first, and then whatever there might be a demand for. On the other side of the coin, next-day national shipping for 3,50€ to 5€ is the norm around here. Go try that in NA.
  - nabla9 11y ago
    >The smaller countries are mostly used to everything being in English (Slovenia, Finland), so they don't care. I live in Finland and I can tell you that you don't have full access to mass markets unless you handle the language, deliveries and local payment methods as well. Case: https://www.varusteleka.fi/en https://www.varusteleka.fi/en It's very successful Finnish army/outdoors store that sells mostly trough net (probably biggest in the Europe). They have build loyal international customer base outside Finland mainly because they have a great customer service and they're very honest about the products it sells. No marketing bullshit, if they sell inferior products, they tell that the product sucks balls and sell it very cheap. They have been gradually expanding their operations from Finland to Sweden, Estonia, Russia and other countries. Similar company started in Minnesota (same size as Finland) would be several times bigger by now.
jokoon 11y ago
Europe is less capitalistic, is less versed into risk, and is clearly not entrusting so much money to an IT company like google. It's hard explaining to people what exactly google does for so much money. Europe is more "feet on the ground" when it comes to business in general. What does google sells by the way ? Ads, android (which is mostly open), internet services... it's hard to really tell. In europe, technologies and research will often rather belong to the public sector than the private sector. The silicon valley is a typically american thing because US business laws and the culture allow it. In europe it just won't. The only way you can really thrive as a programmer in europe, is by doing open source, and Torvalds is a good example of that, so by a loose definition it's only accessible to people who spent a lot of time in universities. There are no other way you are going to do business and getting money typing code in europe. It just won't happen.
- kiiski 11y ago
  I don't think you have to be academic to be successful in open source. One example of non-university developed financially successful open source would be MySQL. I'm sure there are others from other parts of Europe that I'm not familiar with.
  - jokoon 11y ago
    Well you need a way to bring food on the table. I too could make the most amazing software if I could by open sourcing it. Without resources nor the organization, nothing will happen.
danmaz74 11y ago
I think one thing the EU could really do to help startups here would be to offer almost free services and/or grants to localize their websites/apps into all the EU languages much more quickly and less expensively.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  That's not the issue, the overall mentality, strict employment laws, and stricter access to funding is what slowing EU startups down. Startups do not need free services that ridiculous, they need an environment which will allow them to take risks and not to have to cut trough a mile of red tape to hire and employees.
  - danmaz74 11y ago
    It's not "the" issue. It is AN issue, and one where they could actually do something.
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      Startups already get plenty of free stuff, that's not whats holding them back so it won't do anything.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
I like the point made about the hypocracy of Google saying that European companies don't have the right to affect what people in other countries can see in search results, but, at the same time, filter results based on the special interests of US copyright laws.
jkaljundi 11y ago
One of the big issues in Europe is almost non-existent local M&A (and to lesser extent single pan-European shared IPO) market. As long as that is purely focused on US e.g. the exits at all stages (from tiny few million acquihires to hundreds of millions acquisitions) are mostly based in America, a healthy tech market will not emerge in Europe.

65 points by SandB0x 11y ago

x5n1 11y ago

Europe needs an investment culture similar to the Capitalist American culture. Without that there is no hope for anyone. There need to be investors and technical people in one hub that feed off each other, network with each other, and empower each other. How many American startups are a result of a pissed off employee working at a successful company going off and creating the same thing his or her employer did but better? And this cycle feeding on itself. Or university students with an idea getting all the financial, technical, and managerial support necessary to create the next big thing. You have to understand the process and then try to replicate the process. And each component of the process is as important as the other. You need the whole pie. Not a piece for it to succeed. You can seed this with massive capital expenditure, tens of billions basically poured into private coffers of Caplists, but the process has to be very similar for it to actually work.

kwhitefoot 11y ago
> How many American startups are a result of a pissed off employee working at a successful company going off and creating the same thing his or her employer did but better? Some numbers might make your point more convincing.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Easily googable and not news Intel started like this. See the companies founded by ex-Googlers
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- xiaoma 11y ago
  All of them, arguably. Google "the traitorous eight".

knz42 11y ago

“The combined value of the top three internet companies in the Americas – so, basically, in America – is around $0.75tn (£0.5tn). In Asia, it’s around $0.5tn. In Africa, it’s $50bn. And in Europe, it’s just $25bn.” In Europe, we have wealth redistribution. A few companies with so much concentrated financial power is not healthy.

apsec112 11y ago
Europe has plenty of big companies - Total, Volkswagen, ING, Daimler, Fiat, Siemens, Tesco, BMW, HSBC, Nestle. The problem is that it's very difficult to make new ones. "Mergers aside, the youngest firm in the CAC 40, [France's] main stock index, was founded in 1967."
dogma1138 11y ago
Sorry to burst your bubble but "In Europe we have X" is more often than not a "myth", Europe is much more closer to the US it in's overall outlook than most European would think. And as far as educated professionals go then Europe is actually considerably poorer than the US, so unless you're a low skilled worker I would not take so much pride in that.
adventured 11y ago
Europe has far more stagnant wealth than America does in fact. Europe's dynasties do not tend to give away their wealth, instead they pass it down through families for generations. Most of Europe's largest companies and fortunes are controlled through family dynasties. American billionaires always dominate the list of most philanthropic.[1] It's also why Europe sees such a low rate of turn-over among their billionaires, and why such a high proportion of their billionaires are derived inherited wealth. [2] [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2013/11/18/the-50-philanthropists-who-have-given-away-the-most-money/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2013/11/18/the-50-ph... [2] http://i.imgur.com/cvTR3q1.png http://i.imgur.com/cvTR3q1.png
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Is an operating business well described as stagnant wealth?

knz42 11y ago

CM30 11y ago

Personally (as someone from Europe), I'd say the general reasons we don't have an equivalent tp Google or Silicon Valley or any of that sort of thing are more that: 1. European laws are too restrictive. It's especially notable with stuff like the hilariously stupid online tax laws the area has (having to apply different tax rates based on the location of the user rather than the business makes it hugely more complex than it has to be) or the right to be forgotten, but it just feels we're too restrictive here in general. 2. Culture. People in the US seem more ambitious and more willing to risk everyone for the small chance of becoming a millionaire/billionaire at the end of it. People in European countries on the other hand seem to be encouraged to avoid risk and avoid anything that might lead to less job security in the short term. Probably because failure in the US is seen as a minor bump in the road, whereas failure in Europe is seen as the worst possible thing imaginable. 3. Money. Not just in the form of venture capital (though that's a huge reason), but also because US startups tend to pay their employees more, whereas their European equivalents stick to the average local wages. Hence the best programmers, designers and other such people usually either find employment in a more stable company (read, one where there's a work/life balance) or move to the US to work in Silicon Valley. If we want a 'European Google' or European startups in general, we need to become less risk averse, more willing to reward the types of people needed to work in those companies and less obsessed about regulations. Oh, and fix the issues certain areas have with internet connection speeds. The fact that a lot of areas in large cities like London can't get fibre internet and the likes is not helping our tech businesses compete with their US counterparts.

jacquesm 11y ago
Also: Different languages to cater to right from day 1, better job security so less of a drive to be independent, education tends to prepare for a job rather than for running a company or being a founder.
- jryle80 11y ago
  > education tends to prepare for a job rather than for running a company or being a founder. This is an interesting point. Can you elaborate?

vlehto 11y ago

"de facto platform, it’s hard to control and even harder to dislodge" There is a Finnish service called irc-galleria.net. It's a service that was created to let irc users to share pictures of themselves to other irc users. It got really big in Finland. They even had big screen in center of Helsinki to show new pictures uploaded to the service. They had this paid feature which let you keep a list of friends in there. Everybody talked about irc-galleria stalking. Then Facebook came. The major difference was that facebook let you make friends for free. Year later nobody remembers irc-galleria. Dislodging a platform is easier than ever. It's enough to make better or cheaper product, then just get lucky. Previously you had to also take distribution and marketing into account and then get lucky.

jacquesm 11y ago
Dislodging a many-billion-euro incumbent is a lot harder than dislodging a funny irc pic sharing site.
- vlehto 11y ago
  Funny pic sharing vs. funny digital yearbook. Irc-galleria was many million euro behemoth in the context of Finland. Facebook at the time could not spend even 10k to tackle irc-galleria. Tackling many billion-euro incumbent is probably harder than tackling many million-euro incumbent. But it's probably like twice as hard, not 1000 times harder. And it has happened in less favorable situations before. Look up Toyota.
7952 11y ago
I don't think these big platforms will ever be dislodged exactly, just made irrelevant. Photo sharing used to be difficult enough that it could act as the basis for an entire product category. Now it has been commoditized sufficiently that it can be just added to any product with relative ease. Maybe one day it will be possible to add Google style search technology to any product with ease. At that point the opportunity is to have specialist search as an add-on to other products.
- 11y ago

jacquesm 11y ago

Well, a European Google would still have to abide by the patent minefield that search has become so it has very little chance of getting off the ground without a breakthrough in search engine technology outside of Google or Microsoft. Good luck with that, the head start is tremendous. And the likely outcome of such a thing happening would be an acquisition by... Google or Microsoft.

frik 11y ago
Wrong, "Software patents" aren't recognized in most parts of Europe.
- rwmj 11y ago
  .. unless they also wanted to do business in the US.

randomsearch 11y ago

I think it's a fairly straightforward cultural difference. Americans take more risks and are more ambitious. This is true of both entrepreneurs and VC, although I'd say VC is the heart of the problem. Money goes into safer investments in Europe.

dmoo 11y ago

Just a question, how many people actually benefit from a Google being in their particular country?

dazc 11y ago
Google being in Ireland, for example, has likely had a big impact in terms of the local employment/economy but maybe not much else?
- FormFollowsFunc 11y ago
  I can't speak for Dublin where Google is based, but in Cork you have Apple's European headquarters. As a developer/Apple user you wouldn't know it was there. There isn't an Apple store in the country and all products are shipped/repaired from the UK. Since our taxes are higher and our public services worse than the UK (I used to live there) we're probably not getting a huge amount of corporate tax from the US multi-nationals but we are getting jobs which makes the politicians look good. Saying that, there are a lot of Range Rovers around, so those directly involved with the multi-nationals are getting rich though it's not really trickling down.
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
I tried to cover this line of reasoning a bit in an other post in this thread. No deep analysis from me, but very briefly looking at ROI of Google's shareholders one can see it flows to investors worldwide, not the US in particular. Taxes then... very minimal, and are mostly redirected through a Dutch-Irish tax scheme anyway, EU probably profits more than the US. Employment, 50k or so, that's significant for sure. But 40% is outside the US, and compare it say to Walmart which employs literally a couple million, and you'll find tech companies in general don't make large dents in employment figures. As for actual services, there's barely any difference. A European benefits virtually the same from Google's products and services, albeit sometimes say the launch of the latest Nexus happens two weeks later in small European countries like the Netherlands. Mostly I'd say the benefits are related to generating and disseminating your own culture, more political/legal influence in worldwide companies, drawing talent to your country etc. These benefits are significant, but I don't think Europe has anything to be alarmed about. Tech here is great, lots of solid companies with billion dollar valuations, solid infrastructure, but fewer unicorns. And that's no surprise with the EU being, deep down, a fragmented market where the biggest first-language market is German which stands at 18% of the EU population. It's not easy to roll out companies that grow to hundreds of millions of people in Europe, if the biggest language that people speak as a first language is only spoken by 18% of the union. European talent with great ideas that aim very large tend to go English first, and then move to the US at the earliest signs of solid traction. Everyone else stays, and that's how you get lots of solid companies like Supercell with a few billion dollars valuation that are relatively small compared to a Facebook. That's not a bad thing.

lumberjack 11y ago

Not sure how they are related but Qwant is the new Google rival. It's also partly funded by the French government: https://www.qwant.com/ https://www.qwant.com/

adventured 11y ago
France has been trying for nearly a decade to build a search engine that matters: http://www.dw.com/en/eu-allows-france-to-bankroll-google-rival/a-3186854 http://www.dw.com/en/eu-allows-france-to-bankroll-google-riv...

sqldba 11y ago

LOL. How about Australia? The lucky country indeed...

ThePhysicist 11y ago

Why are people looking for a second Google in Europe? They should instead look in China, where there already is not only a second Google but also a second Facebook, Amazon, WhatsApp, Stripe, ... So, why did the Chinese succeed where Europe failed? Here are my thoughts: * Regulation: With its strict censorship and great firewall, the Chinese government effectively shut out most American IT companies from their market, giving local companies enough time to grow. * Culture: Chinese culture is much more different from American than European culture is, hence it is also much more difficult to adapt an American IT service to the Chinese market than to the European. * Market size: With 1.3 billion people, 900 million of which speak Mandarin the market size for any IT service is enormous, even taking into account that many people still do not have reliable Internet access or a lot of money to buy services / products online. Likewise, the market growth is much higher than in the US or Europe. Personally I believe that the main competition for American IT companies will not come from Europe but from China. Right now, most Chinese IT startups only follow in the roots of their successful American idols, but with so many well-educated young entrepreneurs this should change soon, and I predict that we will see more and more disruptive Internet startups "made in China" very soon.

pille 11y ago
> Why are people looking for a second Google in Europe? Because they are in Europe, not China. It's a British article.
- ThePhysicist 11y ago
  I just think that by looking at China you can better understand the reasons why there is no European Google.

Scarblac 11y ago

Does booking.com count? Founded in Europe in 1996, still entirely located in Europe, over $1 billion _yearly profit_, but acquired by an American company in 2005.

CM30 11y ago

Also, I'd say the university system may have something to do with it. US unis work more like UK Sixth Form Colleges, where students study a variety of subjects and encounter people with different interests (whereas a UK university education is about one subject with a much smaller group of peers). As a result, the US system is arguably a lot better suited to networking and meeting people with an interest in starting a business. How many tech company founders met at university? Now, how many studied the exact same things? I'd say a lot less of them.

icebraining 11y ago
How many tech company founders met at university? Now, how many studied the exact same things? Well, a short search returns: Google: two PhDs studying the same thing. Apple: Jobs and Woz met when the former was in High School; they never attended the same college. Yahoo: two EE graduate students. Microsoft: childhood friends, didn't attend the same college. Oracle: didn't attend the same college, met when working for the same company. Red Hat: didn't attend the same college. Salesforce: met while working at Oracle. At least for the software behemoths, it seems it's not that important to have mixed colleges.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago

One can wonder how valuable these companies really are. Yes, they're valuable to investors, but the investors of Facebook are not American, they're completely international. The return on investment on capital investment flows to investors worldwide, not just US investors because it's a US company. So what else then... Taxes, here tech companies are notorious. Stories of FB paying a few thousand in total taxes in the UK, Apple leaving its cash abroad to avoid taxation, Google channeling its revenues through a royalty-scheme between Ireland and the Netherlands that goes virtually untaxed (Dutch Sandwich) etc... tax wise these companies contribute little to the place of their main business (e.g. the US for the above three companies). Then, employment? Here too, tech companies are known for providing relatively little employment compared to the size of the business, versus other industries. To take an extreme example, walmart (a company which pulls the vast majority of its revenues from the US alone) has up til recently had more store locations, than FB has employees. FB doesn't even have 12k employees, Walmart has literally a couple million. The article mentions Whatsapp as an example, it just had 55 employees when it was sold for almost $20b Compare that with say Vente Privee, a French online retailer that has 2500 employees and close to $2b in revenue and a slightly higher valuation, that nobody talks about. Which would you rather have in your country, creating jobs? You may still (likely) say Whatsapp, but it wouldn't be an obvious answer. Instagram is similar, 18 employees, who cares whether they're in the US or not? It's a meaningless figure for employment alone. And again, ownership wise the billion dollar valued company is in the hands of international investors, and tax wise it's likely little to nothing. So what's the contribution of these US companies to the US then? What is Europe really missing? It profits from all the international innovations (I happily use Google's services), while it taxes the above companies for doing business in the EU. If tech was shitty in Europe, sure, all of this would be alarming. But we have great research (e.g. hadron collider), IT/ICT infrastructure is very solid, if I look at my own country we have digitised and modernised everything from insurance to banking to tax filings, at the supermarket I pay via NFC, as I do in a bus, metro, train or tram. I don't live in some outdated world without technology. There are very obvious counterarguments to make... in particular political and cultural control and influence that large companies like Google have and the power that wields, that Europe thereby doesn't have, can be or become an issue. Reinventing our own industries the next few decades without inspiring tech companies, is trickier. Seeing talent trained at great European universities with great startup ideas fly to the US for various reasons, is an issue. I appreciate all of that, and yet I feel the importance of companies like FB's contributions to the US as opposed to the rest of the world, is overstated, and that we're not missing out all that much by not having a European FB, for example. At the end of the day there are 3 superlarge markets, the US, Europe and China. Then a number of very large ones like India or Japan. But of those first three, the EU is merely a partial economic, political and legal union, with a wide range of languages, laws, cultures and systems. While the US and China certainly have internal diversity, it's nothing like the EU. It's why we have tons of companies with a few billion dollar valuations, that capture a substantial portion of the EU but far from all of it. The biggest first language market in the EU is German, and it stands at 18% of the EU as a first language, see what I mean? In the US or China, you can pretty much roll out tech products nationally in many cases, not without any friction, but in a way that's much more natural than in the EU. That doesn't mean tech sucks here, that we have little value, no jobs or shitty digital/online services, it's just fine here (find me digital/online services that the US has that we simply don't have access to, that's missing in EU markets completely), but we have fewer ultralarge unicorns like Google or Facebook, and I'm not all that convinced that this is as big a problem as it's made out to be.

frik 11y ago

"Quaero was announced by Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder during the French-German ministerial conference in April 2005. [...] Quaero was often described as a European competitor to Google [...] The main source of disagreement was the format of the search engine, with German engineers favoring a text-based search engine and the French engineers favoring a multimedia search engine. Many German engineers also balked at what they thought was becoming too much of an anti-Google project, rather than a project driven by its own ideals." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero https://www.exalead.com/search/ https://www.exalead.com/search/ The project failed to deliver. Though the Exalead web search engine survived and got bought by Dassault Systems (CATIA 3D CAD). Next time they should open source the public funded projects...

nabla9 11y ago

Biggest Internet companies are in advertising or catalog merchant business that started in late 90's or early 2000's. American Internet startups in these areas had immediate access to markets of 300 million people. Homegrown American, Chinese or Japanese Internet company can have hundreds of millions in revenue before it even starts to think about localization and adjusting to other countries, cultures, languages, payment system and advertising biz. Network effect rules in the Internet business and US based business had huge upper leg in this regard in early 2000s.

CM30 11y ago
This is a very good point. European businesses basically have to 'sell internationally' right off the bat, whereas those in larger countries like the US and China can become successful in the domestic market before having to do business abroad. Hence a business from somewhere like the US will already have a large audience by the time it opens in European or Asian countries, whereas a European one doesn't get the same privilege.
hengheng 11y ago
Germany has 80 million people, the German-speaking market is 100 million people. The smaller countries are mostly used to everything being in English (Slovenia, Finland), so they don't care. France is 50 million people as well. If your business idea doesn't bootstrap with that market size, it won't work with a factor 6 more either. Also recently, international payment can be considered a solved problem with iban/bic, PayPal and credit cards. Which means you can get by just as well with English, French or German only, and some point down the line you add i18n for one or two other languages first, and then whatever there might be a demand for. On the other side of the coin, next-day national shipping for 3,50€ to 5€ is the norm around here. Go try that in NA.
- nabla9 11y ago
  >The smaller countries are mostly used to everything being in English (Slovenia, Finland), so they don't care. I live in Finland and I can tell you that you don't have full access to mass markets unless you handle the language, deliveries and local payment methods as well. Case: https://www.varusteleka.fi/en https://www.varusteleka.fi/en It's very successful Finnish army/outdoors store that sells mostly trough net (probably biggest in the Europe). They have build loyal international customer base outside Finland mainly because they have a great customer service and they're very honest about the products it sells. No marketing bullshit, if they sell inferior products, they tell that the product sucks balls and sell it very cheap. They have been gradually expanding their operations from Finland to Sweden, Estonia, Russia and other countries. Similar company started in Minnesota (same size as Finland) would be several times bigger by now.

jokoon 11y ago

Europe is less capitalistic, is less versed into risk, and is clearly not entrusting so much money to an IT company like google. It's hard explaining to people what exactly google does for so much money. Europe is more "feet on the ground" when it comes to business in general. What does google sells by the way ? Ads, android (which is mostly open), internet services... it's hard to really tell. In europe, technologies and research will often rather belong to the public sector than the private sector. The silicon valley is a typically american thing because US business laws and the culture allow it. In europe it just won't. The only way you can really thrive as a programmer in europe, is by doing open source, and Torvalds is a good example of that, so by a loose definition it's only accessible to people who spent a lot of time in universities. There are no other way you are going to do business and getting money typing code in europe. It just won't happen.

kiiski 11y ago
I don't think you have to be academic to be successful in open source. One example of non-university developed financially successful open source would be MySQL. I'm sure there are others from other parts of Europe that I'm not familiar with.
- jokoon 11y ago
  Well you need a way to bring food on the table. I too could make the most amazing software if I could by open sourcing it. Without resources nor the organization, nothing will happen.

danmaz74 11y ago

I think one thing the EU could really do to help startups here would be to offer almost free services and/or grants to localize their websites/apps into all the EU languages much more quickly and less expensively.

dogma1138 11y ago
That's not the issue, the overall mentality, strict employment laws, and stricter access to funding is what slowing EU startups down. Startups do not need free services that ridiculous, they need an environment which will allow them to take risks and not to have to cut trough a mile of red tape to hire and employees.
- danmaz74 11y ago
  It's not "the" issue. It is AN issue, and one where they could actually do something.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    Startups already get plenty of free stuff, that's not whats holding them back so it won't do anything.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

I like the point made about the hypocracy of Google saying that European companies don't have the right to affect what people in other countries can see in search results, but, at the same time, filter results based on the special interests of US copyright laws.

jkaljundi 11y ago

One of the big issues in Europe is almost non-existent local M&A (and to lesser extent single pan-European shared IPO) market. As long as that is purely focused on US e.g. the exits at all stages (from tiny few million acquihires to hundreds of millions acquisitions) are mostly based in America, a healthy tech market will not emerge in Europe.