There are so few innovative web-startups in Europe. Most business are copycats: At the moment we have round about 10 clones of groupon.com in Germany. They usu

There are so few innovative web-startups in Europe. Most business are copycats: At the moment we have round about 10 clones of groupon.com in Germany. They usually hire cheap offshore php guys to clone it 1:1. Cloning does neither need skilled on-site developers and architects nor better technolgy and processes (think of agile/bdd, ruby, python, younameit instead of php4-ish php). Also in Germany bootstrapping is not really accepted in the public opinion. Neither is entrepreneurship. Nearly everyone thinks you do this because you're not qualified or hard enough working to get a 'real' job. This tends to change however small business are still avoided. This is one reason SaaS does not work here yet: most US SaaS apps are focussing small businesses or freelancers and don't care about the enterprise (right way imho). On the other side everybody wants web-related things as cheap as possible. Usually it's okay to redo it in a couple of years. There's no visible premium segment except some banking corps or offical corps but they're still doing either cobol or JEE with the most available amount of abstraction and bloat (sorry, been there, done that).