4 ms·

Nokia fits in a bigger picture of large European tech firms which stumbled over the last 20 year, sold off and shut down divisions before radically restructurin

by Nanite 9y ago

Nokia fits in a bigger picture of large European tech firms which stumbled over the last 20 year, sold off and shut down divisions before radically restructuring and reemerging as a smaller but more nimble companies. What is very worrying however that unlike in the US, which had similar scenarios with HP and IBM, hardly anything close to new giants of the likes of Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon appeared during that timeframe in the EU

jamesblonde 9y ago
We haven't done software right in Europe. Really, we only have SAP and computer games companies as massive software companies. We have been terrible at software. It's very worrying for the remaining industries that software will soon eat: automobiles and trucks. We're way behind there. Deja vu all over again, maybe?
- noir_lord 9y ago
  UK has a few large ones - though we are trying hard to get out of Europe at the moment... Sage and Sophos are pretty well known. Generally though I agree and it's something Europe should/could be good at since they are high paying jobs that require a good thorough educational system.
  - ccozan 9y ago
    And let's not forget Autonomy which sold to HP for ~10bn USD. This _is_ big.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > We haven't done software right in Europe. Really, we only have SAP and computer games companies as massive software companies. We have been terrible at software. It's very worrying for the remaining industries that software will soon eat: automobiles and trucks. We're way behind there. Deja vu all over again, maybe? As a German I say: I would not say we can't do software or we are bad at it. "Getting really big" is not the typical German culture - so instead we have software companies from mittelstand that are quite successful in their niche, but if you don't work in the specific industry, you surely have never heard of. What we are really bad at is internet-based (cloud-based) services. On one hand in Germany there are strong data protection laws which make some kind of monetization harder - but only people from Germany and neighboring countries seem to care about what is done with their data. On the other hand there existed German companies that tried to provide similar services to GMail, Dropbox etc., but they simply did not have the large financial backing that is necessary to provide such a service with large capacities for free in the hope that some time in the future they will make money on it. So they had to do monetization attempts much earlier on which did not work out well.
  - jamesblonde 9y ago
    I never said we can't do it. We educate good enough people - just look at some of the key technical people at the american giants - Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Urs Hölzle at Google, Johnny Ive at Apple. There are technical reasons - lack of deep VC capital markets and data protection laws as you point out. There are also cultural reasons - we sell out at 100m and then go enjoy life instead of building a global giant.
    - Nanite 9y ago
      > we sell out at 100m and then go enjoy life instead of building a global giant. This is what happened to Booking.com, sold to Priceline back in 2005 for about $150M due to lack of growth capital, currently Booking.com accounts for 70% of Priceline's revenue, which, with some handwaving, would amount to a virtual market cap of 50+ Billion $ if hypothetically they had continued on their own.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - cJ0th 9y ago
      > data protection laws as you point out I don't think data protection is our problem. For one thing, if our government really meant it (which they don't), we could build businesses that attract customers from all over the world who need strong data protection laws they can't find anywhere else. For another thing, there probably is a huge, unexplored market for all kinds of software which would be in line with the current law. However, there are many roadblocks that hinder people from experimenting, like too much bureaucracy and financial dangers (UBI might come in handy here) And then there are "the little things". Take that law which urges you to fully disclose your address on your website. If I had build twitter, without knowing how it is going to turn out, I would not want my boss to be able to find out what I do in my spare time. In other words, I wouldn't have put it online.

by Nanite 9y ago

jamesblonde 9y ago

We haven't done software right in Europe. Really, we only have SAP and computer games companies as massive software companies. We have been terrible at software. It's very worrying for the remaining industries that software will soon eat: automobiles and trucks. We're way behind there. Deja vu all over again, maybe?

noir_lord 9y ago
UK has a few large ones - though we are trying hard to get out of Europe at the moment... Sage and Sophos are pretty well known. Generally though I agree and it's something Europe should/could be good at since they are high paying jobs that require a good thorough educational system.
- ccozan 9y ago
  And let's not forget Autonomy which sold to HP for ~10bn USD. This _is_ big.
wolfgke 9y ago
> We haven't done software right in Europe. Really, we only have SAP and computer games companies as massive software companies. We have been terrible at software. It's very worrying for the remaining industries that software will soon eat: automobiles and trucks. We're way behind there. Deja vu all over again, maybe? As a German I say: I would not say we can't do software or we are bad at it. "Getting really big" is not the typical German culture - so instead we have software companies from mittelstand that are quite successful in their niche, but if you don't work in the specific industry, you surely have never heard of. What we are really bad at is internet-based (cloud-based) services. On one hand in Germany there are strong data protection laws which make some kind of monetization harder - but only people from Germany and neighboring countries seem to care about what is done with their data. On the other hand there existed German companies that tried to provide similar services to GMail, Dropbox etc., but they simply did not have the large financial backing that is necessary to provide such a service with large capacities for free in the hope that some time in the future they will make money on it. So they had to do monetization attempts much earlier on which did not work out well.
- jamesblonde 9y ago
  I never said we can't do it. We educate good enough people - just look at some of the key technical people at the american giants - Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Urs Hölzle at Google, Johnny Ive at Apple. There are technical reasons - lack of deep VC capital markets and data protection laws as you point out. There are also cultural reasons - we sell out at 100m and then go enjoy life instead of building a global giant.
  - Nanite 9y ago
    > we sell out at 100m and then go enjoy life instead of building a global giant. This is what happened to Booking.com, sold to Priceline back in 2005 for about $150M due to lack of growth capital, currently Booking.com accounts for 70% of Priceline's revenue, which, with some handwaving, would amount to a virtual market cap of 50+ Billion $ if hypothetically they had continued on their own.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - cJ0th 9y ago
    > data protection laws as you point out I don't think data protection is our problem. For one thing, if our government really meant it (which they don't), we could build businesses that attract customers from all over the world who need strong data protection laws they can't find anywhere else. For another thing, there probably is a huge, unexplored market for all kinds of software which would be in line with the current law. However, there are many roadblocks that hinder people from experimenting, like too much bureaucracy and financial dangers (UBI might come in handy here) And then there are "the little things". Take that law which urges you to fully disclose your address on your website. If I had build twitter, without knowing how it is going to turn out, I would not want my boss to be able to find out what I do in my spare time. In other words, I wouldn't have put it online.