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China has a population of 1+ billion who are firewalled both by network access and by language. European citizens have better English proficiency and no great
by cromwellian 9y ago
China has a population of 1+ billion who are firewalled both by network access and by language.
European citizens have better English proficiency and no great firewall, hence the transaction barriers to consuming global services are easier.
I’m afraid you have to be globally competitive unless the EU wants a Great Firewall.
- kome 9y ago> hence the transaction barriers to consuming global services are easier. It's just a political choice. It's not a fact of life. Better regulation and better taxation of capitals would "firewall" Europe as well. As I said below, language has never been an issue. Nobody is using google because is in English. Google is well translated everywhere.
- cromwellian 9y agoThe regulation and taxes are more likely to disadvantage smaller players. Europe’s problem with tech investment isn’t because of existing big tech players.
- george3383 9y ago>European citizens have better English proficiency "better" yes, but not good enough to make American products successful unless they are translated
- cromwellian 9y agoIt's not a simple manner of translation, it has to be culturally localized. Burger King can't just sell beef burgers in India by translating their menu language. It's a lot easier for a Western business to translate their UI to German or French, than it is to Chinese or Japanese. Input methods alone are an issue that calls for interaction UX to be designed differently.
- george3383 9y agoThere are no big cultural differences between European countries that I'm aware of.
- cromwellian 9y agoI'm talking about the fact that the cultural difference between the US and Europe is smaller, so US services can be easily consumed by Europeans with just language localization. The same is not true for China. It is easy for US firms to serve Europeans by localizing language, ergo European firms face global competition from US firms with a lower barrier. It is more difficult for US firms to serve the Chinese market, even if you have perfect language localization. The cultural differences are larger than US<->Europe. Even before the Chinese government got protectionist, US firms had trouble competing in China. We've seen lots of tech companies launched from the UK, Germany, and Scandinavia, but less so from other regions. Perhaps it would be better to ask what is it about say, Italy, or France's internal markets that makes tech harder to find investment for locally.
- kome 9y ago> Even before the Chinese government got protectionist, US firms had trouble competing in China. lol.
- cromwellian 9y agoMight be better to actually post a rebuttal.
- kome 9y agoChinese government before being protectionist it was communist and closed: there never was a period without protectionism in China. Chinese economy has always been fully regulated, especially in the 90s. In other words, there is not much sense in your post, and it signals you don't know what you are talking about…
- Apocryphon 9y agoMaybe we're not so far from an European Great Firewall decades down the line- to stop Five Eyes spying (once the U.K. is no longer an EU member state) or from monopolistic Google privacy infringement or whatever. Economics can be determined by geopolitics.