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There was still not that long ago an incredible amount of innovative companies and products in Europe. But at that time companies were still built for their ho

• AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  > There is for example no way a Swedish mapping company could have competed with google maps An Israeli one did.
  • 317070 6y ago
    So did a Dutch one... (For the record: it's TomTom)
  • AsyncAwait 6y ago
    Waze was acquired by Google, am not sure that counts.
    • AlchemistCamp 6y ago
      If Waze couldn't compete against an incumbent Google Maps, why would Google ever have bought it?
      • AsyncAwait 6y ago
        I didn't mean from a technological perspective, but from a sustainability one. These kinds of startups can often compete/outcompete on tech, in fact that's their premise, but they're looking for an ASAP exit, rather than running something sustainably for decades.
  • usrnm 6y ago
    In Russia we have several successful competitors to Google Maps and even a search engine that's actually good. Competing with Google is extremly difficult, but possible
    • puranjay 6y ago
      Yandex Maps is much better in Russia than Google Maps. I also found Yandex's image text translation capabilities to be much superior than Google
      • scottlocklin 6y ago
        Yandex is a great example of a company which absolutely squashes Google on technical chops wherever it has tried to compete; and it only has 9000 employees (compared to Google's 120,000).
        • rewq4321 6y ago
          Not entirely related to this discussion, but one thing I know about Yandex: Their web crawlers are ruthless. They hammer my sites to the point where I need to specifically throttle them based on their "from" header (they seem to ignore 429s - they simply make requests with a different IP). This is only a problem because I have a few sites that are like "search engines" in that they have basically an infinite number of pages (one for each possible search term), and so they just keep crawling the "related searches" links. It's probably not a problem for most sites, but it's a pain for me. Google seems to more strategically crawl pages based on search terms that they know are popular, whereas Yandex just crawls every possible link it can find. All of that said, I'm quite happy to deal with it for the benefit of having another competitor to Google - the more the merrier. Hopefully one day they add some more "smarts" to their crawlers though - starting with respecting 429s across all their IPs, perhaps.
          • scottlocklin 6y ago
            In modern Russia search engine search you. They actually answer their email; if you ask them they'll probably stop.
• gumby 6y ago
  > There is for example no way a swedish mapping company could have competed with google maps Not Swedish, but Danish founders, working in Australia. Google purchased the company and made it google maps
  • vidar 6y ago
    That does not mean it would have succeeded without the Google acquisition
    • wombatmobile 6y ago
      The commercial value proposition of Maps is its applications to advertising - as a platform, and as meta data that informs Google where users are, which provides context for what ad they might click on next.
    • rstuart4133 6y ago
      https://www.nearmap.com/ https://www.nearmap.com/ was another one that google looked at, before buying the other mob that became maps.google.com. They are also Australian. It depends what you mean by successful I guess, but nearmap fits my definition of successful. Far better more and detailed maps that google, sold to people who needs such things rather than being used as platform to sell advertising. In the beginning they used to have an honour system that allowed everyone to view their maps for free. They merely requested people who used it commercially to to purchase access. I gather that didn't work out, or maybe it was just a way of ensuring everybody knew about their product as there is no free access now. but while it was free it was great for checking when roof gutters needed cleaning, comparing flood levels and that sort of thing.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• vin047 6y ago
  I think the arguments for Europe being less innovative or risk taking is because these companies seem to start first in the US and then come to Europe, not the other way round.
  • rjknight 6y ago
    There is no "Europe", though. France and Germany speak different languages and have different legal systems. Spain is different again. And Poland. And Greece. And Ireland. And Italy. Put it this way: if products depend on viral growth, then European countries are socially distanced from each other as a result of these barriers.
    • dgellow 6y ago
      People downvote this comment, but it is correct, the EU has A LOT of fragmentation at the national level.
      • sgc 6y ago
        It's obviously a complex situation, but I think the regulation of small business has more to do with it than the social diversity in the EU (which matters as well). By the time a company in the EU is big enough to go from national to expanding into the wider EU markets, it has capital to do so, and there is no shortage of local experts to help with that. But getting to that scale, or really to anything that requires more than a couple employees, is the big hurdle to overcome. I am not sure how to overcome that and respect employee rights, since a strong progressive tax on corporations that would subsidize some of the employment costs of smaller businesses would make the larger EU companies noncompetitive internationally. So in a real sense the failure of international labor laws is partially responsible for the difficulty of EU companies to innovate (or more precisely, to profit and grow based off their innovation). Another point is that historically the US tech sector took off fast and takes off fast, so they are awash with cash based on being first movers, and they have a competitive advantage when it comes to attracting talent. I think that advantage has been perhaps completely destroyed in the last 4 years due to local political and social issues making life there unattractive. Sure many people will run for the money, but perhaps now not enough to create imbalance in the labor market. Also, companies today understand better how fast things scale in the US due to the single market/language/comparatively lax regulations, and they know to focus on that market much earlier in their growth cycle. This contributed to the success of Spotify, Zendesk, etc. So if I had to predict there will be a rising percentage of successes out of the EU in the next ten years compared to the last ten years. But it's always going to be hard to start.
• 88840-8855 6y ago
  I like your points and agree on your conclusion. Further, I would like to add a few ideas: - innovation in Europe can only scale if we achieve a higher degree of unity in Europe, including one common language, one common jurisdiction and law framework. Localization is just too expensive in Europe and hinders scaling. - a certain degree of protectionism is good. I am a big fan of how China made it. They have a really fantastic digital landscape that is superior in so many areas compared to Europe (if you exclude the data privacy issue) - reliance on the old economy is bad and this is a political decision. - too many people are too scared of new technologies and want things "how they used to be". This is bad and is typical for many Europeans, especially here in Germany. Cultural change must happen but you cannot force it.
  • irrational 6y ago
    What could the one common language be? English would seem to be the logical choice, but there is no way France would agree to that.
    • zegl 6y ago
      The EU doesn’t even agree on which alphabet to use, Latin is the most common one but the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets are also official in the union. English is my second language, and while I wouldn’t mind changing the official language of my country, I can’t see that ever happening, there’s just so much culture attached to the language, that would be forgotten together with our language.
      • menybuvico 6y ago
        Yep. A common European first language would start a process which would result in a terrible loss of local cultural tradition. Cultural suicude for the common good has been suggested before, but I can't imagine that there would be a lot of people who'd agree with it.
        • HeWhoLurksLate 6y ago
• ZeroGravitas 6y ago
  Banning monopolies (not just foreign ones) may also have worked, and is probably the smartest plan for the planet as a whole. I'd say the main US advantage is that it's set up to create stagnant monopolies that can then leverage that power into other areas. Microsoft is now one of the players in gaming consoles, but they basically bought their way in on the back of monopoly rents from Office and OS.
  • jeswin 6y ago
    That's not monopolistic abuse; what you described is just investment in a new sector with profits from an existing one. Companies, investors and funds do it all the time. Abuse would be when a company leverages a monopoly to enter or influence another market, such as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.
    • mytherin 6y ago
      Perhaps monopoly abuse is not the right term, but Microsoft did buy their way into the gaming industry by selling millions of consoles at a loss. There is no way for any company that is not already a multi-billion dollar company to compete with that. The same happens in many other areas where large tech companies use their inertia and tons of existing capital to make it impossible for anyone but other tech giants to compete with them. This is extremely problematic because these companies almost win “by default” just by swinging their weight around, even if their product might not be the best product in that area.
      • transperceneige 6y ago
        Predatory pricing is what you are refering to.
      • p_l 6y ago
        You might want to change your example, as while the tactic is reprehensible and common to VC-backed companies, selling consoles at loss is standard practice for I think all makers (they recoup it by license fees on games)
• wbl 6y ago
  Europe has the single market, and lots of English speakers. But it also has very conservative capital and tax and employment systems that make entrepreneurship difficult. Some of that is easy to fix, some hard to fix.
  • joshuaissac 6y ago
    Despite the name, the European Single Market is far less unified than that of the US. A company starting out in Europe will have to overcome linguistic, cultural and regulatory barriers in 27 different countries. While American companies still have to deal with regulatory differences across state borders, it is not quite the same as what European start-ups face.
    • ls612 6y ago
      The UCC is an unfair state sponsored advantage for the US in trade, according to the European Commission. (/s in case it is necessary)
  • take_a_breath 6y ago
    ==But it also has very conservative capital and tax and employment systems that make entrepreneurship difficult.== The rate of new business creation is higher in Europe than the US. I would guess that the US has more venture-backed entrepreneurs, but more businesses are being start by Europeans than Americans. “The net rate of business creation among the EU economies has been over three times faster than in the USA and Canada since the financial crisis, according to research by RSM International, the seventh largest global network of independent audit, tax and consulting firms.” == https://www.businessawardseurope.com/news/item/rate-of-new-business-creation-in-eu-over-three-times-faster-than-in-north-a https://www.businessawardseurope.com/news/item/rate-of-new-b...
    • NalNezumi 6y ago
      I haven't fully checked that source but whats the filtering criterion for "new business creation"? I remember someone used to call Sweden an "top innovative country" and when I took a closer look, he based that argument on amount of new business creation (weighted with population) Taking a closer look, it was evident that they didn't sort the business by size, or how long they stayed, revenue or amount of employer. And as a person who lived there I know a lot of people start businesses just to circumvent the high tax rate, very restrictive hiring laws/taxes, and essentially do consulting (freelance) job. This is a symptom of how the society was made: hiring and income are heavily taxed, but not the same can be said for businesses. The claim that the country was innovative based on number of business creation quickly fell apart.
• chrischen 6y ago
  China’s protectionism is fairly blatant, but Japan also engages in some aggressive protectionism as well.
  • fouc 6y ago
    Japan has a firewall?
    • chrischen 6y ago
      No, I said Japan engages in protectionism.
• puranjay 6y ago
  Europe isn't able to compete with American tech salaries, plain and simple. American tech salaries, on the other hand, are inflated by exaggerated tech stock valuations.
  • captainredbeard 6y ago
    > American tech salaries, on the other hand, are inflated by exaggerated tech stock valuations How does a company’s stock price affect salaries? Companies only receive capitalization (via stock) at IPO. Stock market valuations do enable higher total comp through RSUs / options.
    • Nasrudith 6y ago
      At best very indirectly by having to compete with "lotto tickets" in theory for start ups and total compensation but in practice not really since the sensible default financial assumption when factoring in equity stake at a random start up is "worth $0 because it will probably fail".
  • Nasrudith 6y ago
    I believe it is not /willing/ to as opposed to not able to judging by GDP per capitia.
• trenchgun 6y ago
  Of google maps competitors, Here is based in Europe. Currently Netherlands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Technologies
• legulere 6y ago
  It's also important to consider that until the fall of the iron curtain the US needed western Europe to be strong economically and now does not care about Europe that much anymore, so they use industrial espionage, etc. like against the rest of the world.
• nerdponx 6y ago
  Corollary: regulation is not what's preventing European innovation from thriving.