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Apple and Huawei are very recent phenomenons in Europe. GSM, and today's mobile networks, are essentially products of subsidized European national telcoms. Th
by johbjo 6y ago
Apple and Huawei are very recent phenomenons in Europe.
GSM, and today's mobile networks, are essentially products of subsidized European national telcoms.
The problem is rather that Europeans have historically been ineffective or slow at understanding end-user "cultural" products. American pop culture still dominates, while locals usually seem like poor imitations.
But the value produced by FANGs is essentially cultural, rather than technological or industrial. This thinking is suspicious and foreign to European engineers. Boomer engineers and industrialists really struggle to grasp this and it's still a point of contention even though few know how to articulate it.
- AstralStorm 6y agoValue produced by Google? How about value drained by Google, esp. privacy and advertising. About the only value produced by Google being Google Docs and Android. Well, and the rare FLOSS improvements related to these. Facebook? Similar. Taking over culture is not value. We had better services at around time it was created, but the huge money combined with network effects did the number on them. Netflix, well. Let's say we had VoD services before them, some even better. Their major cultural win is making exclusive series with the huge money they got invested. Amazon has one improvement in their sales systems with the remote warehouses. Plus AWS. Apple at least designs phones. All of the companies benefited hugely from big cash investment, somehow EU companies don't get these. It's not a matter of culture either, there's plenty enough startups around. But US money is always more and bigger.
- soco 6y agoMaybe I'm reading is wrong, but I couldn't imagine European engineers == boomers.
- johbjo 6y agoI'm probably using boomer to refer generally to "stale mindsets". But the current state is the result of sequences of decisions made in the preceding twenty years. Until it was literally demonstrated by Apple, they entirely dismissed the idea that most value in phones would be generated through an open ecosystem. There are plenty of people with stale mindsets in the European industrial giants struggling to grasp how electrification and AI will affect their legacies.
- p_l 6y agoI've been there when first EU deployments of iPhones (3G) happened. The only more closed ecosystem was that of cheap value phones that didn't even have J2ME, and that one was still more free on few axes. It took at least two generations of apple products IIRC to shed american closed ecosystem approach which was rightly seen as total shit - but that knowledge didn't percolate much outside the very small group that had iPhones or worked in telecom high enough to know details of how sausage was made. There are many things to talk about what Apple did differently, but "open" was not it. Arguably the bigger issue was how due to how Microsoft and Nokia dropped the ball on system software (which resulted in certain lock-step issues with hw), allowing reasonably cheap chance for Apple to appear as huge jump (arguably, UX-wise it was big change, but being used to smartphones I found early iPhone very, very clumsy)