4 ms·
Why does Europe suck at technological innovation?
- btilly 15y agoAn interesting data point. Look at the top 5 languages in the TIOBE index. Of them C++, C# and PHP were all created by Europeans. (In fact all 3 are Danes by birth.) To the best of my knowledge their founders live in Texas, Washington and California respectively. This is not a small problem for Europe.
- gusi 15y agonowadays they could be living in europe if they want also... but the title of the post is about innovation.... europeans have their own way to innovate and that wont be reflected on US news papers because they just dont care, are closed minded or there are interests in that or who knows what...
- jarek 15y agoExcept Rasmus was born on Greenland and was in university in Ontario when he created PHP. Claim Ontario or Canada as a capitalist paradise at your own risk :).
- btilly 15y agoRasmus was born on Greenland which is a Danish possession, so he is a Danish citizen by birth. Which makes him a Dane, as I said. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf for verification. Furthermore I didn't make any claims about a "capitalist paradise", either explicitly or implicitly. In fact another of the three is Bjarne Stroustrup, a professor in academia. He may live in the USA, but he's an academic, and academia is generally not filled with rabid capitalists.
- jarek 15y agoI'm not sure how a data point this specific is then interesting for this subject. Three people, having been born as Danish citizens, went on to become original creators of three most popular languages today, two of whom did so in generally fairly uncapitalistic environments, now live in the U.S. This is not a small problem for Europe.
- btilly 15y agoIt is interesting because the data point is not an isolated example. From Dijkstra to Torvalds, there are a many prominent examples of top notch computer talent from Europe choosing to live in the USA. The resulting brain drain leaves fewer top people in Europe, and more opportunities for Americans to benefit from that talent. Benefits range from their availability for American businesses to the fact that it is easier to meet and be inspired by that talent if you live in the USA. (Particularly if you live near a tech center like Silicon Valley.)
- scythe 15y agoSmall markets doesn't seem to explain it. Germany alone has the world's fourth-largest GDP, which sounds like a pie worth slicing. Despite this, Russia, whose GDP is less than half as large, has a bigger (iirc) tech industry than Germany. I think the latter explanation -- market restrictions -- is more likely, and research spending probably contributes as well.
- JanezStupar 15y agoWhat the frack are you counting as tech industry that you managed to Russia have more than Germany?
- hassy 15y agoYandex and Mail.ru IPOs I would guess.
- ugh 15y agoSelling US products in Germany – which was basically colonized by the US after 1945 – is bound to be easier than selling those same products in Russia or China.
- chalst 15y agoThe US imports approaching twice as much from Germany as it exports. http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c4280.html http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c4280.html
- mootothemax 15y agoWhat the frack are you counting as tech industry that you managed to Russia have more than Germany? I'm wondering this as well. Surely the computing power behind Frankfurt must be quite substantial...
- JanezStupar 15y ago
- sebilasse 15y agoAlso Europe isn't causing massive bubbles every other year that throw half of the world into a depression. Just wondering if this is related, not trying to start a flame-war or whatever.
- jdminhbg 15y agoNot entirely sure how you can look at the economic history of the past 3 years or so and think Europe doesn't have any bubbles or financial crises. But more to the point, I don't think technical innovation has much to do with bubbles, any more than building technology caused the real estate bubble.
- sebilasse 15y agoI don't see a bubble (not financial or other crises) originating in Europe that had an impact world-wide similar to the dot-com bubble and the real estate bubble which is partly caused by some financial "innovation" (credit default swaps).
- stfp 15y agoIt just isn't true. Europe just does not "suck" at tech innovation. Some europeans move to the US to have a bigger impact, and/or because that's where tech money is. The US evolved a giant media+capital machine to make this happen, and this means making it hard for others to do the same - by being more attractive, in real terms of course, but maybe even more so in people's minds. I see articles criticizing other regions of the world for not having as much success as part of this (very natural, imho) process.
- synx508 15y agoARM Holdings was the first company that popped into my head when I read the headline. Without ARM there would be no Facebook/Twitter because inexpensive mobile computing probably wouldn't have been invented yet.
- jarek 15y agoNokia anyone? Massive innovation in terms of creating cheap, portable tiny computers that we now derisively call "dumb phones" early on, when no one else was doing anything like it. Other smartphone players just came in and skimmed off the top ;)
- hassy 15y agoThe title of the article is misleading. Yearly revenues do not necessarily mean technological innovation. There is plenty of innovation in Europe (and a lot of it gets sold to US companies who get to increase their annual revenues with it).
- mootothemax 15y agoWhy is Europe so bad at technology development? Heterogeneity, among other things. Hang on a second... so Europe's technical founders are disadvantaged by being able to serve particular niches? I get that being able to sell to hundreds of millions of people gives you a great market by numbers. What I don't understand is why targeting by culture, language etc., is viewed disfavourably.
- samfoo 15y agoI'm only speculating, but these are my thoughts: 1. Harder to expand quickly because of legal barriers. 2. Network effect/expansion is harder. Say you start hitting a network effect in Germany with some new social app... You can't necessarily leverage that in Portugal where the same simply isn't true in the US market. 3. When you serve a niche market you can't necessarily apply the economies of scale.
- stygianguest 15y agoIndeed. Take netflix. Setting that in the 27 countries of the EU requires 27 different contract negotiations with the respective copyright organisations. Another example would be the social web. Suppose a French and American facebook launch at the same date. Given the same growth rate (with the more or less exponential networking effect), the American can simply buy the French facebook after a small amount of time. (Western) Europe is pretty good in technical niches, which seem to be mostly business to business. Just not quite as visible. Yet, as a European (through and through I might add) I believe American innovation comes from some superbly creative and inquisitive minority. This: http://vimeo.com/19829560 http://vimeo.com/19829560 we do not have in Europe. Finally, do not forget that European population is shrinking and aging. That has a tremendous effect on all growth figures. Perhaps on innovation too, but that I doubt.
- micheljansen 15y agoAs a "European" from The Netherlands, I feel I need to say something about the inflammatory title of this article. Europe does not "suck" at technological innovation, there is simply no such thing as "Europe" at this scale. Like the article says: Europe is still 27 very different markets. As a US consumer, you are used to a being part of a massive and hugely uniform market that also happens to speak the language of international business. As such, nearly every successful innovation company will try to enter that market. Don't be fooled, however, into thinking that everything you use is American, simply because it is in English. I am sure most would not think of Distimo, eBuddy, MobyPicture and Skylines as European, yet they are all from the tiny country of The Netherlands. And Europe does not just sprout small tech startups either. TomTom (NL), Siemens (DE) and Philips (NL) are all huge players in their fields. Yes, making a lot of money with innovation is easier in the American market and the conditions for founding a startup are still best in The Valley, but saying that innovation in Europe sucks really makes no sense. Perhaps most the innovation is of a different nature and scale, but it is certainly there. It is a shame that this article does not attempt to uncover these things, but instead tries to score some cheap points with one liners. P.S. Did you know Python and Vim are both Dutch as well? P.P.S. Did you know that most European countries hardly produce any wine? Europe is more than France, Spain and Italy.
- eibrahim 15y agoWait, you mean Europe is not a country? That's funny... I always hear that complain from my "African" friends... Now you know how it feels to lump people into one group "African", "Middle Eastern", "Asians", etc... :)
- micheljansen 15y agoExcellent point. I never said it is good to lump anyone into any category, but I am not writing articles for Slate :)
- eibrahim 15y agoI think it's a cultural thing. Americans (and American immigrants) are risk takers. So even if you are Danish, French or Egyptian by virtue of immigrating to a new home, you have exhibited a high level of risk taking behavior. It is only natural that this behavior turns into more entrepreneurial and innovative ideas. But I have to agree with other commenters that regulations and laws play a huge part. Americans are definitely better at that. So, you might have all sort of labor protection, multi-week vacations, free healthcare and benefits in Europe, these laws are usually a burden on small businesses (where most innovation takes place).
- chl 15y agoBecause we invented the web and since then ... Farmville.
- carsongross 15y agoEurope is great at technological innovation. Why do Americans make more money in software? * Pure inertia from the early cowboy days of Silicon Valley, which gave us great universities and lots of private investment capital looking for returns. (Contrast with academic grants.) * A more straight-forward focus on technology-for-moneys-sake (really anything-for-moneys-sake) and marketing * The U.S. development culture, to Dijkstra's eternal chagrin, is much more "Worse Is Better" so we tend to ship early, often and win the market, even though our stuff kind of sucks.
- dhs 15y agoPeople, please... don't feed the trolls.
- tintin 15y agoEuropean Innovation Scoreboard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Innovation_Scoreboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Innovation_Scoreboard It show the gap is getting smaller with US innovations. But the article is stupid. They do not suck at innovation.
- endtime 15y agoSurprised that `ctrl-F incent` yields no results in the article or the comments. Sounds like a simple matter of incentivization to me. When you live in a relatively socialist country that puts discouraging penalties on rewards, why take a risk?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- paganel 15y agoI'd rather have my car powered by a German engine (well, it's manufactured in "lazy" Spain by a German company, but it's European all the same). It consumes way less gasoline compared to US cars, and it's also a lot more reliable. Some of you could say that reliable, low-consuming car engines do not count as "technological innovation", that we should give more praise to technological "innovators" like Facebook and Zynga. Then again, having FB or FarmVille down doesn't cause any wars, while being able to drive cars that consume less gasoline might avoid a war or two.
- laut 15y agoWhile the US has brought the world many great technological innovations, "Europe" on the whole doesn't suck at it. And Europe is not France, it's a continent with many different countries. If we are talking about the internet, these things were made by Europeans: The World Wide Web, Skype, C++, PHP, MySQL, Rails. Just to name a few things. The car industry is also pretty high tech and the European car companies are doing well while the government run car companies of the US suck. A few of the many car related innovations from Europe: the car itself, ABS, Electronic Stability Control.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Joeri 15y agoThe article isn't based on any sort of objective measurement, so we can't say objectively that europe has less technological innovation, only subjectively. I live in Belgium, and in my opinion I've had plenty of opportunity to do interesting innovative work. 6 years ago I wrote an SVG renderer in actionscript, on top of a DXF-to-SVG convertor in PHP. 5 years ago I wrote my own rich web grid component, backed by a metaquery system that allows users to point-and-click together arbitrary filters. 3 years ago I switched to a web app architecture of javascript components over JSON-RPC services. IMHO, that was interesting and innovative work, but you've never heard of the product it went into (myMCS), because the company I work for focuses on the european market and has decided to do that without seeking external financing. That's typical of european tech companies. They operate on a local market, and they take on less risk so they don't grow as aggressively. That doesn't mean there's less innovation, just that it's less visible.
- euromix 15y agoNice troll, It's been a long time since capital has no borders and large companies employ people from all over the world...