4 ms·

So no ARM then? And no web?

eternalban 4y ago
To say Europe is not "good at innovating" seems to fly in the face of history of technology. It is possible this article is a European's way to deal with the fact that social mobility is the elephant in the room. It is possible that the issue is European establishment's (social/economical/political) reluctance to having to deal with newly minted tech titans in their midst? Family members giving founders grief is also a telling sign: a mild form of enforcing a social taboo.
mike_hearn 4y ago
Both of those were created decades ago, and by the British (albeit TBL worked in Switzerland at the time he created HTML). A lot of people in EU countries say Europe when what they mean is EU member states. The EU leadership itself does this all the time and the practice spreads. The author may believe that Britain is not European for the purposes of this essay. For instance he says there's no AI innovation, which ignores DeepMind (the question posed by the article is about innovation not ownership, so the fact that they sold to Google shouldn't matter). The UK does OK but many of the same cultural issues are present. Some are misidentified as European vs American culture when in reality they are more like tech vs non-tech culture, I think. He talks a lot about outsourcing and contractors. Companies created/run by non-programmers often have no intuition for the large range of experience that can be found inside the job class of software developers, nor what can or can't be done with technology, and therefore can't see why you shouldn't just outsource it all to the lowest bidder. I had to face that regularly at my last employer. It was founded by Americans but they came from finance. All the tech work was done in the UK. "Why can't we just ship this all to India/eastern Europe" was a common question from the US management even though the product required fairly complex technical design work. It was the Brits pushing back and arguing for well compensated and equity incentivized devs (who came from all over Europe). There were other cultural differences around hiring as well. It may seem like this problem is more prevalent in Europe but I think that's just because more companies here are older and therefore not run by developers. If you look at what we mean by tech firm or tech startup, and what defines this, it's hard to come up with a consistent marker beyond "a company founded by engineers or otherwise highly technical people". If you look at US tech firms, every single one is founded by a programmer. Moreover their board of directors may be made up of former developers too! It gives them an intuition for software and how to make it work that you just struggle to get otherwise. It's not impossible - one reason Goldman Sachs is so respected/feared in the finance world is that they managed to do a good job of their internal software platform early on. But it's a bit rarer. Still, the cultural issues are real. I remember my mother once asking me why I didn't found YouTube. This was many years ago. I replied, "because their business model is insane, you can't pay for that much bandwidth with banner ads". And it was kinda true, but back then I hadn't understood just how plausible selling to a competitor even if you lost money actually was. Also an issue - top question for startup founders from family will be, "when will you be earning your old salary". Creating a company can be seen as almost a self-indulgent wastrel thing to do vs just earning a salary.

To say Europe is not "good at innovating" seems to fly in the face of history of technology. It is possible this article is a European's way to deal with the fact that social mobility is the elephant in the room. It is possible that the issue is European establishment's (social/economical/political) reluctance to having to deal with newly minted tech titans in their midst? Family members giving founders grief is also a telling sign: a mild form of enforcing a social taboo.

mike_hearn 4y ago

Both of those were created decades ago, and by the British (albeit TBL worked in Switzerland at the time he created HTML). A lot of people in EU countries say Europe when what they mean is EU member states. The EU leadership itself does this all the time and the practice spreads. The author may believe that Britain is not European for the purposes of this essay. For instance he says there's no AI innovation, which ignores DeepMind (the question posed by the article is about innovation not ownership, so the fact that they sold to Google shouldn't matter). The UK does OK but many of the same cultural issues are present. Some are misidentified as European vs American culture when in reality they are more like tech vs non-tech culture, I think. He talks a lot about outsourcing and contractors. Companies created/run by non-programmers often have no intuition for the large range of experience that can be found inside the job class of software developers, nor what can or can't be done with technology, and therefore can't see why you shouldn't just outsource it all to the lowest bidder. I had to face that regularly at my last employer. It was founded by Americans but they came from finance. All the tech work was done in the UK. "Why can't we just ship this all to India/eastern Europe" was a common question from the US management even though the product required fairly complex technical design work. It was the Brits pushing back and arguing for well compensated and equity incentivized devs (who came from all over Europe). There were other cultural differences around hiring as well. It may seem like this problem is more prevalent in Europe but I think that's just because more companies here are older and therefore not run by developers. If you look at what we mean by tech firm or tech startup, and what defines this, it's hard to come up with a consistent marker beyond "a company founded by engineers or otherwise highly technical people". If you look at US tech firms, every single one is founded by a programmer. Moreover their board of directors may be made up of former developers too! It gives them an intuition for software and how to make it work that you just struggle to get otherwise. It's not impossible - one reason Goldman Sachs is so respected/feared in the finance world is that they managed to do a good job of their internal software platform early on. But it's a bit rarer. Still, the cultural issues are real. I remember my mother once asking me why I didn't found YouTube. This was many years ago. I replied, "because their business model is insane, you can't pay for that much bandwidth with banner ads". And it was kinda true, but back then I hadn't understood just how plausible selling to a competitor even if you lost money actually was. Also an issue - top question for startup founders from family will be, "when will you be earning your old salary". Creating a company can be seen as almost a self-indulgent wastrel thing to do vs just earning a salary.