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Let's be honest here, European <any software tech> can't really challenge the global industry right now. We have a few Spotifys and SAPs as outliers, but due to

• paulluuk 4y ago
  It could be that legal requirements are a constraint, but I think that the lack of investors is the real issue. Because we're not really comparing Europe to "all of the US", we're comparing all of Europe to Silicon Valley -- I doubt Europe is a worse place to start a tech company than, say, Nebraska.
  • golergka 4y ago
    > Nebraska is an at-will employment state. This means employees can be dismissed for any reason at any time and without notice when an employment contract or other governing principle is not in effect. https://www.mightyrecruiter.com/recruiter-guide/at-will-employment-wrongful-termination-laws-nebraska/ https://www.mightyrecruiter.com/recruiter-guide/at-will-empl... Almost any american state is a vastly better place to start a company than almost any european country.
    • pavlov 4y ago
      Do you really think Lincoln, Nebraska is automatically a better place to start a company than, say, Stockholm? Talent availability and local startup ecosystem don't count for anything? All that matters is that you can dismiss employees for any reason at any time?
      • golergka 4y ago
        It's 2023, best talent in tech works from home anyway. A developer in Stockholm would rather work for a corp from Delaware for $200k as a contractor than for a local company where he would be lucky to make $70k post-tax.
        • rvense 4y ago
          Is this something you have first-hand experience of? I'm in Copenhagen and that's really not what it looks like.
          • golergka 4y ago
            The first part, yes. I'm currently in Israel, and although tech salaries here can be quite high, the overall comparison with remote US positions still works the same way.
        • akvadrako 4y ago
          It's not hard to find contractor jobs making $200k in the Netherlands; that's about 100 EUR per hour, which is mid-market. The average non-contractor salary is much lower and it's rare to find startups hiring contractors, I assume since they don't have as much money.
          • golergka 4y ago
            Is 100 EUR per hour mid market for contractor jobs that keep you in full employment for years, offer stock options and PTO and are actually a regular job in everything but the name and taxes? Because that's what I meant by “contractor” in my original comment. Should have explained it right away, my bad.
            • akvadrako 4y ago
              All of that except stock options.
      • 4y ago
    • ben_w 4y ago
      There's a lot more to running a business than how easy it is to fire people. For all that America likes to proclaim how varied it's culture is from state to state, I'm a 2 hour train ride from switching currency and language, in addition to substantial cultural norms. Such things seem much more significant to me than notice periods.
  • Quarrelsome 4y ago
    You only have to look at Snapchat's slap on the wrist for wilfully mis-informing its customers about the ephemerality of messaging to show the difference between the two places. The USA is a much more attractive environment for investment and hence startups and the EU would struggle to offer the same without losing its soul.
  • tormeh 4y ago
    It is, though. The EU has a unified single market for goods, but not for services. And since most software tries to provide a service, or integrate with businesses that do, EU software companies often struggle to expand to other member states than their native one. There are legal and lingual differences, obviously, but also different ecosystems of private entities that you're expected to integrate with. The EU is really good at making stuff that goes in boxes, though.
    • tomcam 4y ago
      Insightful, thanks. Answers a ton of questions swirling around my noggin for ages.
    • jdiez17 4y ago
      > The EU has a unified single market for goods, but not for services. It's definitely possible and easy for a company in EU country X to provide a service to individuals or companies in another EU country. What makes you think otherwise?
      • markus92 4y ago
        Language, for one. Legally it might be one market but having to translate your service in well over two-dozen languages is a bit of an entry barrier.
      • revelio 4y ago
        The EU itself admits that. Their attempts at a digital market for services never really went anywhere. It's one reason the UK left and economic impact was less than some people claimed it would be. A services heavy economy wasn't benefiting from the EU single market so much to begin with. For example trying to sell legal or financial services across the EU is painful.
  • danpalmer 4y ago
    US investors will invest in an idea to see if it works. EU investors will invest in a working idea. We have far fewer ridiculous startup ideas or companies that can't scale, but the flip side is that we have fewer winners too.
    • CM30 4y ago
      Yeah, this is it right here. EU investors are terrified of risky bets, or throwing a lot of money at untested business ideas to see if they'll catch on. Investors in the US will throw millions or even billions of dollars at an innovative new business, even if it doesn't make that money back for years. They'll invest in consumer facing businesses, like consumer tech products, apps, social media sites etc. EU ones won't do that. They'll invest fairly tiny sums in safe, conservative businesses with a proven (but arguably limited) business model, and that won't be enough to get the kind of unicorns Silicon Valley specialises in.
      • danpalmer 4y ago
        I think it's a fairly deep cultural difference. In the US there's a cultural sense that anyone can make it, that if you just put in enough effort it'll work. Arguably there's even a culture of it being your right to try anything to make money, there are very few businesses that the US would disallow. The former is obviously hubris, and the latter creates some of the worst exploitation in the US, but sometimes these factors create hits. In the EU the culture is much more cynical, and the belief in individual impact is much lower. There's also more of a sense of there being things that one just does not try to exploit, types of business that could be considered morally distasteful (see the healthcare industry for the clearest examples of what I mean). These are very broad generalisations, they don't apply evenly across the US or the EU, and while they all sound quite negative they are really trade-offs and it's up to individuals to decide where they prefer to sit on these trade-offs.
• traveler01 4y ago
  Yeah Europe it's facing an excessive taxation plus excessive regulation. Regulation it's good but it should be small and precise. The excess of regulation in Europe it's only being benefitial to huge corps, that have money to either pay the small fines, or an army of lawyers to either comply or circumvent regulations. For example, they forced brands to switch to Type-C, everyone here cheered up the EU. This will come back to bite us in the a*. EU's actions were excessive and in the future will hurt innovation since brands will now have to ask permission to EU to come up with new standards if needed.
  • jwestbury 4y ago
    > Europe it's facing an excessive taxation plus excessive regulation. Is there a compelling argument to be made that it's not the inverse of this? Perhaps other jurisdictions are facing destructively light regulations?
    • traveler01 4y ago
      Regulation it's always destructive. It's always meant to forbid/enforce some actions. Some light regulations can be bad for climate but good for companies and economy and vice-versa, it's up to the politician to find the balance. European politicans can't do that since they're busier trying to win next elections.
  • DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    I am gonna have to strongly disagree, the major reason tech companies struggle in Europe is because of access to funding. Investors are way more risk averse and 'VCs' are closer to business angels than VC's in terms of level of funding rounds. In the same way, for EU companies to really play ball and have access to US based VCs they at some point have to incorporate in Delaware or NY to be taken seriously. The only exceptions to what I described that I have seen seem to gravitate around fintech.
• pembrook 4y ago
  Every time this topic comes up I like to point out that Europe’s inability to compete in tech has been true even since the personal computer. Here’s an article from 30 years ago doing a postmortem: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/07/business/why-european-computer-makers-flop.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/07/business/why-european-com... It’s baffling to me why the entire world in the 1900s was eventually able to compete with Detroit in auto manufacturing…even after being decimated during WW2 (Europe, South Korea and Japan have no trouble competing in automotive)…why have they not been able to compete with Silicon Valley? Manufacturing cars is far more capital intensive than anything in software, so I don’t think funding is at the heart of the issue. Either there’s something fundamentally different about computers/software or the rest of the world is about to finally wake up and start competing.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • schnitzelstoat 4y ago
    The UK had quite a strong computing industry right up to the 90's - a lot of it got sold off or beaten by competitors though. Although the UK still punches above its weight in computing.
  • revelio 4y ago
    It's partly the war dividend. Auto industry got well established prior to WW2, around the turn of the century. WW2 and the aftermath changed everything in Europe: - Much of the continent was a hotbed of dictatorships and extremists well into the late 20th century. Large parts were locked behind the iron curtain; skilled but poor. No way for them to compete. Spain and Greece were dictatorships until ~1975. Italy experienced continuous political instability post-war and arguably still does. Germany was split in two with a giant razorwire wall down the middle. This situation is not conducive to establishing new successful companies. - Netherlands and Norway became (to some extent) petro states. - The British population had been subjected to years of wartime propaganda in which all government failures were covered up, so naturally concluded that governments must be pretty great at running things. Even now, previously unknown wartime disasters are still being declassified, one stopped being secret only a few years ago. The British economy became steadily more socialist from the 1940s to the 1980s, being changed only when the economy was on the brink of collapse and Thatcher came in. During the 1970s when HP and Intel were establishing themselves in Silicon Valley the UK government was being toppled by openly communist unions, there were rotating power outages, 3 day weeks, trash piling on the streets, an IMF bailout. Thatcher righted the ship but not before the UK lost most of its heavy industry including its auto industry to militant unionism, along with the drive to set up new industries. Even when a nascent domestic computing industry developed it was partly driven by the BBC wanting to educate kids, and came way late compared to the Valley firms who were by then already large and powerful. - Europe decided that the best way to avoid a repeat of the war was to unify under a single government, but the form of that government was heavily influenced by the French and their love of protectionist big government subsidies and tariffs. That shapes everything and the EU doesn't hesitate to do things that are blatantly anti-industry or anti-innovation if they think it will advance their agenda of further "integration" i.e. movement of power away from national governments towards the EU institutions. That always takes priority. The US government doesn't have the same goal of abolishing the individual states, so Congress and the Supreme Court often rule in ways that enable local divergence and policy innovation. The EU in contrast sees those things as problems to be solved, not opportunities or constitutional rights. - Elitist distrust of the population is sadly a long term feature of European culture. After the war Germany decided it needed strong anti-nazi/anti-holocaust speech related laws. Partly as a consequence Europe doesn't have the first amendment or strong free speech culture, and frequently doesn't have any concept of fair use in copyright law, but large parts of Silicon Valley since 2000 aren't really possible without these things. The animating values of early Facebook, Google, Twitter etc are populist in nature and these companies turn towards widespread speech control only came very recently in the grand scheme of things. And a non-war factor: in some countries an pervasive problem with cultural elitism in which American things are crass and commercial, unlike the refined reasonableness of all things Euro. It's not true so causes people to search around for talking points to try and prop it up. In the tech world this is often privacy and you see the results in the article, where the author interprets criticism of a privacy focused OS nobody cares about (iOS and Android privacy is good enough) as a criticism of making a "European" phone OS.