5 ms·

This is most likely going to fail. Just like how the EU finance a hundreds of millions of dollars for a Google competitor that we haven't heard of today. [1]

by max_ 3y ago

This is most likely going to fail. Just like how the EU finance a hundreds of millions of dollars for a Google competitor that we haven't heard of today. [1] [1]: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/eu-approves-166-million-in-funding-for-google-competitor/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/07/eu-approves-16...

IshKebab 3y ago
Yeah I've worked in a couple of startups in the UK now that I was surprised to discover got most of their funding from the EU. E.g. Ultrahaptics (which was an obviously flawed idea) got most money from Horizon 2020, not customers. Kind of weird that these wastes of money are never in the news, not even during Brexit.
- jimnotgym 3y ago
  Are they a waste of money? Did they stimulate the startup economy, upskill workers, etc? Were there no spin offs? Nobody learnt anything?
  - p_l 3y ago
    Or simply provided employment to people who then paid for other things in the economy.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    At least Ultrahaptics was. It may have stimulated the startup economy, but you can do that by funding startups that have realistic ideas. And yes, often you can easily tell if an idea is a non-starter. It isn't the case that "you never know".
- vidarh 3y ago
  Want to bet you've never heard of most of the companies that benefited from vast amounts of US government research grants that helped lay the foundations for much of the US tech industry? Most people won't have heard about most the successful companies that resulted from the combination of military spending and research grants, much less the many failures on the way. If we knew how to pick the successes ahead of time, there's be no point in gov funding, or in venture capital firms, because they'd be able to go into any mainstream bank and loan finance their entire business with regular business loans. Government research funding almost inherently should have a high failure rate, because they offer the most value where they enable research that is so high risk they can't get funding elsewhere both because of the occasional big win, but also because of the side effects of creating eco systems. That's not to say that doesn't also lead to lots of stupid projects getting funded, and lots of mismanaged funding programs that deserve scrutiny. But it's also always easier to recognize the stupidity after the fact...
  - chottocharaii 3y ago
    Well said !!
  - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
    I mean no one in the USA cares because the USA has accomplished amazing things with that money like say the internet.... Spending in Europe hasn't accomplished a fraction of what the same dollar has done in the USA. It's not clear why.
    - DreamGen 3y ago
      > Like say the Internet It's not so clear cut ;) "Research at CERN in Switzerland by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989–90 resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
      - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
        There were a couple of global contribution during the development why pick literally the least valuable and most simple to replace one to highlight? We even had perfectly serviceable alternative at the time.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      Spending of those dollar amounts in the US started decades earlier, and coincided with massive amount of military spending e.g. on radio and signals tech going back to WW2. Once there now is one hub, you should expect trying to create a competitor to be vastly more expensive because you have to counter the draw of SV. E.g. every effort to bolster the tech scene in London has sort-of worked, except a portion of the most promising companies then leave for Silicon Valley. This is repeated all over Europe. Similarly, within the UK, I worked for a VC for whom part of the goal was to bolster investment in the regions, and we faced the constant struggle that because founders (rightly) assumed that most UK VC's preferred companies in London, a lot of the most promising companies moved to London before we got to them. For that matter, I live in London because of this situation. I moved to London with my startup at the time because after getting funding in Oslo our VCs advised us there just wasn't enough capital for tech startups in Norway at the time, and so we moved to London for better funding opportunities. Pouring funding in lifts all of these ecosystems, but it also hastens the departure of the ones who get the most benefit unless you do so well that you remove that incentive. Or attach strings to your funding. Fixing that will require you to provide so much capital that more startups start seeing staying in Europe as making their funding situation easier. That means plugging the vast gap in later-stage VC funding between Silicon Valley and Europe, not just some R&D grants here and there. That's not to say I think the European R&D funding efforts have been good enough, but it'll take many times as much funding, and a lot of extra effort, before you should even begin to hope to get the same outcome.
- p_l 3y ago
  You'd be surprised how many "commercial successes" in USA (essentially entire Silicon Valley and before that, Route 128) were driven by big bags of government money at a time when considerable portion of rest of the world would continue to repair and rebuild things wrecked by war.
jimnotgym 3y ago
It's a bit of a weirdly worded article. I think what actually happened was the German government funded it. The EU approved of them doing it, which had to be checked under the EU state aid rules. This is very different to what you stated. https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/28084-eu-clears-state-aid-for-german-multimedia-search-engine-project https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/28084-eu-clears-state-ai...
- sunshine-o 3y ago
  At the end it is always the same type of scheme. The search engine story made the news because it sounded so ridiculous. The EU (and its members) does that for every key technology. For cloud they did it at least 2 or 3 times. I vaguely remember a bunch of alternative "clouds" were created so they have a sovereign cloud, and then bought back by a big telco linked to the state. Then the big telco have it managed by Huawei [1] [1] https://www.orange-business.com/en/press/orange-business-services-strengthens-its-international-cloud-strategy-with-new-public-cloud https://www.orange-business.com/en/press/orange-business-ser...
  - jimnotgym 3y ago
    Of course they did, when the aeroplane was invented lots of countries made their own aeroplanes. They still buy them from Boeing, but they could make their own if they had to. This is how governments protect their countries, they have a back up plan. If access to MS Office, Oracle, AWS etc was restricted by the US government, or began to be priced unreasonably high, effective replacements are ready to go live. Until then it makes sense to stick with the ones everyone else is using
    - sofixa 3y ago
      > Of course they did, when the aeroplane was invented lots of countries made their own aeroplanes. They still buy them from Boeing, but they could make their own if they had to. Airbus is the dominant commercial airplane maker, beating Boeing in orders and deliveries, not to mention quality, for years in a row. And yes, it started as a bunch of European countries merging their national (sometimes government owned, sometimes just closely guarded) aerospace manufacturers.

by max_ 3y ago

IshKebab 3y ago

Yeah I've worked in a couple of startups in the UK now that I was surprised to discover got most of their funding from the EU. E.g. Ultrahaptics (which was an obviously flawed idea) got most money from Horizon 2020, not customers. Kind of weird that these wastes of money are never in the news, not even during Brexit.

jimnotgym 3y ago
Are they a waste of money? Did they stimulate the startup economy, upskill workers, etc? Were there no spin offs? Nobody learnt anything?
- p_l 3y ago
  Or simply provided employment to people who then paid for other things in the economy.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  At least Ultrahaptics was. It may have stimulated the startup economy, but you can do that by funding startups that have realistic ideas. And yes, often you can easily tell if an idea is a non-starter. It isn't the case that "you never know".
vidarh 3y ago
Want to bet you've never heard of most of the companies that benefited from vast amounts of US government research grants that helped lay the foundations for much of the US tech industry? Most people won't have heard about most the successful companies that resulted from the combination of military spending and research grants, much less the many failures on the way. If we knew how to pick the successes ahead of time, there's be no point in gov funding, or in venture capital firms, because they'd be able to go into any mainstream bank and loan finance their entire business with regular business loans. Government research funding almost inherently should have a high failure rate, because they offer the most value where they enable research that is so high risk they can't get funding elsewhere both because of the occasional big win, but also because of the side effects of creating eco systems. That's not to say that doesn't also lead to lots of stupid projects getting funded, and lots of mismanaged funding programs that deserve scrutiny. But it's also always easier to recognize the stupidity after the fact...
- chottocharaii 3y ago
  Well said !!
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago
  I mean no one in the USA cares because the USA has accomplished amazing things with that money like say the internet.... Spending in Europe hasn't accomplished a fraction of what the same dollar has done in the USA. It's not clear why.
  - DreamGen 3y ago
    > Like say the Internet It's not so clear cut ;) "Research at CERN in Switzerland by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989–90 resulted in the World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
    - tick_tock_tick 3y ago
      There were a couple of global contribution during the development why pick literally the least valuable and most simple to replace one to highlight? We even had perfectly serviceable alternative at the time.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Spending of those dollar amounts in the US started decades earlier, and coincided with massive amount of military spending e.g. on radio and signals tech going back to WW2. Once there now is one hub, you should expect trying to create a competitor to be vastly more expensive because you have to counter the draw of SV. E.g. every effort to bolster the tech scene in London has sort-of worked, except a portion of the most promising companies then leave for Silicon Valley. This is repeated all over Europe. Similarly, within the UK, I worked for a VC for whom part of the goal was to bolster investment in the regions, and we faced the constant struggle that because founders (rightly) assumed that most UK VC's preferred companies in London, a lot of the most promising companies moved to London before we got to them. For that matter, I live in London because of this situation. I moved to London with my startup at the time because after getting funding in Oslo our VCs advised us there just wasn't enough capital for tech startups in Norway at the time, and so we moved to London for better funding opportunities. Pouring funding in lifts all of these ecosystems, but it also hastens the departure of the ones who get the most benefit unless you do so well that you remove that incentive. Or attach strings to your funding. Fixing that will require you to provide so much capital that more startups start seeing staying in Europe as making their funding situation easier. That means plugging the vast gap in later-stage VC funding between Silicon Valley and Europe, not just some R&D grants here and there. That's not to say I think the European R&D funding efforts have been good enough, but it'll take many times as much funding, and a lot of extra effort, before you should even begin to hope to get the same outcome.
p_l 3y ago
You'd be surprised how many "commercial successes" in USA (essentially entire Silicon Valley and before that, Route 128) were driven by big bags of government money at a time when considerable portion of rest of the world would continue to repair and rebuild things wrecked by war.

jimnotgym 3y ago

It's a bit of a weirdly worded article. I think what actually happened was the German government funded it. The EU approved of them doing it, which had to be checked under the EU state aid rules. This is very different to what you stated. https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/28084-eu-clears-state-aid-for-german-multimedia-search-engine-project https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/28084-eu-clears-state-ai...

sunshine-o 3y ago
At the end it is always the same type of scheme. The search engine story made the news because it sounded so ridiculous. The EU (and its members) does that for every key technology. For cloud they did it at least 2 or 3 times. I vaguely remember a bunch of alternative "clouds" were created so they have a sovereign cloud, and then bought back by a big telco linked to the state. Then the big telco have it managed by Huawei [1] [1] https://www.orange-business.com/en/press/orange-business-services-strengthens-its-international-cloud-strategy-with-new-public-cloud https://www.orange-business.com/en/press/orange-business-ser...
- jimnotgym 3y ago
  Of course they did, when the aeroplane was invented lots of countries made their own aeroplanes. They still buy them from Boeing, but they could make their own if they had to. This is how governments protect their countries, they have a back up plan. If access to MS Office, Oracle, AWS etc was restricted by the US government, or began to be priced unreasonably high, effective replacements are ready to go live. Until then it makes sense to stick with the ones everyone else is using
  - sofixa 3y ago
    > Of course they did, when the aeroplane was invented lots of countries made their own aeroplanes. They still buy them from Boeing, but they could make their own if they had to. Airbus is the dominant commercial airplane maker, beating Boeing in orders and deliveries, not to mention quality, for years in a row. And yes, it started as a bunch of European countries merging their national (sometimes government owned, sometimes just closely guarded) aerospace manufacturers.