I don't really have an opinion one way or another, simply because I'm not multi-cultural enough (haven't seen much of European office life). All I can look at

I don't really have an opinion one way or another, simply because I'm not multi-cultural enough (haven't seen much of European office life). All I can look at is what has been done over the years on both continents. First of all, not much, we all appear to be living off achievements of previous generations mostly funded by the military in fear of WWIII. "Internet revolution" actually started in the 60s and was pretty much complete by the end of the 80s when I, as many of you, was still in middle school. Operating systems, compilers, protocols, all these basic building blocks all belong to that era and nobody contributed anything significant on top of them. "5th generation computing" was supposed to be The Shit but it didn't happen. AI didn't happen. So... fundamentally, I don't see anything significant coming out of either culture: yes, computers got smaller and cheaper, not a big deal - they were supposed to. Now, looking at lesser degree improvements in the past 10-15 years, US has produced nothing (well... RMS being a human is not a program, be he can be considered a product of the US), but Europe did real-world-start the open source movement saving UINX in process and producing a free alternative to expensive RDBMS (MySQL). Europe, don't forget, was also responsible for WWW itself. Paul likes to talk about "how much cheaper it is to start a company these days". Yes cheaper indeed, - mostly because of those three developments (Linux/MySQL/Web). They are nice additions on top of the fundamentals delivered by Americans in the 60-70s, but hey - they have nothing to do with entrepreneurs. Call me a skeptic or even an asshole but the picture I am seeing isn't pretty: there are thousands of smart and involved folks who love computers and who's been the real force behind all these wonderful improvements we've seen, they are the people who make the difference. On the other hand we have "entrepreneurs" who's done nothing but milking that other group, producing largely irrelevant, secondary BS of questionable value (which gets duplicated by Chinese and Russian companies in a matter of weeks). Yes, SV offers a very favorable climate for this kind of individuals to strive, but I doubt this has anything to do with economic prosperity of a nation or with any metric of "awesomeness" worth arguing about: 99.95% of the time, the code running on an average CPU of an average server of an average SV startup has been written for free by someone from US/Europe/whatever. Entrepreneurs don't make anything. They only find ways to deliver results of other people's work/research to mass markets. Hardly a noble role, yet not completely useless. Le Webs, TechCrunch 50s don't matter. These drunk assholes on stage don't matter. They don't code, don't know shit about computers and Internet and their main function there is to promote their personal brands/blogs. Entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley doesn't matter. That's just a thin buildup on top of something significantly bigger and more important: millions of true computer lovers firing up vim/emacs/visual studio every day, coding for free, for that "Internet Love" that got featured on YouTube earlier today.