3 ms·

What's the counter examples to highlight Europe's tech successes? Skype? Nokia? Soundcloud? Spotify?

by influx 2y ago

mrtksn 2y ago
Define success. If it's high stock market cap calculated by multiplying the number of shares with the last trade price Europe doesn't have many of those.
- simplyluke 2y ago
  I’d flip the question and ask you by what metrics Europes tech sector is performing comparatively well. Employment? Average salary? ARR? I struggle to think of a metric that’s a positive outlier.
  - kube-system 2y ago
    Vacation time.
    - RestlessMind 2y ago
      Pfft. Iran, Burkina Faso, Cambodia and Bahrain beat "Europe" handily on that metric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b... Let's have those countries as our role model then? /s
      - mrtksn 2y ago
        The full phrase is "vacation time in Europe".
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      If we are talking about tech companies, as stated in the great-grandparent comment, tech employees in the US have as much or more vacation time as Europeans. I can easily take multi-month vacations if I so choose (with some prior planning and assent of course), and that is a similar story for other tech employees too. The difference is that we just get paid much more for the same work.
      - kube-system 2y ago
        They are allocated a good number of PTO hours, but Americans are really bad at taking them. I also could take that long of a vacation too, technically, but I never have and realistically never would.
        satvikpendem 2y ago
        I guess, that's on them then. One could say the same of those types of Europeans who don't take vacation either. Personally I'm taking everything I'm allocated.
    - influx 2y ago
      I know a bunch of FAANG engineers that retired in their 30s and 40s, so the rest of their life is vacation time...
  - mrtksn 2y ago
    Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction. Companies are there to make these possible, not to maximise the stock trading price. Some achieve that by making EUV lithography machines, others do chemicals or pharmaceuticals. Are you aware that you can use the developer tools in your browser to set the price of the stock or your bank account balance to anything you like? You don't have to crumble your infrastructure, run from the mentally ill homeless people or bankrupt sick people to see those numbers. If you insist on extra steps, you can sell a stock to your friend at ridiculous price and say that that this company is now bigger than the worlds' economy combined.
    - RestlessMind 2y ago
      > Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction Apart from longevity[1], everything else is subjective so do you have any evidence? From what I see based on a quick search, happiness level seems same in US/Canada vs Germany/France. eg. Rankings by this[2] measure: Canada(15), USA(23), Germany(24), France(27). Or scores by this[3] measure: Canada (6.9), USA(6.7), Germany(6.7), France(6.6) [1] Even longevity is full of caveats and nuances. When you look at life expectancy by ethnicity, a given ethnicity has similar life expectancy across different advanced countries (eg. Japanese-Americans vs Japanese in Japan). It doesn't even seem to be correlated by income in the US, because latinos have a higher life expectancy than whites[4] even though later group is richer than the former. [2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-... [3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-map-of-global-happiness-by-country-in-2024/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-map-of-global-happiness-b... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9256789/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9256789/
      - mrtksn 2y ago
        I’m sure Americans are dying healthy and happy at young age. Crunching the numbers until the fit the narrative aside, the chocolates are horrible too.
        knowaveragejoe 2y ago
quentindemetz 2y ago
Adyen Revolut GoCardless Shift Vinted …
- gruez 2y ago
  >Adyen >Revolut Those have 1% of the revenue compared to the top American tech companies (individual, not combined). The rest are private and I suspect have even less revenue. If those are the best examples of "tech successes" you can think of, you're proving the parent commenter's point.
  - bmurphy1976 2y ago
    I don't know why the parent is calling out those companies, strange list. Europe has plenty of very successful, influential, and tech heavy organizations. ARM and AirBus come immediately to mind. Car manufacturers such as VW or BMW. Software companies such as SAP. Some of the largest banks and fossil fuel companies in the world.
NicoJuicy 2y ago
I bet the hardware you're running on wants to have a word. Wether if it's from Samsung, Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA or AMD. And lately, Intel too. ASML
- freedomben 2y ago
  Aren't those American companies (other than Samsung)? I mean, they're all global/multi-national like most big corps, so it's not as clean as that. But it seems like you're actually agreeing with the parent...
  - NicoJuicy 2y ago
    Except Intel, all the hardware is produced in Taiwan or abroad at TSMC. Samsung and Intel ( + all others) buy their fabs at ASML. Cars: my preference is still German ( and Toyota). Tesla is really low build quality and it's claims for FSD ( as it's "technological innovation") is a joke. But, Waymo is ahead though. Planes: Well, Airbus, duh.
    - freedomben 2y ago
      If you zoom in on the just the hardware production market then yes sure, although that seems more an artifact of a small number of highly specialized manufacturers than evidence of startup friendliness, otherwise I'd expect to see a bunch of competing manufacturers rather than a handful of huge ones. In the context of this conversation also, when we say "tech" we're usually talking about much more than just hardware production (especially software). A huge chunk of the value-add is from the software and other use cases that the tech company adds to the hardware. But even just looking at hardware, a ton of that hardware is designed in the US and just sent out for manufacturing. The physical manufacturing is just a piece of the whole. But even all that aside, none of those major manufacturers seem to be in Europe, so I don't see how even zooming in on the hardware makes a point about Europe not having barriers and/or friction. As an aside, to be clear, I'm not making any value judgments here by saying just because things are done somewhere means that is better. There's a lot more to the equation than just that, which is easily illustrated with a hypothetical example. If you enslaved a population you could get a lot of business by doing things cheaply, but it obviously wouldn't be a "better" place just because it's the easiest/cheapest place to get business is done.

What's the counter examples to highlight Europe's tech successes? Skype? Nokia? Soundcloud? Spotify?

by influx 2y ago

What's the counter examples to highlight Europe's tech successes? Skype? Nokia? Soundcloud? Spotify?

Define success. If it's high stock market cap calculated by multiplying the number of shares with the last trade price Europe doesn't have many of those.

simplyluke 2y ago
I’d flip the question and ask you by what metrics Europes tech sector is performing comparatively well. Employment? Average salary? ARR? I struggle to think of a metric that’s a positive outlier.
- kube-system 2y ago
  Vacation time.
  - RestlessMind 2y ago
    Pfft. Iran, Burkina Faso, Cambodia and Bahrain beat "Europe" handily on that metric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b... Let's have those countries as our role model then? /s
    - mrtksn 2y ago
      The full phrase is "vacation time in Europe".
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    If we are talking about tech companies, as stated in the great-grandparent comment, tech employees in the US have as much or more vacation time as Europeans. I can easily take multi-month vacations if I so choose (with some prior planning and assent of course), and that is a similar story for other tech employees too. The difference is that we just get paid much more for the same work.
    - kube-system 2y ago
      They are allocated a good number of PTO hours, but Americans are really bad at taking them. I also could take that long of a vacation too, technically, but I never have and realistically never would.
      - satvikpendem 2y ago
        I guess, that's on them then. One could say the same of those types of Europeans who don't take vacation either. Personally I'm taking everything I'm allocated.
  - influx 2y ago
    I know a bunch of FAANG engineers that retired in their 30s and 40s, so the rest of their life is vacation time...
- mrtksn 2y ago
  Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction. Companies are there to make these possible, not to maximise the stock trading price. Some achieve that by making EUV lithography machines, others do chemicals or pharmaceuticals. Are you aware that you can use the developer tools in your browser to set the price of the stock or your bank account balance to anything you like? You don't have to crumble your infrastructure, run from the mentally ill homeless people or bankrupt sick people to see those numbers. If you insist on extra steps, you can sell a stock to your friend at ridiculous price and say that that this company is now bigger than the worlds' economy combined.
  - RestlessMind 2y ago
    > Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction Apart from longevity[1], everything else is subjective so do you have any evidence? From what I see based on a quick search, happiness level seems same in US/Canada vs Germany/France. eg. Rankings by this[2] measure: Canada(15), USA(23), Germany(24), France(27). Or scores by this[3] measure: Canada (6.9), USA(6.7), Germany(6.7), France(6.6) [1] Even longevity is full of caveats and nuances. When you look at life expectancy by ethnicity, a given ethnicity has similar life expectancy across different advanced countries (eg. Japanese-Americans vs Japanese in Japan). It doesn't even seem to be correlated by income in the US, because latinos have a higher life expectancy than whites[4] even though later group is richer than the former. [2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-... [3] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-map-of-global-happiness-by-country-in-2024/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-map-of-global-happiness-b... [4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9256789/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9256789/
    - mrtksn 2y ago
      I’m sure Americans are dying healthy and happy at young age. Crunching the numbers until the fit the narrative aside, the chocolates are horrible too.
      - knowaveragejoe 2y ago

quentindemetz 2y ago

Adyen Revolut GoCardless Shift Vinted …

gruez 2y ago
>Adyen >Revolut Those have 1% of the revenue compared to the top American tech companies (individual, not combined). The rest are private and I suspect have even less revenue. If those are the best examples of "tech successes" you can think of, you're proving the parent commenter's point.
- bmurphy1976 2y ago
  I don't know why the parent is calling out those companies, strange list. Europe has plenty of very successful, influential, and tech heavy organizations. ARM and AirBus come immediately to mind. Car manufacturers such as VW or BMW. Software companies such as SAP. Some of the largest banks and fossil fuel companies in the world.

NicoJuicy 2y ago

I bet the hardware you're running on wants to have a word. Wether if it's from Samsung, Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA or AMD. And lately, Intel too. ASML

freedomben 2y ago
Aren't those American companies (other than Samsung)? I mean, they're all global/multi-national like most big corps, so it's not as clean as that. But it seems like you're actually agreeing with the parent...
- NicoJuicy 2y ago
  Except Intel, all the hardware is produced in Taiwan or abroad at TSMC. Samsung and Intel ( + all others) buy their fabs at ASML. Cars: my preference is still German ( and Toyota). Tesla is really low build quality and it's claims for FSD ( as it's "technological innovation") is a joke. But, Waymo is ahead though. Planes: Well, Airbus, duh.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    If you zoom in on the just the hardware production market then yes sure, although that seems more an artifact of a small number of highly specialized manufacturers than evidence of startup friendliness, otherwise I'd expect to see a bunch of competing manufacturers rather than a handful of huge ones. In the context of this conversation also, when we say "tech" we're usually talking about much more than just hardware production (especially software). A huge chunk of the value-add is from the software and other use cases that the tech company adds to the hardware. But even just looking at hardware, a ton of that hardware is designed in the US and just sent out for manufacturing. The physical manufacturing is just a piece of the whole. But even all that aside, none of those major manufacturers seem to be in Europe, so I don't see how even zooming in on the hardware makes a point about Europe not having barriers and/or friction. As an aside, to be clear, I'm not making any value judgments here by saying just because things are done somewhere means that is better. There's a lot more to the equation than just that, which is easily illustrated with a hypothetical example. If you enslaved a population you could get a lot of business by doing things cheaply, but it obviously wouldn't be a "better" place just because it's the easiest/cheapest place to get business is done.