7 ms·

Except EU doesn’t have big tech.

dijit 2y ago
Anything that gets close gets bought or killed by non-european giants. Tencent buys basically all game companies, microsoft buys basically all communication companies (skype, nokia come to mind), google buys basically everything. Even ARM is owned by Softbank after starting out in the UK. The Automotive industry and ASML are just about the only things resistant to this because they're so large already; Automotive acts a lot like big tech. (a clear similarity I saw after being in BMW R&D and Googles Zurich and SF campuses)
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  They can't buy anything unless Europeans are willing to sell.
  - dijit 2y ago
    Vivendi and Tencent attempting to buy Ubisoft via shares might be one thing in living memory that disagrees. If you are publicly traded there is little you can do to prevent people buying shares - though you are right that people sell privately held companies a little too often. Ubisoft in particular created many poison pills to prevent companies getting too dug in, however that didn’t prevent anything except a total buyout. Their board is stacked with Microsoft and Tencent which causes weird, extremely harmful, decision making in the org.
    - carlosjobim 2y ago
      > If you are publicly traded there is little you can do to prevent people buying shares Nobody can force you to sell your shares. Nobody can force you to make your company public. It's all voluntary. You can't have your cake and eat it. Want to get that juicy foreign investor money then cry that the foreigners are taking over?
      - dijit 2y ago
        I have a low tolerance for absurdly stupid comments. Once you sell a share you don't get to control who it is sold to afterwards, you could give shares to people as stock-options, and they are (rightly) going to sell their shares regardless who the buyer is, only based on the price. So. Seriously, shut the fuck up, you're suggesting that the only answer is isolationism. Identification of an issue (people buying up European talent before it gets large enough to be competitive) is not an invitation for absurd and deficiently reasoned victim blaming.
        carlosjobim 2y ago
        Your anger comes from your frustration, your frustration comes from realizing that you're wrong. If you want to keep control of a company - or anything - within certain hands, then you can't sell that thing to others. As evident by millions of companies never having their shares publicly listed or sold on any market. If you sell, you have to accept that you don't have any control of who owns in the future. You can't have your cake and eat it. Not even Europeans can do that. "People buying up European talent" - they can only buy if Europeans are willing to sell. Such victims... This reminds me of people complaining about foreign investors buying up real estate. But of course, no blame is to be put on the greedy sellers who slurped up that juicy foreign money.
  - aniviacat 2y ago
    What's your intended message? Yes, people sell things voluntarily. (In particular, small companies being bought and killed by monopolies is usually very benefitial to the small companies' owners, even if it's bad for the economy as a whole.) That does not contradict the parent comments.
    - pests 2y ago
      The parents comments are about foreign companies owning your company. If you do not want that, do not voluntarily sell your company. I like my cat. I don't want others owning my cat. I probably shouldn't sell my cat then right? I can't take the money now and complain later the neighbor owns my cat.
- roenxi 2y ago
  There is an issue with that perspective though. The Europeans sell out. Ok. Maybe they are bad at valuation and don't realise that their companies are worth more than they are being paid for. Or maybe an EU company can't capture as much value as a US/Chinese company. And those are really the only two options - either the decision is rational or irrational. If it is an irrational decision then there isn't much to talk about. But it is probably the second case - selling out to someone on a different continent generates value. And there is a good chance that is because it helps avoid EU regulators. For example, you mentioned Nokia. Nokia was blown out of the market by superior Chinese manufacturing and US design [0]. It wasn't a close battle, the EU contender was crushed. Apple's motivation for entering the market was that among other things that companies like Nokia were so bad at making phones that Apple reckoned it could break in to a new vertical. That is a very EU-led-industry problem to have. The reason they sold out was because the EU turned out to be incapable of incubating a modern, successful phone manufacturer in the 21st century even with an incredible lead and Nokia was being outmanoeuvred everywhere. [0] Both looked like regulatory issues to me, we've seen how the EU responds to things like micromanaging the iPhone charging port.
  - awesomeMilou 2y ago
    > Nokia was blown out of the market by superior Chinese manufacturing and US design [0]. No, Nokia was blown out of the market via the exclusive deal with Microsoft, which in turn made the dumbest management decisions ever. Nokia bled under the horrible management of Steve Ballmer and their own ignorance with regards to Android. They also proved later on that you don't need any expertise to produce decent Android phones, as HMD global used their name as a brand and has been thriving. To add to this: It's not that hard to develop a mobile operating system that's on par or better than Android, despite what Google might want you to think.
    - pragmaticd 2y ago
      Exactly. Part of Nokia still lives on in Jolla and they have a modest team.
      - 2y ago
- ahartmetz 2y ago
  SAP, too.
autoexec 2y ago
Not on Apple's scale, but with apple pulling products from the market, this opens the door for someone else to step up and fill that highly profitable gap in the market apple abandoned. I really hope that they do. The more players there are in the game from other countries the better off we'll all be.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  But Apple also fumbled with the Vision Pro. They won't remain on the top for much longer I think.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    How is apple impacted if Vision Pro fails? You think they care about the lost R&D cost? Or do you think others will leapfrog them in the VR/AR space?
    - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
      This is the first product miss. And I don't know where Apple goes from here. Others will also leapfrog them is my instinct. Basically they are too big now and startups have a chance of beating both Google and Apple.
      - echoangle 2y ago
        In my opinion, nothing is lost here. They will either put out new improved and cheaper versions until they get the interest they want, or wait for someone else to innovate and then copy it better, the apple way (TM). I don’t see a way where this is apples downfall until they continue to f it up again and again.
      - ericd 2y ago
        Nah, the first iPhone was too expensive, slow, and limited in capabilities (no App Store). They quickly iterated to improve on all of that. The first watch also kind of sucked. The initial iPod wasn’t a blockbuster, either - didn’t work well on Windows, required FireWire. I’m sure there are other initial misses. I think there’s something there with Vision Pro, they just need to iterate and get the cost down.
ffhhj 2y ago
This could be the beginning of big tech for them, another winning situation.
bamboozled 2y ago
How important “big tech” though? Honestly ? It’s even an insidious sounding name.
- refurb 2y ago
  How important is technological industry? Pretty damn important I'd say if you're interested in economic growth and hence supporting your social safety net.
  - Barrin92 2y ago
    The technological industry is indeed very important, the mistake is thinking VR goggles and chatbots are somehow the only or even particularly relevant form of technology. Europe is of course full of high technology firms, (the awkwardly named https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana) contains a non trivial amount of high value added industry in the world. What we need more of these days is 155 mm shells, chip fabs, nuclear power plants, solar cells and rail, not Facebook and Apple equivalents complaining about regulations.
    - refurb 2y ago
      You have a good point, I'll give you that. We get so focused on big tech being social media/ad companies that we ignore the rest of it, which is actually huge.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    Big tech is not inherent in the concept of a tech industry. Big tech is like 6 companies that want to swallow the world. Not being able to separate these two concepts is grade school level literacy and critical thinking. It’s not acceptable to conflate them. It’s completely ridiculous.
    - rsanek 2y ago
      how many other large eu based tech companies can we name? like 3 total?
bamboozled 2y ago
How important “big tech” though? Honestly ? It’s even an insidious sounding name. Big tech has caused a lot of problems for society. Echo chambers on social media, monopolistic behaviour, teen depression and addiction. We want the tech, without the grifting.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  Are they separable? Teens in particular appear to be bad for each other's mental health. Connectivity increases that effect, anonymity makes it worse, likes and other status features makes it worse still. Not sure where you draw a line between not quite bad enough and too bad.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    It doesn’t help there are algorithms designed to keep them looking at things that aren’t great for them to be looking at though does it. Can you provide an example in the past wheee this has existed before outside of big tech ?
    - shermantanktop 2y ago
      I wasn’t arguing that this was just as bad before. It’s clearly all made worse and accelerated by social media calling engagement and ad dollars above all. Historically the victims of contagion have been oldsters in a moral panic. This time I think it is actually true - there’s a mind virus loose.
okanat 2y ago
EU didn't go into an uncontrolled spree investing every company that had .com in its name and ruined thousands of lives and wasted billions of dollars. EU usually doesn't let companies to grow uncontrollable sizes that the government is completely controlled by them not the citizens. The existence of Big Tech means that the government did a very poor job in protecting the consumers and the free and fair market
- ADeerAppeared 2y ago
  > EU didn't go into an uncontrolled spree investing every company that had .com in its name and ruined thousands of lives and wasted billions of dollars. This is the thing that so many Americans in tech don't seem to understand. VC Twitter is full of smugposting about how the US has "$5 trillion market-cap of startups" and the EU doesn't. And what they miss is that the EU doesn't want Silicon Valley. It doesn't want the "trillions in startups". Because essentially none of them turn any profit. Why on earth would anyone want $5 trillion dollars in companies that do not make financial sense yet have awful externalities.
  - ryan93 2y ago
    The five trillion market cap is from very profitable companies
    - ADeerAppeared 2y ago
      Startups, not big tech companies.
      - ryan93 2y ago
        Every company was started up
  - khuey 2y ago
    AAPL's profit is roughly equivalent to the GDP of Slovakia.
machiaweliczny 2y ago
Will have, if Russia can have their own search engine or Czechia (8M people). It’s matter of nit having US competition that undercuts on ads monopoly
RamblingCTO 2y ago
Ever heard of Spotify or SAP maybe?
- rsanek 2y ago
  those are tech companies, but aren't really considered big tech. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech
  - RamblingCTO 2y ago
    If you consider salesforce big tech, then you gotta consider SAP big tech as well. They have 31 vs 34.5 billion. Spotify has only 13.x something tho
onel 2y ago
How is that a bad thing?

Anything that gets close gets bought or killed by non-european giants. Tencent buys basically all game companies, microsoft buys basically all communication companies (skype, nokia come to mind), google buys basically everything. Even ARM is owned by Softbank after starting out in the UK. The Automotive industry and ASML are just about the only things resistant to this because they're so large already; Automotive acts a lot like big tech. (a clear similarity I saw after being in BMW R&D and Googles Zurich and SF campuses)

carlosjobim 2y ago
They can't buy anything unless Europeans are willing to sell.
- dijit 2y ago
  Vivendi and Tencent attempting to buy Ubisoft via shares might be one thing in living memory that disagrees. If you are publicly traded there is little you can do to prevent people buying shares - though you are right that people sell privately held companies a little too often. Ubisoft in particular created many poison pills to prevent companies getting too dug in, however that didn’t prevent anything except a total buyout. Their board is stacked with Microsoft and Tencent which causes weird, extremely harmful, decision making in the org.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    > If you are publicly traded there is little you can do to prevent people buying shares Nobody can force you to sell your shares. Nobody can force you to make your company public. It's all voluntary. You can't have your cake and eat it. Want to get that juicy foreign investor money then cry that the foreigners are taking over?
    - dijit 2y ago
      I have a low tolerance for absurdly stupid comments. Once you sell a share you don't get to control who it is sold to afterwards, you could give shares to people as stock-options, and they are (rightly) going to sell their shares regardless who the buyer is, only based on the price. So. Seriously, shut the fuck up, you're suggesting that the only answer is isolationism. Identification of an issue (people buying up European talent before it gets large enough to be competitive) is not an invitation for absurd and deficiently reasoned victim blaming.
      - carlosjobim 2y ago
        Your anger comes from your frustration, your frustration comes from realizing that you're wrong. If you want to keep control of a company - or anything - within certain hands, then you can't sell that thing to others. As evident by millions of companies never having their shares publicly listed or sold on any market. If you sell, you have to accept that you don't have any control of who owns in the future. You can't have your cake and eat it. Not even Europeans can do that. "People buying up European talent" - they can only buy if Europeans are willing to sell. Such victims... This reminds me of people complaining about foreign investors buying up real estate. But of course, no blame is to be put on the greedy sellers who slurped up that juicy foreign money.
- aniviacat 2y ago
  What's your intended message? Yes, people sell things voluntarily. (In particular, small companies being bought and killed by monopolies is usually very benefitial to the small companies' owners, even if it's bad for the economy as a whole.) That does not contradict the parent comments.
  - pests 2y ago
    The parents comments are about foreign companies owning your company. If you do not want that, do not voluntarily sell your company. I like my cat. I don't want others owning my cat. I probably shouldn't sell my cat then right? I can't take the money now and complain later the neighbor owns my cat.
roenxi 2y ago
There is an issue with that perspective though. The Europeans sell out. Ok. Maybe they are bad at valuation and don't realise that their companies are worth more than they are being paid for. Or maybe an EU company can't capture as much value as a US/Chinese company. And those are really the only two options - either the decision is rational or irrational. If it is an irrational decision then there isn't much to talk about. But it is probably the second case - selling out to someone on a different continent generates value. And there is a good chance that is because it helps avoid EU regulators. For example, you mentioned Nokia. Nokia was blown out of the market by superior Chinese manufacturing and US design [0]. It wasn't a close battle, the EU contender was crushed. Apple's motivation for entering the market was that among other things that companies like Nokia were so bad at making phones that Apple reckoned it could break in to a new vertical. That is a very EU-led-industry problem to have. The reason they sold out was because the EU turned out to be incapable of incubating a modern, successful phone manufacturer in the 21st century even with an incredible lead and Nokia was being outmanoeuvred everywhere. [0] Both looked like regulatory issues to me, we've seen how the EU responds to things like micromanaging the iPhone charging port.
- awesomeMilou 2y ago
  > Nokia was blown out of the market by superior Chinese manufacturing and US design [0]. No, Nokia was blown out of the market via the exclusive deal with Microsoft, which in turn made the dumbest management decisions ever. Nokia bled under the horrible management of Steve Ballmer and their own ignorance with regards to Android. They also proved later on that you don't need any expertise to produce decent Android phones, as HMD global used their name as a brand and has been thriving. To add to this: It's not that hard to develop a mobile operating system that's on par or better than Android, despite what Google might want you to think.
  - pragmaticd 2y ago
    Exactly. Part of Nokia still lives on in Jolla and they have a modest team.
    - 2y ago
ahartmetz 2y ago
SAP, too.

autoexec 2y ago

Not on Apple's scale, but with apple pulling products from the market, this opens the door for someone else to step up and fill that highly profitable gap in the market apple abandoned. I really hope that they do. The more players there are in the game from other countries the better off we'll all be.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
But Apple also fumbled with the Vision Pro. They won't remain on the top for much longer I think.
- echoangle 2y ago
  How is apple impacted if Vision Pro fails? You think they care about the lost R&D cost? Or do you think others will leapfrog them in the VR/AR space?
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    This is the first product miss. And I don't know where Apple goes from here. Others will also leapfrog them is my instinct. Basically they are too big now and startups have a chance of beating both Google and Apple.
    - echoangle 2y ago
      In my opinion, nothing is lost here. They will either put out new improved and cheaper versions until they get the interest they want, or wait for someone else to innovate and then copy it better, the apple way (TM). I don’t see a way where this is apples downfall until they continue to f it up again and again.
    - ericd 2y ago
      Nah, the first iPhone was too expensive, slow, and limited in capabilities (no App Store). They quickly iterated to improve on all of that. The first watch also kind of sucked. The initial iPod wasn’t a blockbuster, either - didn’t work well on Windows, required FireWire. I’m sure there are other initial misses. I think there’s something there with Vision Pro, they just need to iterate and get the cost down.

ffhhj 2y ago

This could be the beginning of big tech for them, another winning situation.

bamboozled 2y ago

How important “big tech” though? Honestly ? It’s even an insidious sounding name.

refurb 2y ago
How important is technological industry? Pretty damn important I'd say if you're interested in economic growth and hence supporting your social safety net.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  The technological industry is indeed very important, the mistake is thinking VR goggles and chatbots are somehow the only or even particularly relevant form of technology. Europe is of course full of high technology firms, (the awkwardly named https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana) contains a non trivial amount of high value added industry in the world. What we need more of these days is 155 mm shells, chip fabs, nuclear power plants, solar cells and rail, not Facebook and Apple equivalents complaining about regulations.
  - refurb 2y ago
    You have a good point, I'll give you that. We get so focused on big tech being social media/ad companies that we ignore the rest of it, which is actually huge.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  Big tech is not inherent in the concept of a tech industry. Big tech is like 6 companies that want to swallow the world. Not being able to separate these two concepts is grade school level literacy and critical thinking. It’s not acceptable to conflate them. It’s completely ridiculous.
  - rsanek 2y ago
    how many other large eu based tech companies can we name? like 3 total?

bamboozled 2y ago

How important “big tech” though? Honestly ? It’s even an insidious sounding name. Big tech has caused a lot of problems for society. Echo chambers on social media, monopolistic behaviour, teen depression and addiction. We want the tech, without the grifting.

shermantanktop 2y ago
Are they separable? Teens in particular appear to be bad for each other's mental health. Connectivity increases that effect, anonymity makes it worse, likes and other status features makes it worse still. Not sure where you draw a line between not quite bad enough and too bad.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  It doesn’t help there are algorithms designed to keep them looking at things that aren’t great for them to be looking at though does it. Can you provide an example in the past wheee this has existed before outside of big tech ?
  - shermantanktop 2y ago
    I wasn’t arguing that this was just as bad before. It’s clearly all made worse and accelerated by social media calling engagement and ad dollars above all. Historically the victims of contagion have been oldsters in a moral panic. This time I think it is actually true - there’s a mind virus loose.

okanat 2y ago

EU didn't go into an uncontrolled spree investing every company that had .com in its name and ruined thousands of lives and wasted billions of dollars. EU usually doesn't let companies to grow uncontrollable sizes that the government is completely controlled by them not the citizens. The existence of Big Tech means that the government did a very poor job in protecting the consumers and the free and fair market

ADeerAppeared 2y ago
> EU didn't go into an uncontrolled spree investing every company that had .com in its name and ruined thousands of lives and wasted billions of dollars. This is the thing that so many Americans in tech don't seem to understand. VC Twitter is full of smugposting about how the US has "$5 trillion market-cap of startups" and the EU doesn't. And what they miss is that the EU doesn't want Silicon Valley. It doesn't want the "trillions in startups". Because essentially none of them turn any profit. Why on earth would anyone want $5 trillion dollars in companies that do not make financial sense yet have awful externalities.
- ryan93 2y ago
  The five trillion market cap is from very profitable companies
  - ADeerAppeared 2y ago
    Startups, not big tech companies.
    - ryan93 2y ago
      Every company was started up
- khuey 2y ago
  AAPL's profit is roughly equivalent to the GDP of Slovakia.

machiaweliczny 2y ago

Will have, if Russia can have their own search engine or Czechia (8M people). It’s matter of nit having US competition that undercuts on ads monopoly

RamblingCTO 2y ago

Ever heard of Spotify or SAP maybe?

rsanek 2y ago
those are tech companies, but aren't really considered big tech. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech
- RamblingCTO 2y ago
  If you consider salesforce big tech, then you gotta consider SAP big tech as well. They have 31 vs 34.5 billion. Spotify has only 13.x something tho

onel 2y ago

How is that a bad thing?