Yes. Europe Does Produce Big Tech Companies. | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Europe Does Produce Big Tech Companies.

blog.awesomezombie.com

18 pointsig13 comments

I think there's a broader point to be made here: Silicon Valley has an inherent association with technology partly because it's a center for consumer technology. Two of the companies mentioned in the tweet that sparked the post, Skype and Nokia, need to be known to consumers to sell products. Whereas chip manufacturers don't care whether the average Joe knows what they do, as long as their potential customers do.

I bet the average consumer these days associates SV with Google, Apple, and Facebook, not the abundance of technology firms serving enterprise or vertical markets.

You make a valid point, without thinking about it I simply assume most video games are made in the US. When I actually think about it, I quickly realise that no, in fact, they're not.

Video games have this mystical ability to avoid being marked by its place of creation. Looking through my shelf for big names; Mass Effect & Dragonage (plus an obvious shit ton more beforehand like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc) are Bioware - Canadian; Assassin's Creed (Beyond Goof & Evil, Brothers in Arms, Far Cry, Heroes of Might and Magic, Myst, Prince of Persia, Tom Clancy's ...'s) - Ubisoft Montreal (the second branch of the French game developer). It's kind of hard to go on without repeating the article, or filling the entire thread with a mere list of the dozens of game developers that dominate peoples minds when it comes to video games.

The biggest game company that comes to mind when I think American is Maxis, and beyond that it's EA - which incidentally hasn't been the sole producer of a game I've enjoyed in so long that I'm currently completely incapable of thinking of one.

Another point worthy of mention: a lot of Americans tend to disregard tech that is not as "sexy" or "in your face". Is traditional engineering not tech anymore? I'd definitely add Volkswagen, Daimler, and BMW (actually, almost every Euro automaker) to that list; think of how much software / systems engineering goes into their production cars, much less their racing divisions. One of the top engineering schools in Germany, TUM, even offers graduate degrees in automotive software engineering.

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