Hacker News Reader

Comment by fvdessen | Hacker News Reader

There was still not that long ago an incredible amount of innovative companies and products in Europe.

But at that time companies were still built for their home markets first and on that regard the USA is big and unified. Since software is mostly winner takes all it means that when the USA companies came to Europe they had already won the USA and could steamroll the local competition

There is for example no way a swedish mapping company could have competed with google maps , which had so much search monopoly money backing it up from the start

The only way Europe could have prevented this is to just ban foreign monopolies, wich is what china did, and why they are now succesfully ‘innovating’.

I read often on this website that europe cannot ‘take risks’ or ‘innovate’ and is ‘riding on american innovation for free’ and I find that a bit insulting, because I fell that as things are geopolitically it’s just not possible for Europeans to compete fairly with Americans

View on HN

I like your points and agree on your conclusion.

Further, I would like to add a few ideas:

- innovation in Europe can only scale if we achieve a higher degree of unity in Europe, including one common language, one common jurisdiction and law framework. Localization is just too expensive in Europe and hinders scaling.

- a certain degree of protectionism is good. I am a big fan of how China made it. They have a really fantastic digital landscape that is superior in so many areas compared to Europe (if you exclude the data privacy issue)

- reliance on the old economy is bad and this is a political decision.

- too many people are too scared of new technologies and want things "how they used to be". This is bad and is typical for many Europeans, especially here in Germany. Cultural change must happen but you cannot force it.

What could the one common language be? English would seem to be the logical choice, but there is no way France would agree to that.

The EU doesn’t even agree on which alphabet to use, Latin is the most common one but the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets are also official in the union.

English is my second language, and while I wouldn’t mind changing the official language of my country, I can’t see that ever happening, there’s just so much culture attached to the language, that would be forgotten together with our language.

Yep. A common European first language would start a process which would result in a terrible loss of local cultural tradition. Cultural suicude for the common good has been suggested before, but I can't imagine that there would be a lot of people who'd agree with it.

I'm sure that some wouldn't mind other's cultural suicide, however.

Definitely not. There's probably no shortage of people promiting their own culture's demise either.

I disagree, I live in Denmark where the majority speaks very good English. There's no shortage of Danish media.

On the other hand, economic suicide is assured by insisting on a high standard of living while doing everything possible to prevent innovation.

As a Swedish-speaking Finn, I can confirm that a culture can end up on the decline even if there's powerful legal backing to preserving it (including forcing the remaining ~90% of the population to learning Swedish in school). Incidentally, I'd say there's a large correlation with English being more and more accepted in Finnish society, but I suspect the actual root cause simply is that cultural production is mainly taking place in the first language (Finnish) and that it leaves less for the others.

The same would happen if you managed to get the entire EU to agree to switch to one single language (remember, it's likely that it would be French or German instead of English). As a result of pushing adoption of the new first language, it would mean increased cultural output in that language, and a reduced output for the others. After a while, the differences will start showing.

I've lived in Denmark for quite a few years and I agree that people in Copenhagen and the other larger cities wouldn't notice that much of a difference to begin with, but remember that this would mean a cultural shift that will take multiple generations. Ask the German speakers in southern Jutland in another 24 years, and compare how their culture thrives compared to how they did before the war and you will probably have a pretty decent view on how the situation would be for many, many of EU's minorities 100 years after the switch to a single European first language.

Quite a few large french companies that are global in nature have switched to English first, but for the broader acceptance and the government to officially support English as the unifying language I share your skepticism

English may be more acceptable once the UK excited, leaving no favored EU state.

The UK has already left the EU (it's in the transition phase now) and Ireland and Malta both have English as an official language.

Ireland and Malta are both small enough that no one would mistake them for a dominant force in the EU.

Latin is tanned, rested and ready.

Proto-indo-european would be a better unity option so as to not show favor to Romance-speaking countries.

PIE lacks the vocabulary for certain modern things like writing.

That's the best part!

Modern languages already have words for things like a mouse, a screen or the Big Bang, but it's all stupid stuff like an analogy to how a computer mouse looks like an animal because of its long cord-tail, a reference to the white screen a projector casts it's projection on, or a vulgar put-down of a theory being like God's orgasm.

If we take a dead language and start adding in vocabulary, we can quietly sweep that all under a rug before we encounter any alien species we have to explain ourselves to.

Alien species: "So you remodeled your language, removing all traces of history and culture from it, because you were worried about the impression you'd make on aliens you didn't know, you didn't even know existed?"

"You're the most pathetic people in the known universe."

I mean, we'll try, but we can only do so much. Even in ancient languages, every word for "tool" is also slang for "penis", and twenty percent of the verbs can also be used to refer to a sex act.

I don't agree that centralization in Europe is the answer, that's exactly how you end up relying on others manufacturing capacity. Decentralize more so when the political winds change you are not at the mercy of other countries if your own nation has no manufacturing capacity to speak of.

If those countries are small, you're not at their mercy, they are at yours. See Germany - Eastern Europe ;-)

If you rely on a superpower, then that's your own damn fault :-))

This! The EU needs to be more cohesive and create an alternative to the U.S. (with it's increasing anti-intellectualism) or China.

There has been a strong movement to more unity in Europe. But, this has not been accompanied by democratisation.

To stay competitive Europe needs unity in the political process, defense and border security for example, and not in regulations in economy, finance, immigration etc, which are excessive already.

innovation in Europe can only scale if we achieve a higher degree of unity in Europe, including one common language, one common jurisdiction and law framework. Localization is just too expensive in Europe and hinders scaling.

Obviously we already have English, nearly universally spoken as a second or third language in the EU. So I assume you mean English, or some other language as the first language.

Which I think means all other languages would after a few generations become nearly extinct. Like Latin these days.

But despite how much I wish we had more innovation, I don't think losing all languages is worth it.

If English becomes national language, you could forget about innovation. A big reason why China and SK are successful is language barrier. It effectively stops brain drain and thus, increase innovation. All countries with either main language or secondary language as English has already lost tech market.

Just look at foreign competitors of Amazon, Google, Facebook etc. Even Russia like country have major tech companies while being poorer than western European countries.

> A big reason why China and SK are successful is language barrier. It effectively stops brain drain and thus, increase innovation.

This is BS. There will always be a loss of brain power to the lingua franca nation(s), regardless what that language happens to be. The research opportunities will (almost?) always be better.

That said, many people stay in China or return to China because they like it there, even if they speak English at a high level and have the option to stay in an English-speaking country. This has been true in my circle of friends and professional acquaintances since the 90s.

It might be the case that China is large enough to create its own large opportunities, so emigrating from China to an English-speaking country may not be particularly compelling. That said, I think it’s an apple-and-oranges comparison — the opportunities largely seem to be simply different from where I sit.

What Russian tech have you ever used?

GLONASS?

Klashnikov (very indirectly)?

> - innovation in Europe can only scale if we achieve a higher degree of unity in Europe, including one common language, one common jurisdiction and law framework. Localization is just too expensive in Europe and hinders scaling.

If that were the cost, then it would not be worth the price. Fortunately, it is completely unnecessary. It suffices to look to when Europe was at her best.

Technology is mere instrument. What you describe is Procrustean cultural destruction to satisfy some metric. Technology is not the end, but a means that has its proper place. The destruction of the various cultures that make the world rich is a recipe for monoculture and thus lack of inspiration. A diverse and decentralized Europe permits the exchange of ideas to occur in an atmosphere of diverse cultures. "Scale" is about de facto standardization and standardization is a double edged sword, not an unalloyed good. If anything, scale is what makes monopolies possible.

The solution is not to create a bland mass of rootless "citizen consumers" crafted out of the corporate pop culture, though, to be honest, Europe is practically there already, wearily drifting along, preferring to keep warm. The solution is a fundamental awakening of Europeans to the deep roots of their civilization and what made it great. That's where the life force is. The EU is in practice a form of managed decline perpetrated by delusional ideologues, petty bureaucrats, and ignorant airheads. It is antithetical to a vibrant Europe so looking for a solution there is like asking a dictator of some banana republic what makes a vibrant country.

Can't overstate how important this is. India is slowly coming to terms with adopting English (instead of Hindi) as the lingua franca - it has been a reliable economic mobility driver for millions of people. More European states might do well by adopting a bilingual/trilingual approach to expand economic opportunities for the population. I think parts of Scandinavia already manage to do this quite well.

I just want to say you articulated the difficulty with innovating in the European market very well.

> innovation in Europe can only scale if we achieve a higher degree of unity in Europe

Interesting, I hadn't seen the term localisation used beyond language. IMO, the major hindrance to European unification is nationalistic reflexes together with too many voluntary projects: EEC vs EU, Schengen, human rights, immigration, the euro... the instigators of such projects thought the success of these projects/goals would encourage more countries to opt in at a later date, which never happened, as a general rule. This resulted in more ways to slice and dice what "Europe" means, instead of contributing to unification.

A frequent occurrence is national politicians pretending they played no part in the council of ministers and blame-shifting towards Europe in order to gain or maintain domestic popularity. This actively undermines belief in EU institutions.

The facts seem to indicate the individual countries want to keep the systems they have in place, which can include vast differences in labour law, bureaucracy, remuneration schemes, pension plans, sick leave regulation and workplace safety, despite a basic common regulatory framework. As far as I'm aware, US states don't have as much variance between them.

As a result, a would-be tech giant has higher startup costs if it wants to employ people throughout Europe. I would say actual language localisation is a much less prohibitive cost.

As a German, do you see greater unification happening any time soon? I'm not sure I do, as one of your smaller neighbours.

Banning monopolies (not just foreign ones) may also have worked, and is probably the smartest plan for the planet as a whole.

I'd say the main US advantage is that it's set up to create stagnant monopolies that can then leverage that power into other areas.

Microsoft is now one of the players in gaming consoles, but they basically bought their way in on the back of monopoly rents from Office and OS.

That's not monopolistic abuse; what you described is just investment in a new sector with profits from an existing one. Companies, investors and funds do it all the time.

Abuse would be when a company leverages a monopoly to enter or influence another market, such as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.

Perhaps monopoly abuse is not the right term, but Microsoft did buy their way into the gaming industry by selling millions of consoles at a loss. There is no way for any company that is not already a multi-billion dollar company to compete with that. The same happens in many other areas where large tech companies use their inertia and tons of existing capital to make it impossible for anyone but other tech giants to compete with them. This is extremely problematic because these companies almost win “by default” just by swinging their weight around, even if their product might not be the best product in that area.

Predatory pricing is what you are refering to.

You might want to change your example, as while the tactic is reprehensible and common to VC-backed companies, selling consoles at loss is standard practice for I think all makers (they recoup it by license fees on games)

Nintendo doesn’t sell at a loss - only Sony and Microsoft do. Both are huge multi-billion dollar companies that entered the console market using money they had from other ventures. There is also effectively no other competition on this market besides those companies. I think my example is fine.

If the profits come from a monopoly, I'd argue that it's monopolistic abuse. If they weren't abusing the monopoly, they wouldn't have the profits to do whatever the next thing is, which often involves losing money in the short term to tie up a market in the longer term (i.e. further abuse of monopoly).

> There is for example no way a swedish mapping company could have competed with google maps

Not Swedish, but Danish founders, working in Australia. Google purchased the company and made it google maps

That does not mean it would have succeeded without the Google acquisition

The commercial value proposition of Maps is its applications to advertising - as a platform, and as meta data that informs Google where users are, which provides context for what ad they might click on next.

https://www.nearmap.com/ was another one that google looked at, before buying the other mob that became maps.google.com. They are also Australian.

It depends what you mean by successful I guess, but nearmap fits my definition of successful. Far better more and detailed maps that google, sold to people who needs such things rather than being used as platform to sell advertising.

In the beginning they used to have an honour system that allowed everyone to view their maps for free. They merely requested people who used it commercially to to purchase access. I gather that didn't work out, or maybe it was just a way of ensuring everybody knew about their product as there is no free access now. but while it was free it was great for checking when roof gutters needed cleaning, comparing flood levels and that sort of thing.

Europe has the single market, and lots of English speakers. But it also has very conservative capital and tax and employment systems that make entrepreneurship difficult. Some of that is easy to fix, some hard to fix.

Despite the name, the European Single Market is far less unified than that of the US. A company starting out in Europe will have to overcome linguistic, cultural and regulatory barriers in 27 different countries. While American companies still have to deal with regulatory differences across state borders, it is not quite the same as what European start-ups face.

The UCC is an unfair state sponsored advantage for the US in trade, according to the European Commission. (/s in case it is necessary)

==But it also has very conservative capital and tax and employment systems that make entrepreneurship difficult.==

The rate of new business creation is higher in Europe than the US. I would guess that the US has more venture-backed entrepreneurs, but more businesses are being start by Europeans than Americans.

“The net rate of business creation among the EU economies has been over three times faster than in the USA and Canada since the financial crisis, according to research by RSM International, the seventh largest global network of independent audit, tax and consulting firms.”

== https://www.businessawardseurope.com/news/item/rate-of-new-b...

I haven't fully checked that source but whats the filtering criterion for "new business creation"?

I remember someone used to call Sweden an "top innovative country" and when I took a closer look, he based that argument on amount of new business creation (weighted with population)

Taking a closer look, it was evident that they didn't sort the business by size, or how long they stayed, revenue or amount of employer. And as a person who lived there I know a lot of people start businesses just to circumvent the high tax rate, very restrictive hiring laws/taxes, and essentially do consulting (freelance) job. This is a symptom of how the society was made: hiring and income are heavily taxed, but not the same can be said for businesses. The claim that the country was innovative based on number of business creation quickly fell apart.

== hiring and income are heavily taxed, but not the same can be said for businesses.==

Same is true in the US. We just changed to tax code to make it even more beneficial to be a business over a salaried-employee. Did you apply the same skepticism for the US numbers?

> has very conservative capital and tax and employment systems

I agree with you to a degree on capital and tax (although there are exceptions within Europe if you take the time to look).

However, if you say Europe should be adopting the US employment system, I'll tell you right now that you can stick that where the sun doesn't shine. Sure the European employment model is not perfect, but by god is it a gazillion times better than the Wild West model deployed in the US.

> There is for example no way a Swedish mapping company could have competed with google maps

An Israeli one did.

So did a Dutch one... (For the record: it's TomTom)

Waze was acquired by Google, am not sure that counts.

If Waze couldn't compete against an incumbent Google Maps, why would Google ever have bought it?

I didn't mean from a technological perspective, but from a sustainability one.

These kinds of startups can often compete/outcompete on tech, in fact that's their premise, but they're looking for an ASAP exit, rather than running something sustainably for decades.

In Russia we have several successful competitors to Google Maps and even a search engine that's actually good. Competing with Google is extremly difficult, but possible

Yandex Maps is much better in Russia than Google Maps. I also found Yandex's image text translation capabilities to be much superior than Google

Yandex is a great example of a company which absolutely squashes Google on technical chops wherever it has tried to compete; and it only has 9000 employees (compared to Google's 120,000).

Not entirely related to this discussion, but one thing I know about Yandex: Their web crawlers are ruthless. They hammer my sites to the point where I need to specifically throttle them based on their "from" header (they seem to ignore 429s - they simply make requests with a different IP).

This is only a problem because I have a few sites that are like "search engines" in that they have basically an infinite number of pages (one for each possible search term), and so they just keep crawling the "related searches" links. It's probably not a problem for most sites, but it's a pain for me.

Google seems to more strategically crawl pages based on search terms that they know are popular, whereas Yandex just crawls every possible link it can find.

All of that said, I'm quite happy to deal with it for the benefit of having another competitor to Google - the more the merrier. Hopefully one day they add some more "smarts" to their crawlers though - starting with respecting 429s across all their IPs, perhaps.

In modern Russia search engine search you. They actually answer their email; if you ask them they'll probably stop.

In what ways is it better? Data wise it seems thinner in most places eg New York, London. Perhaps it depends on where you are looking. Moscow does look richer yes, but outside Russia?

If features, what features?

I don't think it's better outside Russia. But within Russia, the level of detail and the accuracy of data is much better. In Moscow and St Petersburg at least, you can see street level details down to individual buildings easily - I would say it's better than Google in NYC.

I do wonder if Google's poor performance in Russia, and Yandex's poor performance outside Russia are a function of data restrictions. I'm not sure western countries would be as keen to share data with a Russian company, and vice versa.

China’s protectionism is fairly blatant, but Japan also engages in some aggressive protectionism as well.

Japan has a firewall?

No, I said Japan engages in protectionism.

Corollary: regulation is not what's preventing European innovation from thriving.

Europe isn't able to compete with American tech salaries, plain and simple. American tech salaries, on the other hand, are inflated by exaggerated tech stock valuations.

> American tech salaries, on the other hand, are inflated by exaggerated tech stock valuations

How does a company’s stock price affect salaries? Companies only receive capitalization (via stock) at IPO.

Stock market valuations do enable higher total comp through RSUs / options.

At best very indirectly by having to compete with "lotto tickets" in theory for start ups and total compensation but in practice not really since the sensible default financial assumption when factoring in equity stake at a random start up is "worth $0 because it will probably fail".

I believe it is not /willing/ to as opposed to not able to judging by GDP per capitia.

I think the arguments for Europe being less innovative or risk taking is because these companies seem to start first in the US and then come to Europe, not the other way round.

There is no "Europe", though. France and Germany speak different languages and have different legal systems. Spain is different again. And Poland. And Greece. And Ireland. And Italy.

Put it this way: if products depend on viral growth, then European countries are socially distanced from each other as a result of these barriers.

People downvote this comment, but it is correct, the EU has A LOT of fragmentation at the national level.

It's obviously a complex situation, but I think the regulation of small business has more to do with it than the social diversity in the EU (which matters as well). By the time a company in the EU is big enough to go from national to expanding into the wider EU markets, it has capital to do so, and there is no shortage of local experts to help with that. But getting to that scale, or really to anything that requires more than a couple employees, is the big hurdle to overcome. I am not sure how to overcome that and respect employee rights, since a strong progressive tax on corporations that would subsidize some of the employment costs of smaller businesses would make the larger EU companies noncompetitive internationally. So in a real sense the failure of international labor laws is partially responsible for the difficulty of EU companies to innovate (or more precisely, to profit and grow based off their innovation).

Another point is that historically the US tech sector took off fast and takes off fast, so they are awash with cash based on being first movers, and they have a competitive advantage when it comes to attracting talent. I think that advantage has been perhaps completely destroyed in the last 4 years due to local political and social issues making life there unattractive. Sure many people will run for the money, but perhaps now not enough to create imbalance in the labor market. Also, companies today understand better how fast things scale in the US due to the single market/language/comparatively lax regulations, and they know to focus on that market much earlier in their growth cycle. This contributed to the success of Spotify, Zendesk, etc. So if I had to predict there will be a rising percentage of successes out of the EU in the next ten years compared to the last ten years. But it's always going to be hard to start.

Of google maps competitors, Here is based in Europe. Currently Netherlands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Technologies

It's also important to consider that until the fall of the iron curtain the US needed western Europe to be strong economically and now does not care about Europe that much anymore, so they use industrial espionage, etc. like against the rest of the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com