Good. It’s about time Europe started producing global software products. We need competition in the US and China dominated spaces.
"Ek mentioned machine learning, biotechnology, materials sciences and energy as some of these areas."
Material science in particular has endless promise. With the new XFEL infrastructure there is lots of potential too. Some examples of what we could do is replace plastics with bulk metallic glass, save energy in transport with low density steel, and more broadly with eutectic systems.
China dominates what in the global software industry? Desktop OS? Smartphone OS? Office Suite? Database? Web server?
But I agree that we do need more competition.
You might be tempted to include WeChat and games that Tencent brought, but if we lower the bar to that then the list of EU companies would grow a lot as well, such as SoundCloud, Shazam, last.fm, Viber, King, Mojang, Rovio, Supercell, Kiloo, Dailymotion, Criteo, SAP, ASOS, Skyscanner, Wix, GoCardless, Adyen, Kaspersky Labs, Yandex, Transferwise, Badoo, etc.
Europe also produces 20% of world's research in the field [1]
The big question though is: do we measure success correctly? The vast majority of "great American companies" are either vaporware with inflated valuations, or produce zero innovations [2]
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/european-rd-review-f...