Why does Europe suck at technological innovation?
slate.com
slate.com
As a US consumer, you are used to a being part of a massive and hugely uniform market that also happens to speak the language of international business. As such, nearly every successful innovation company will try to enter that market.
Don't be fooled, however, into thinking that everything you use is American, simply because it is in English. I am sure most would not think of Distimo, eBuddy, MobyPicture and Skylines as European, yet they are all from the tiny country of The Netherlands. And Europe does not just sprout small tech startups either. TomTom (NL), Siemens (DE) and Philips (NL) are all huge players in their fields.
Yes, making a lot of money with innovation is easier in the American market and the conditions for founding a startup are still best in The Valley, but saying that innovation in Europe sucks really makes no sense. Perhaps most the innovation is of a different nature and scale, but it is certainly there. It is a shame that this article does not attempt to uncover these things, but instead tries to score some cheap points with one liners.
P.S. Did you know Python and Vim are both Dutch as well?
P.P.S. Did you know that most European countries hardly produce any wine? Europe is more than France, Spain and Italy.
I live in Belgium, and in my opinion I've had plenty of opportunity to do interesting innovative work. 6 years ago I wrote an SVG renderer in actionscript, on top of a DXF-to-SVG convertor in PHP. 5 years ago I wrote my own rich web grid component, backed by a metaquery system that allows users to point-and-click together arbitrary filters. 3 years ago I switched to a web app architecture of javascript components over JSON-RPC services.
IMHO, that was interesting and innovative work, but you've never heard of the product it went into (myMCS), because the company I work for focuses on the european market and has decided to do that without seeking external financing. That's typical of european tech companies. They operate on a local market, and they take on less risk so they don't grow as aggressively. That doesn't mean there's less innovation, just that it's less visible.
Why do Americans make more money in software?
* Pure inertia from the early cowboy days of Silicon Valley, which gave us great universities and lots of private investment capital looking for returns. (Contrast with academic grants.)
* A more straight-forward focus on technology-for-moneys-sake (really anything-for-moneys-sake) and marketing
* The U.S. development culture, to Dijkstra's eternal chagrin, is much more "Worse Is Better" so we tend to ship early, often and win the market, even though our stuff kind of sucks.
If we are talking about the internet, these things were made by Europeans: The World Wide Web, Skype, C++, PHP, MySQL, Rails. Just to name a few things.
The car industry is also pretty high tech and the European car companies are doing well while the government run car companies of the US suck. A few of the many car related innovations from Europe: the car itself, ABS, Electronic Stability Control.
Some of you could say that reliable, low-consuming car engines do not count as "technological innovation", that we should give more praise to technological "innovators" like Facebook and Zynga. Then again, having FB or FarmVille down doesn't cause any wars, while being able to drive cars that consume less gasoline might avoid a war or two.
The US evolved a giant media+capital machine to make this happen, and this means making it hard for others to do the same - by being more attractive, in real terms of course, but maybe even more so in people's minds. I see articles criticizing other regions of the world for not having as much success as part of this (very natural, imho) process.
This is not a small problem for Europe.
Furthermore I didn't make any claims about a "capitalist paradise", either explicitly or implicitly. In fact another of the three is Bjarne Stroustrup, a professor in academia. He may live in the USA, but he's an academic, and academia is generally not filled with rabid capitalists.
From Dijkstra to Torvalds, there are a many prominent examples of top notch computer talent from Europe choosing to live in the USA. The resulting brain drain leaves fewer top people in Europe, and more opportunities for Americans to benefit from that talent. Benefits range from their availability for American businesses to the fact that it is easier to meet and be inspired by that talent if you live in the USA. (Particularly if you live near a tech center like Silicon Valley.)
I'm wondering this as well. Surely the computing power behind Frankfurt must be quite substantial...
Guys were talking tech in country that built stealth planes in 40's. And that boosted US and SSSR into space.
Have you really not seen what krauts are up to for the last 50 years? Have you not seen those fine wagens they build. Or impressive industrial technology they poses and continue to evolve? Have you seen the tank they built?
SAP, Siemens, BASF, BOSCH, etc... Theres hardly a piece of modern technology built that doesn't rely on German tech.
The Germans may not be building the blingest widgets and the hipest social media experts. But in this gold rush they are selling a metric fuckton of shovels.
But more to the point, I don't think technical innovation has much to do with bubbles, any more than building technology caused the real estate bubble.
It show the gap is getting smaller with US innovations. But the article is stupid. They do not suck at innovation.
Hang on a second... so Europe's technical founders are disadvantaged by being able to serve particular niches?
I get that being able to sell to hundreds of millions of people gives you a great market by numbers. What I don't understand is why targeting by culture, language etc., is viewed disfavourably.
1. Harder to expand quickly because of legal barriers.
2. Network effect/expansion is harder. Say you start hitting a network effect in Germany with some new social app... You can't necessarily leverage that in Portugal where the same simply isn't true in the US market.
3. When you serve a niche market you can't necessarily apply the economies of scale.
Take netflix. Setting that in the 27 countries of the EU requires 27 different contract negotiations with the respective copyright organisations.
Another example would be the social web. Suppose a French and American facebook launch at the same date. Given the same growth rate (with the more or less exponential networking effect), the American can simply buy the French facebook after a small amount of time.
(Western) Europe is pretty good in technical niches, which seem to be mostly business to business. Just not quite as visible.
Yet, as a European (through and through I might add) I believe American innovation comes from some superbly creative and inquisitive minority. This: http://vimeo.com/19829560 we do not have in Europe.
Finally, do not forget that European population is shrinking and aging. That has a tremendous effect on all growth figures. Perhaps on innovation too, but that I doubt.
(More seriously, I wish people wouldn't submit interesting articles and then sullen them with dumbed-down, incendiary headlines.)
But I have to agree with other commenters that regulations and laws play a huge part. Americans are definitely better at that. So, you might have all sort of labor protection, multi-week vacations, free healthcare and benefits in Europe, these laws are usually a burden on small businesses (where most innovation takes place).