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Comment by laurent92 | Hacker News Reader

In the end, one may talk about all the startups (when the BPI pumps billions into it, I sure hope there are some startups and medium companies), but EU has proven unable to build an Apple. It would be dismantled here, and CEO beaten up before reaching any interesting level. DailyMotion (French) was as big as Youtube. Many others like this. We always end up #2, and the Silicon Valley still decides what is ok to say on our smartphones in EU, which is a lot of soft power, and means we live under foreign cultural domination.

This is the price of being #2. Loss of leadership of our own country.

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There have been companies like Nokia, SAP, Spotify, ARM, ASML all showing it's not impossible to be #1. This is not even considering the auto sector where Europe dominates by a huge margin. I don't think there is something inherently lacking about Europe to enable business growth. The US obviously enjoys a first mover advantage in the software industry and as a result continues to receive much more VC funding than anyone else.

> EU has proven unable to build an Apple

and US has proven unable to build a Mercedes

> and US has proven unable to build a Mercedes

And yet neither the US or EU could affordably fix a Mercedes

> > and US has proven unable to build a Mercedes

> And yet neither the US or EU could affordably fix a Mercedes

Or an Apple product :))

The problem with the Apple product is that it can't be repaired (try to swap in a new battery for an AirPod). The Mercedes can very much be repaired by any automotive shop. (And as a Mercedes owner, I can't understand what Americans are complaining about repair costs with Mercedes-Benz.)

Europeans buy new cars - Americans buy 15 year old 5th hand German cars that their previous owners mistreated harshly and expect them to be as reliable as brand new cars from the factory that are serviced at the recommended intervals. Mercedes is expensive, though - that's why rich people like them.

I'm European and I drive a 10-year-old Mercedes-Benz so I don't understand where this data is coming from.

The stock market thinks it's building one right now, however.

The US has Tesla, with almost 6x the market cap as Mercedes-Daimler.

Mercedes cars also destroy the planet with fossil fuel exhausts.

United States unlike EU is one big market, with one unified language and standards, and I believe this difference is a huge reason (the reason?) why US has so many large startups and corporations. Also one might think that the existance of large companies like Apple points to a deficit in executive/governmental branches.

The big reason is US prioritizes big business and makes conditions most favorable to it, even at the expense of the society.

The EU doesn't build Googles or Amazons, because those companies are inherently unhealthy monopolies. But it has built numerous tech successes, including Nokia, Spotify, Wise, Airbus, and others.

In reality the EU has curbed the imperial pretensions of aggressive US corporates numerous times - including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, and (soon) Facebook.

5 of the 6 most valuable companies on the planet by market cap. Not doing a great job at curbing them.

“Because those companies are inherently unhealthy monopolies.”

Yeah, I’m not a billionaire because that much money brings problems. I choose not to be one...but I definitely could be.

Nokia blew up. Spotify was funded by the Danish government. Wise I've never heard of and Airbus is a pan-EU jobs program sponsored primarily by the UK, French and German governments to make sure there's jobs for random people to make wings in Wales or welding in Toulouse or whatever.

It is easy to argue that a well functioning economy should never produce an Apple.

Do it then. Explain why we shouldn’t have Apple.

Huge companies concentrate power and distort the market. They can then extract rent from the economy by forcing others to play by their rules.

Talking about Apple specifically, they haven't released an innovative phone in years, but are still selling their phones for premium prices. They invest huge amounts of money in marketing to influence consumers to buy their products for prestige rather than any cost/benefit analysis. They extract rent in the form of their 30% cut of all iPhone transactions. They have colluded with other giants to keep programmer salaries lower. They are sitting on huge amounts of cash which are prevented from doing useful work in the economy. They can afford complex tax evasion schemes. They operate at a huge profit, which means their shareholders get a disproportionate amount of value compared to their buyers and workers. They have outsized influence on web standards and other commons (they have sometimes used this for good purposes, but there is no reason to allow such power in the hands of an autocratic power).

Note: Apple's competitors are just as bad or worse. My point is that huge corporations are a malady, not that Apple is worse than Google or MS or [...]

If Huawei or someone else was building a better mobile experience people would be buying that over Apple.

What is an innovative phone? The iPhone 12 looks marvellous, runs great, is secure, gets constant updates unlike android and tries to preserve privacy. Apple Pay is awesome, makes me spend more cause of how fluid it is but still is an amazing experience. The software with the hardware makes apple great.

>If Huawei or someone else was building a better mobile experience people would be buying that over Apple.

Just what is it with HN and pretending that customers in general care more about functionality than anything else?

Marketing and hype are the main motivators for your average customer. As long as the product isn't utter shit when compared to the alternative, those are far more important for sales than the product itself being good.

Apple Pay didn’t come out until 2014, the rest of the world was paying with contactless on phones for years before that - Japan from 2004 onwards.

America’s strength is taking what other people do, slapping a flag on it for the lucrative US market, and marketing it globally.

This feels like a straw man argument. It is pretty widely recognized that innovation in the US is ahead of the vast majority of the rest of the world, even Europe. Only China is now challenging the US in that regard. I think that the late adoption of contactless payments by Apple is the exception, not the rule.

Huawei was starting to make such phones, but got blocked by the power of the US state to help protect Apple, Google and others. Even if they hadn't been, Huawei is another giant, controlled by an even worse regime.

And of course, the iPhone 12 is a pretty good phone. So we're the iPhone 11, X, 8, 7, 6 etc. In fact, apart from the camera, they are essentially the same great phone, but people keep buying newer ones, mostly because of marketing reasons (sure they have more powerful processors and more memory, but virtually no one really needs the power of those, since they use their phone to browse the web and get directions).

EU built a Nokia. Until MS infiltrated and dismantled it, that is.

How much help did Nokia have from the EU?? Sure it was very Finnish, but not clear the EU helped. And it wasn't MS, it was Nokia itself in the face of Apple. I worked at Nokia and saw it first hand.

Finland's economy opened up significantly when we joined EU. It's no coincidence that Nokia's success followed soon after.

Europe gave us GSM[0]. At a time when everyone in Europe had a GSM phone penetration in the US was embarassingly low.

It's hard to remember now, but Nokia exploded in the consumer market at a time when mobile phones were still niche in the US.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM

Back in 2000 everyone and his dog had a payg Nokia 3310 in the U.K.

The US was (as always) late to the party, arrived in force, drove everyone else away, then claimed it was their party all along.

Nokia dismantled itself. Just one trivial example. Nokia backup software. It was 10x worse than anything Microsoft ever produced. They did bot care about the feedback.

How long can you push a shitty product? Not that long I guess.

Until apple and Android made it irrelevant

Chances are Nokia would have been a great competitor. Have you seen Nokia N9? It was in my opinion ahead of both iOS and Android at the time. But it was killed and replaced with Windows Phone.

Talk about moving the goalposts

How is that moving the goalposts?

It is irelevant to the present that Nokia was a big player in the past. The fact that I was a top student in high-scool is irelevant to my current job where I underperform.

Nokia is now a shadow a its former self both in money it brings to the EU economy and in the amount of tech jobs it provides.

That's what's relevant now and there's no pride in this defeat.

Did the EU build an Apple? Yes, Nokia was a dominant phone manufacturer, so it clearly did. But it made a mistake and died (like Apple almost did in the 90s).

So you moved the goal posts by claiming that somehow it dying meant that it never counted.

Nothing is forever, just because the US has been briefly dominant in a field does not make it's approach right, especially as it's pretty obvious to the whole world there's a good chance it's going to become number two soon.

> The fact that I was a top student in high-scool is irelevant to my current job where I underperform.

Maybe spending less time on HN will improve your job performance?

Apple and Android didn't make Nokia irrelevant. Nokia made bad decisions and chose the losing player. After which said losing player gutted it.

Nokia had the might to a) build their own great OS, and b) continue to be a market leader. But when you have management making bad decisions, this is all you get. Whether you're in the EU or in the US, doesn't matter.

I haven’t seen anyone discussing Rim/BlackBerry - who were Canadian, made great smart phones, but lost out because of the crucial mistake of concentrating on corporate IT as the customers, and by the time they pivoted to consumers with thins like BBM they were too late.

I can’t let this go. You are viewing Nokia as a consumer company. That’s wrong. Like Ericsson and Nortel they were huge in service provider. By the time MS rolled around Nokia had already flubbed the consumer market but had more importantly completely lost in the high tech arena around service providers. I competed directly with Nokia in the early 2000s and we produced a solution in the mobile backhaul space that was not only 10x more performant but also denser and more reliable. We did this with ease and crushed them. Nokia still does work on the space (notably building the dissident tracking system for Iran) but it was killed outright as soon as the Valley tech companies (the actual tech companies, not the consumer web crap) went after them. Now theyre replaying that by clinging to a product (deepfield) that is already past its expiration date.

Microsoft came along once the company was flailing and demoralized. It was already dying.

I suspect that the NSA has a role in preventing any European Apple to become too successful.

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