If it’s just companies reselling existing things or incremental tech (e.g. grocers, telecoms, utilities, airlines, etc), then smaller companies are nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator
And don't forget ARM was initially a UK/EU design. Arduino and Pi still are.
Also not doing so badly with fintech and entertainment.
https://www.information-age.com/value-of-european-tech-compa...
That’s the point. Where are they? They couldn’t compete due to lack of scale. They couldn’t scale due to structural restrictions on scale.
The next iPhone isn’t going to come from Europe. It may be first developed there. But an American or Chinese copycat will rapidly advance upon them.
It's more likely the next generation will come exclusively from China - not because of structural restrictions on scale but because it's deliberately built up its electronics manufacturing base while the US and Europe allowed theirs to dwindle because short term profit margins outweighed long term industrial strategy.
Right, but where are they now? The article says in just its third paragraph that "Europe used to pack a punch." Up to 2000, "nearly a third of the combined value of the world’s 1,000 biggest listed firms was in Europe, and a quarter of their profits." That aligns with the state of the art having a home in Europe around then.
But something changed over the past 20 years. It's apparent from the outside looking in. But it remains--as made apparent by this thread--shockingly controversial within the Continent.
(And China was always going to move up the value chain in consumer electronics and grow faster than both of us; when it does so further in the next couple of decades it need not represent a flaw in US/European policy)
Does it? Bigger doesn't mean more state of the art. Comcast isn't state of the art. Exxon isn't state of the art. Most big companies aren't Apple.
Moreover, the size of American companies is somewhat exaggerated cos of liquidity being pumped into the stock market.
Nokia couldn't compete because they made a string of incredibly poor investment and management decisions, such as the N-Gage, until their mobile division was eventually bought out by Microsoft. Even with Microsoft's scale they couldn't turn things around.
The reality is that there were a number of mobile phone manufacturers making lots of really bad decisions whilst trying unsuccessfully to compete with the likes of Apple and Samsung. They aren't gone from the market because they lacked scale: they're gone because they were stupid.
Mhm. Cause a working marked with healthy competition never did anything good.
Just one question, how did European car makers then become what they are? Even though its impossible?
Cars have for a long time been tightly linked to the military. Every major Western car maker up to the last decade at some point built tanks.
No. You asked how Europe got certain economies of scale. I answered. Through the engines of past wars. Future wars don't guarantee similar results.
If Europe wants globally-relevant big businesses, it will likely require social upheaval on the scale of war. (I’m not betting on it.)
> And don't forget ARM was initially a UK/EU design.
For sure, but ARM doesn’t manufacture and has not meaningfully stepped into the datacenter where low power could be a home run with some more effort.
>Arduino and Pi still are.
Yep, but these serve very little of the public. The Pi as a desktop for regular users has failed.
These are great companies but they don’t have the engineering and financial muscle to completely reshape entire industries. You need to own the stack top to bottom to do that kind of change and those companies are innovators at just one level.
So I think it's wrong to say that "A small business will never be capable of producing anything like the iPhone for example." since a small business can become a bigger company releasing innovative products like the iPhone.
If anything, Apple is the counter example of being efficient at innovation. They mainly package and market existing ideas in a really efficient way, but having such a capitalisation actually create so little is a waste. The same money spent on a lot of smaller companies is much more likely to produce actual innovations
This is completely erroneous. They do often take ideas originating from outside the company, either by acquihires, consuming open source, or simply just using unprotected ideas.
However the amount of resources they pour into refining and integrating those ideas into a platform that can be manufactured at scale and that consumers and developers can absorb is very large.
It’s fair to criticize Apple for not originating core technologies, but to suggest that they don’t invest much in developing them is just inaccurate.
So yeah, they invest a bit, but it looks like a big waste of resources in my opinion. The same money given to a lot of diffferent companies would drive much more innovation and employ much more people.
Given that they are the market leader by far in many of their product categories, it’s odd that you imagine someone else could be doing better with less.
The fact is that nobody actually is.
If you are right, then whatever disappointment you have in Apple, presumably applies even more so to their competitors.
> It's just more of the same thing year after year.
You mean they haven’t introduced enough new product lines?
Their actual technology platform is dramatically different today than it was 5 years ago. If you think it’s just more of the same, it means you are only looking at the outside.
> The same money given to a lot of diffferent companies would drive much more innovation and employ much more people.
The same money is given to a lot more people and hasn’t.
Oh and Linux and the WWW were developed in Europe, if I remember correctly?
Europe making high volume low margin chips is not bad (especially in the current shortage) but is not the best position in the market you'd want to be in, especially long term with China hot on your heels. Just ask any business analyst.
You DO NOT compete by paying more to the workers and having more workers than the competition. EU is doing the things you say are good, and that's why they are not competing as well with the giant US firms.
Meanwhile, if you don't have a platform like that to build off you are severely constrained in many other markets. Look at elastic - this is the kind of business that will dry up in the next 5-7 years. It's structurally unable to compete without being part of a major web services platform.
It used to be that building a car company didn't require a huge amount of capital, either. Detroit had hundreds of small automotive businesses before consolidation under the big 3 took place. We are witnessing the same process take place in tech.
But then ... what technology was really advanced by companies like Facebook? Except the ad-surveillance-machine and stuff you only need if you run a multi-billion-people "social" network ... the only thing they innovate in is business models that hurt society.
The US does have some major advantages, marketing, flag waving, cultural supremacy (which feeds into marketing), and the ability to create and exploit rent seeking at a global scale.
It benefits the companies and the share holders, but doesn’t neccersarilly benefit the American worker. Nobody care that Nike and Addidas are used globally when the employees are in Bangladesh on 10 cents an hour.
And, that software is maturing.
In much the same way Japanese automobiles didn't compete with US in the 60s by having a plethora of automobile startups started in peoples' garages. It was done with large companies copying American tech being plowed with lavish subsidies and a protected domestic market.
Europe will likewise not compete with American tech head on with small tech startups either. That ship hasn't quite sailed yet, but I don't think it's far off.
I hope I'm wrong.