As a German I would like to point out, that German companies are (as always) too late to the party. Nothing with worldwide relevance in the software, AI nor cloud space came out of Germany / the EU within in the last decades. It's embarrassing :(
Let me list some:
* Teamviewer: used to be more famous in the past but it is still a known brand to people world wide
* Cherry: more of a hardware thing, but they are known world-wide for their MX switches
* Deepl: a xoogler founded startup that is better than Google translate
* Soundcloud: well known all over the world, was founded in Berlin
* Suse: founded in the 90s and had steady growth since
* SAP: world leader in ERP software. Seriously people underestimate how well entrenched they are.
In the last two years, three of these companies had IPOs, two of them as unicorns. Sure, its is dwarfed by the US tech Cloud/AI/software sector but there are certainly world wide players from germany in the digital industry.
US produces more unicorns per year that Germany managed in 20 years
Compare this to the US and their population of 300 Million people and how influential US culture is in the world and how many people speak English. A US company has a potential market of 300 Million people and use that to support your expansion into smaller markets later.
There are probably other factors in play here but it's not surprising to me that Europe didn't produce a Microsoft, Google or an Apple.
- a proper vision
- the balls to implement it, even if that means booting lobbyists off and annoying the US
We have OVH, Hetzner, Infomaniak, Proton, Nextcloud, and plenty of smaller companies, some heavily invested in open source. There's also a mechanism to fund flagship projects with billions.
In my experience with government organizations, the argument that public tax money should be used for public/free re-usable software instead of funding proprietary development (essentially subsidizing R&D of foreign corporations), really strikes a nerve on all administrative levels.
He found it when he was investigating a customer complaint about corrupted log file downloads.
There is still in-depth high-value engineering happening, even if you don't work for the flashy silicon valley VC unicorns.
In fact, such a basic support request would probably have been closed as "could not reproduce" in a highly competitive environment.
but maybe it’s just some marketing BS