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Having worked for both European and US companies, I would say that a) innovation is mutual (we learn from each other) and talent/mediocrity are pretty much evenly distributed.
The US has a more "dynamic" economy in some sense - for example the VC ecosystem is far better funded - but is detrimental in others (Byzantine health care system deters would-be entrepreneurs).
Guido van Rossum - Microsoft Distinguished Engineer
Bjarne Stroustrup - professor of Computer Science at Columbia University (City of New York)
Linus Torvalds - Nationality American/US since 2010 (should I write GNU/American/US? Someone educate me).
Erlang - I don't know anything about Erlang so I've got nothing to say.
Nokia - brutally ejected from the market by the Americans, bought out and sepukku-ed under Microsoft leadership. Now phones may as well be an Asian technology. Oversaw the collapse of European leadership in the mobile space, to the point where it is going to be a case study in how to fail at innovation.
Spotify - Leading EU tech success story. Makes up 50% of the counterexamples, along with ASML. Not detectable as a serious tech company when compared to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, etc.
HTML - I mean, we'd probably have managed without the Europeans on this one. Although useful, HTML isn't a very technical accomplishment. Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.
Most stuff you cheer here is basically a few tech giants out of Silicon Valley. The science kickstart for all that came from a bunch of scientists (like Von neumann) you got when winning WW2 from europe. In a time when many potential competitors were still rebuilding from ruins.
This is over now, europeans tend to no longer go to the us but still produce excellent scientists, Asian countries catched up and both continents start to leave the US behind in most aspects as a desirable place to live, except for 2 things: Military power and billionaires.
Enjoy your 5 tech giants while they last, but also keep in mind that these are international now and draw from nonamerican intellectual power also.
Don't forget that the USians would all be speaking Japanese if it wasn't for the technology they "borrowed" from the British.
American "RADAR" was a laughable non-starter until they got shown how to make magnetrons by Randall and Boot.
Of course Nokia was eclipsed by foreign competition (mostly due to terrible management), but it was still innovative in its time. Just as US companies today face competition from Asia.
> Although useful, HTML isn't a very technical accomplishment. Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.
Yes, but they didn't, did they? It's easy to look at something with 20/20 hindsight and say "anyone could have done this". Back in 1989 Berners-Lee had that insight.
Yes, For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
a) blackmailing for some reason stops working
b) non-military related businesses are vanishing
c) increasing %share of your population has a degrading life quality
d) military costs become unsustainable for questionable ROI
… doubling down on military is a death spiral, especially when the funding money comes from slashing public services.
Europe has more % Entrepreneurs/Self-employed people than the US, lots of great companies even though not leading in the richest top5-ranking, and the work ethic is focussed during working hours instead of chitchatting/looking busy 12h+ per day.
Maybe you are also fooled by one critical thing: US companies are muuuuch better at marketing than European ones, outshining them so you tend to see exclusively US blogvertising and not where real innovation actually happens: all around the world now and the US actually falling behind.
I also think at least US tech has significantly larger firms, but I dont think thats directly in line with societal good. Seems pretty fucking cancerous to me. Cant speak to industries outside of software though.
The biggest advantage I've seen in the US has been the VC ecosystem. For all we deride VCs - and sometimes (particularly given events over the past few weeks) with very good reason, the money spigot is just much more generous in the US. Of course that will change in the new low interest rate economy, but that to me seems more the deciding factor than silly claims that Americans are somehow more innately "innovative" than Europeans.
Instead you have hick senators asking if TikTok listens to your Wifi.
It may be about competition, but it's more likely grandstanding over the latest Red Scare.
US marketing currently happen to be understood almost everywhere and native speakers of English have an advantage. A company does not necessarily need to execute better, but through effective communication they may be able to pretend they are.
There are lot of examples of ideas being picked up and reimplemented in the US, where the original was better but where the adaptation got better traction. The film industry is full of it.
Why should ingenuity not be evenly spread around the globe as well as hopes for a better future? The US represents one particular policy for wealth distribution that happen to work well for, in particular, VCs.
Who cares about this big majority of people that can’t afford stuff?
That there is an absurdly increasing wealth gap is a fact, but that doesn't mean that - for the time being - US households as consumers are still spending lots of money. And if you're in the B2B side of the market then it's even easier.
All the while you can now do stuff in English all over europe increasingly well and legislations are getting normalized between countries, ignoring the odd brexit events here and there.
Ultimately what I am saying is: the factor exists and is significant, but getting lower for the US and other parts of the world are catching up rather quickly.
For sure Europeans are not keen to have to deal with china or Russia as the new world powers instead of the US. Really! But sometimes friends have to call out each other when things go in a bad direction.
But most Americans probably have to deal with the fact that they really aren’t the greatest country on earth any longer, except for military spending, gun deaths and prisoners. This realization is needed before one can really make steps into improving things again.
Yes a walkable city is a massive life quality factor, but one can only „get it“ after experiencing it. Add good public transport on top of that and you can see why european/asian cities are so popular nowadays
There is no innovation in the US, nothing that would make me want to get up and go to work in the morning.
NYC Omny card introduced October 2021