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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>the West dominates

You mean the US dominates. I don't see any EU, Canadian or Australian designed smart-phones, Office365, Google, Chat-GPT, AWS, I can buy reaching critical mass.

Edit: INB4 the chip hipsters who found out about ASML during the pandemic chip shortage, chime in with "but muh ASML is European!". Yes, it is European(Dutch), it's also based on EUV tech licensed from the US, and has EUV light sources at it's core secret sauce, made by Cymer, a US company, but I was talking about software products and services which are the big money makers.

EU, Canada, and the rest of the west are lacking in world dominating SW companies and rely exclusively on the US, which the US can always use as leverage.

Ironically, China's detachment form the US SW companies and the need to develop it's own giants, will give it a major advantage long term, versus US's allies which will keep relying on it.

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> I don't see any EU, Canadian or Australian designed smart-phones, Office365, Google, Chat-GPT, AWS, I can buy reaching critical mass. ... EU, Canada, and the rest of the west are lacking in world dominating SW companies and rely exclusively on the US, which the US can always use as leverage.

Reached critical mass, or even world-dominating: Nokia, RIM, Figma, Skype, Spotify, Hetzner

> the US dominates

... by buying them.

// Of these, RIM lost critical mass, Spotify is on uncertain ground, and Hetzner seems fine.

>Reached critical mass, or even world-dominating: Nokia, RIM, Figma, Skype, Spotify, Hetzner

Not even close. All of those are meh in terms of market cap and have plenty of competition making them easily replaceable by US alternatives.

The likes of Apple, Nvidia, Office365, Google, are irreplaceable in the EU, and they could buy all of those companies if they wanted to.

Arm powers a lot of the devices from these companies

Yes, and? How much money does arm make for the EU economy? How much money do Apple and Nvidia make for the US economy?

Not present tense.

Point is whether EU could reach critical mass or domination, not whether could sustain. In their day, RIM (Canada) for biz and Nokia (EU) for normies destroyed US mobile sales.

pretty sure figma is american

You're right and I can't think who I was thinking of in the web design space.

No but it’s a symbiotic system with EU companies being key parts of the system. Or am I missing some way I can buy a top-of-the-line cell phone not created with Taiwan-manufactured chips built using Dutch equipment? This is on purpose: the system is designed to create an important role for partners albeit a subordinate one. Though one might argue that they let Taiwan become too important. Either way, the recent book a Chip War is illuminating.

Most big US HW/SW companies do have a significant presence in Europe and some other places like Israel, it's not like Europe has a lack of engineers and scientists capable of building this stuff, they are just mostly working for US companies

> it's not like Europe has a lack of engineers and scientists capable of building this stuff

That wasn't my point. We have engineers, but we have no local champions. ASML, SAP and Spotify can't balance out what the US has.

>they are just mostly working for US companies

THAT was my point. Europe has a lack of local top tech companies and our brightest minds are working to build up the US tech sector instead of the domestic one.

Glad that at least some tech people here in Europe are aware of how things stand when it comes to technology and to our economic future (which depends on said tech).

Just the other day I was saying to a person close to me of how right now the world economy is splitting into two separate future growth camps, China and the US, with Europe left somewhere in a stagnating middle.

Ahh yes, good point it is mostly the US, but US allies do own a lot of IP and supply chain capability, particularly Japan and SK.

I don’t agree China will have the advantage though, it will certainly develop its own standards and mandate it internally but it remains to be seen if it will be able to export those standards, it tried with BRI and that did not work, but that was more manufacturing oriented. It’ll try to tech again but it will be a tough sell. It simply does not have the goodwill required. Will see gains in Russia, Pakistan and Cambodia, some countries in Africa but that’s about it.

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