The proof in the pudding is that Europe's legal structure is unsupportive and hinders software development on the scale of an Apple or a Microsoft. Until they fix that, they are either going to have to do without or use foreign software.
Nah, what hinders software development at that scale is literally just... scale and network effects. Europe has a significantly better legal infrastructure than Russia or China (which routinely kills entire sectors for random reasons) but Europe is not a homogenous isolated market of hundreds of millions people speaking the same language. That's literally it.
Looking at it another way, what's the American competition for Microsoft? You're just one company ahead of Europe in most cases, and most of them ironically sit in a state that looks like Europe in regulatory terms. If the vast majority of American states can't produce much competition, most of them extremely lax in terms of the legal environment, that's an indicator that this isn't what actually matters.
Computers: Apple and Google (Chromebooks are big in education). Server operating systems: various flavors of Linux, but I guess basically IBM since they bought Red Hat. Cloud services: Amazon. Office software: Google. Databases: Oracle. Name some slice or segment of all of these companies and there’s usually (though not always) a direct American competitor worth naming in the same breath even though each has their own specialty and none compete in their totality with each other.
MS Teams is lower risk from the perspective of management as it creates less of an alternative "center-of-gravity" for power.
Maybe it's more common in Europe for prestigious positions/roles (as opposed to compensation) to be used as reward/incentive (as opposed to a tool for change). Not sure.
Yeah this is another point that people seem to forget
We're talking about 2 or 3 cities in the US that punch way above their level. But we don't hear too often how there isn't a competitive cloud made in Boston or where's the FB competitor from Minnesota etc
"Gee, these industrial clusters are super rare and delicate! We have to make the conditions as favourable for them as possible"..
"This company is making lots of money but I disagree how they are doing it! We should force them to behave in a way that is more in line with how everyone else does things. All these big companies are the same and the wealth isn't going to go anywhere".
Europe puts a barriers in place that will kill off an entrepreneur's dream here or there. They only have to kill one or two key companies to do trillions of dollars of self-harm (which is what they appear to have done). In fact, everyone does this just to a greater or lesser degree; for example we can see how much prosperity China's manufacturing created with less blockers than in the USA leading to a few key industrial clusters.
However the gap to close is huge and France alone is not big enough to compete with US, it has to be the whole EU. Will see where it goes.
Airbus and Dassault are doing fine because they have well defined stable markets and (probably) government funding.
You should not buy the right wing discourse that in France rich people are too taxed and they flee blabla. This is just a way to push their right wing agenda. I'm myself quite rich and I'm doing well, so don't worry.
It's a great way to limit the understanding of the designers (no hands in the mud) and limit the total utility of design. You end up solving the problems of the elites, only, since no one else is in the room.
There are very elite engineering schools (mostly l'école polytechnique and the ENS which in kind of another beast) which are so selective that people from there are IMO in a different league from other engineers (not necessarily in a good way btw)
What French people don’t like is when elites try to steal our social system.
However your example isn’t really fair to be honest : Arnault and Bettencourt are really not self-made families, they are both from historical bourgeoisie. But we do have our fair share of new millionaires from the startup ecosystem.
Granted I limit myself to people who created successful businesses with real added value and mostly satisfied customers : businesses that are positive for the society.
That’s a myth. Ultra-rich and rich people are as powerful in France than anywhere else.
The myth "French people eat the rich" probably comes from the fact that our system discourages social upheaval.
It’s not the French people but the elites in power who don’t like people being rich if they are not from the same cast (prestigious schools).
French people only eat the richest when they want to steal our social benefits, and even that is becoming more and more rare since most media are now owned by billionaires and are spreading neoliberal narrative.
Yeah why would anyone dislike the idea of a run of the mill techbro making 50x more money than the janitor.
I also don't see what this observation has to do with hiring immigrants or not.
The underappreciated thing about the US immigration system is the fact that you usually don't even need it. If you're a Silicon Valley startup, you have a pool of 330 million people to hire from, and they all live in your country, speak your language and are part of the same culture. Yes, the EU has free movement, but moving from Warsaw to Berlin, two European cities that are pretty close to each other, is going to be far bigger of an ordeal than moving from New York, Massachusetts, or even Texas or Alabama to San Francisco. Maybe not from a legal perspective, but definitely from a language / cultural / "how do I go to a doctor here" perspective. If you need very specific talent, like people with expertise in building distributed databases or self-driving cars, you're far more likely to find them amongst 330 million Americans than amongst, let's say, 2 million Latvians. This causes network effects to kick in, making America even more of a "magnet" for talented people.
The other issue is basically the same problem, except going the other way. In the US, releasing a product means releasing it to 330 million prospective customers at once. In most industries, if you release your product in English and can accept credit cards, most people that you'd want as your early customers can already buy it. This is not true in Europe, every country has its own language and its own take on online payments. If your startup touches the physical world or legal system in any way (think easier invoicing for small businesses, 21st-century software for hotel management, an easy website builder for private medical practices etc), this is even more of an issue. The problem you're solving might not even exist in some countries (maybe their government already provides a good app for invoicing), and where it does exist, it's hard to figure out its nuances without speaking the right language. This basically means those kinds of startups usually work on a local level, not a European level.
Most wealth is not a metric for how ethical a place is. At a certain point it is negative inference.
Having superior infrastructure and economy is definitely a huge part of the answer, I believe the majority of it. This holds true all the way back to Roman and Byzantine empires.
They all lose them over time, or are themselves dissolved and absorbed.
Even within the EU, doing work and business can be very different.
My personal favorites to work in are the Netherlands and Switzerland. Easy going people, flat hierarchies, cooperative and forgiving of mistakes, though YMMV as always.
MS is from Seattle but it didn't start there
Culture and investment/market conditions (sure, with the help of laws) play a much stronger part on that
You couldn't get them without available hardware and without a market willing to experiment.
And you couldn't have that without strong CS/EE departments that had strong investment in the decades prior that had spun a whole semiconductor industry
And you wouldn't have had that without some welcoming immigration laws (at the decades prior) and some worldwide conflicts neither and a specific country that touches both main oceans and has decided that farther away areas might be safer for some developments.
If you want to understand why laws in France are the way they are you need to take a look at what happened in the past 250 yrs more or less.
Everyone wants to get a tech sector like California but insist on having non competition agreements being either valid or conditionally valid meaning there is a gray area that stifles innovation.
Innovation by theft? Well, California is a very special outlier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause
Non competes are good for the big incubent companies, but bad for the economy and the workers.
Compare getting someone to move from Chicago to San Francisco (same language, same culture) versus getting someone to move from Norway to Italy (completely different language, very different culture).
So USA had a much larger effective work force when a company wanted to hire developers and much easier marketing of the products.
Europe had a lot of computer hardware companies in the 1980's but they were never able to capture the full European market. So they died out due to lack of scale.
There is also the problem of every single country wanting to be a king, so there was no political will to say "we need to join forces and create one single SV" (or one single unix company).
Still today EU can't create an European Silicon Valley as you don't get a SV by saying "we want a SV here", you get it by saying "everywhere else is NOT going to be a SV".
You're phrasing it in a way that makes this scale seem like a good thing. Is it?
I'm not convinced that the scale of supranational grow-at-all-costs uncontrollable corporations is good
Yet, here it is the top comment.
It reflects strongly on the American audience here.
It creates jobs in the USA, which is also good.
So of course people will defend that.
In my opinion, what they fail to understand is that this power doesn't have any significant impact on their personal lives. It favours only those who are already in power.
Depends how much they pay.
What has Apple and Microsoft done for Americans ? They pay little to no taxes, they spy on everyone, they provide increasingly terrible products...