Except EU doesn’t have big tech.
Tencent buys basically all game companies, microsoft buys basically all communication companies (skype, nokia come to mind), google buys basically everything. Even ARM is owned by Softbank after starting out in the UK.
The Automotive industry and ASML are just about the only things resistant to this because they're so large already; Automotive acts a lot like big tech. (a clear similarity I saw after being in BMW R&D and Googles Zurich and SF campuses)
For example, you mentioned Nokia. Nokia was blown out of the market by superior Chinese manufacturing and US design [0]. It wasn't a close battle, the EU contender was crushed. Apple's motivation for entering the market was that among other things that companies like Nokia were so bad at making phones that Apple reckoned it could break in to a new vertical. That is a very EU-led-industry problem to have. The reason they sold out was because the EU turned out to be incapable of incubating a modern, successful phone manufacturer in the 21st century even with an incredible lead and Nokia was being outmanoeuvred everywhere.
[0] Both looked like regulatory issues to me, we've seen how the EU responds to things like micromanaging the iPhone charging port.
No, Nokia was blown out of the market via the exclusive deal with Microsoft, which in turn made the dumbest management decisions ever. Nokia bled under the horrible management of Steve Ballmer and their own ignorance with regards to Android. They also proved later on that you don't need any expertise to produce decent Android phones, as HMD global used their name as a brand and has been thriving.
To add to this: It's not that hard to develop a mobile operating system that's on par or better than Android, despite what Google might want you to think.
But when Nokia starts with an overwhelming incumbents advantage, their board doesn't even have confidence that Nokia's internal talent pool can lead them to make a mobile phone! They couldn't defend themselves from multiple companies in completely different industries with no prior competence in the mobile phone world. That was an A-Team EU hardware company's performance.
The issue here isn't company size, it is something specific to the EU. I'm not sure what, but since it is a geographic thing I'd start with regulation and branch out from there.
I'm sorry but it's honestly pointless discussing this as no one in this thread wants to spend even an ounce of time into researching this. Reading your comment in it's entirety tells me you weren't there when stuff was happening.
> That was an A-Team EU hardware company's performance.
For the record, the Lumia phones had A-Tier hardware in them. They boasted the best low light cameras on phones for a while around ~2012.
Nokia made the Lumia phones, MS provided the operating system. Previously, Nokia had their own Linux based OS, called Maemo, which was originally supposed to run on what became Lumia. It later formed into Sailfish OS, which had it's own device family.
The issue wasn't the hardware platform itself, it was the fact that Nokia decided to go with the MS ecosystem, instead of Android. And honestly, I don't even think that was a bad move. I am at a loss trying to figure out how device manufacturers actually make profits based on what has turned into extremely restrictive licensing deals with Google in order to get GAPPS on their phones.
I honestly think Android was a net loss for mobile computing, both in terms of platform and performance.
I think it comes down to two things:
1) The US is a large, uniform (regulation, language, media, etc.) making it easier to grow quickly. This puts the US competitor in a better place to buy the EU competitor than vice-versa.
2) More significantly, the US capital market is bigger & better. That starts with VC funding but is also the case with IPOs and publicly traded companies. That‘s how the EU tech standouts such as Spotify end up IPOing in the US.
#2 is certainly something the EU can work on improving but it has very little to do with tech regulation.
If you are publicly traded there is little you can do to prevent people buying shares - though you are right that people sell privately held companies a little too often.
Ubisoft in particular created many poison pills to prevent companies getting too dug in, however that didn’t prevent anything except a total buyout. Their board is stacked with Microsoft and Tencent which causes weird, extremely harmful, decision making in the org.
Nobody can force you to sell your shares. Nobody can force you to make your company public. It's all voluntary. You can't have your cake and eat it. Want to get that juicy foreign investor money then cry that the foreigners are taking over?
Once you sell a share you don't get to control who it is sold to afterwards, you could give shares to people as stock-options, and they are (rightly) going to sell their shares regardless who the buyer is, only based on the price.
So. Seriously, shut the fuck up, you're suggesting that the only answer is isolationism.
Identification of an issue (people buying up European talent before it gets large enough to be competitive) is not an invitation for absurd and deficiently reasoned victim blaming.
If you want to keep control of a company - or anything - within certain hands, then you can't sell that thing to others. As evident by millions of companies never having their shares publicly listed or sold on any market. If you sell, you have to accept that you don't have any control of who owns in the future. You can't have your cake and eat it. Not even Europeans can do that.
"People buying up European talent" - they can only buy if Europeans are willing to sell. Such victims...
This reminds me of people complaining about foreign investors buying up real estate. But of course, no blame is to be put on the greedy sellers who slurped up that juicy foreign money.
Yes, people sell things voluntarily. (In particular, small companies being bought and killed by monopolies is usually very benefitial to the small companies' owners, even if it's bad for the economy as a whole.) That does not contradict the parent comments.
If you do not want that, do not voluntarily sell your company.
I like my cat. I don't want others owning my cat. I probably shouldn't sell my cat then right? I can't take the money now and complain later the neighbor owns my cat.
EU usually doesn't let companies to grow uncontrollable sizes that the government is completely controlled by them not the citizens.
The existence of Big Tech means that the government did a very poor job in protecting the consumers and the free and fair market
This is the thing that so many Americans in tech don't seem to understand. VC Twitter is full of smugposting about how the US has "$5 trillion market-cap of startups" and the EU doesn't.
And what they miss is that the EU doesn't want Silicon Valley. It doesn't want the "trillions in startups". Because essentially none of them turn any profit. Why on earth would anyone want $5 trillion dollars in companies that do not make financial sense yet have awful externalities.
Who is benefiting from Apple’s profits being the size of a small country’s GDP? Not most people, therefore, why would this be optimized for?
You make this sound like a bad thing. There are diamonds to be found generating genuine value, but quite a bit of activity is simply low value under the guise of innovation.
I would caution against mistaking clarity and understanding for hubris. Europe doesn’t have line go up, but their citizens live better lives by most objective measures. From an optimization and first principles perspective, we should always be mindful of what we are optimizing for, so when I see people come out swinging with “Such profits! Much Tech! Innnnnnnovaaaaaation!” I approach it from a “simmer down now, lets decompose the system and observe” approach. What are the desired outcomes and what is value perspective we can compromise on as “good,” and then work backwards.
Do you think that if you compare the profit that Apple makes to the value that that users get that Apple has the larger share of it? To a disturbing degree?
https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/LAZONICK_Willia... (“Profits Without Prosperity: How Stock Buybacks Manipulate the Market, and Leave Most Americans Worse Off”)
It is easy to forget that the economic system of fiat and capital is a shared delusion, agreed upon rules that can change when needed. The intent is to encourage outcomes, not to be the primary function.
That is a non-sequitur.
Off the top of my head, probably the millions of people who have a pension through one of Apple’s institutional investors like CalPERS. The effects of Apple’s profitability goes far and wide.
That's like a member of the working poor who owns one share of stock, "benefiting" from company lobbying to keep the minimum wage down.
He's got two-hundredths of a cent more in dividends, and has lost many hundreds of dollars in potential wages.
This doesn’t entirely discount that CalPERS holds almost 40M shares (~$8.7B) of Apple (its top holding), just that them doing so is not reason enough to be more judicious about governing corporate profits. Still profits, but less. Those profits have to come from somewhere.
(CalPERS has $502.9B AUM ending June 2024, making APPL ~1.72% of their total assets)
https://www.calpers.ca.gov/docs/forms-publications/acfr-2023... (page 115)
https://calpers.ca.gov/page/newsroom/calpers-news/2024/calpe...
I'm sure they are quite proud of that achievement
My point is, don’t write off this whole product category because people balked at the price of the first iteration, it happened with the first iPhone, too. Apple grinds its way to excellent products.
The web browsing wasn't slow - part of what made it so compelling was that you could browse the real web without going insane. No WAP nonsense.
Yes, it was rough compared to the later versions, but even the first one was insanely better than anything else. It was pretty clear what the issues were (battery life and lack of 3G as you said).
I don't think the Vision Pro is like that at all. It's big issues aren't missing features or lack of polish. It fundamentally makes no sense as a product even if they improve the resolution, speed, battery life, etc.
I was pretty alive at the time, I was an intern on the iPhone team at Apple when it launched and the run-up, so I was using the first gen phone/touch all day every day, and I was paying pretty close attention to its launch (but just watching what was said in the press/by the people I knew, nothing privileged on the sales side). Looking around at sales figures, it looks like the first gen sold low single digit million units total, 1.4M in 2007. The 3G sold 1M on the first weekend (the press release tagline was "Twice as Fast at Half the Price", and that lower price is a big part of what brought it mainstream). Now they’re up to a couple hundred million phones per year.
I wouldn't say it was a "miss", it was very good compared to the status quo trash on the market, but it also wasn't the company defining success it turned into until the following gens, it made much less revenue than Macs at the time, and the Mac was pretty niche. My point was that it took a bit to really dial it in, and Apples first gen products don’t usually reflect their eventual success very well.
I don’t think Vision Pro is at 1M sold yet, and Apple products definitely have more sales reach now, but again, I wouldn’t count it out. I was pretty impressed when I tried it, they really nailed a lot of the hard technical problems, especially around text rendering, and if it was 1/3 the cost, I’d definitely have one now, maybe at 1/2. Which means that unless they really dilute the capabilities or drop the cost less than I expect, I’ll probably have one within the next couple of iterations (I'm also assuming they'll sub out the metal for cheaper/lighter materials to improve long-term comfort). But yeah, maybe it’ll end up being a modern day Newton, we’ll see.
Yeah, they've actually sold less than that, but in context, it's still very much a "let's throw it at the wall and see what sticks" kind of thing. It also nonetheless fits how Apple communicates their product vision in new areas.
The accusatory use of the second person implies that you're in my head enough to know that I'm trying to win an argument. It's patently untrue; I want to be loudly wrong so that I have more than merely a snowball's chance in hell of garnering understanding here.
If you have corrections to offer, I'm receptive to them.
What we need more of these days is 155 mm shells, chip fabs, nuclear power plants, solar cells and rail, not Facebook and Apple equivalents complaining about regulations.
We get so focused on big tech being social media/ad companies that we ignore the rest of it, which is actually huge.
GP will have to explain to me, at a grade school level, how they want to differentiate big tech and BIG tech.
1. Accenture, Capgemini and Atos are consulting companies that don't produce anything, they just rent out their code monkeys to the customers. And you know what those code monkeys are trained in? Software stacks that were created mostly in the US.
2. The rest of the companies you mention do not employ that many software developers.
3. They also do not deliver terribly popular, or important products. I mean, Bosch produces commodities like dishwashers, vaccuum cleaners and power tools, hard to call it "tech company".
If so, Apple and Nvidia won‘t qualify. They‘re more of a hardware company.
BTW Bosch‘s main business is automotive supplies. They‘re doing everything down to having their own fabs for automotive chips. It‘s just completely invisible to us as consumers that‘s why you consider it a dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and power tools company.
Big tech has caused a lot of problems for society. Echo chambers on social media, monopolistic behaviour, teen depression and addiction.
We want the tech, without the grifting.
Historically the victims of contagion have been oldsters in a moral panic. This time I think it is actually true - there’s a mind virus loose.