Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Sorry but you're talking absolute nonsense, Europe has no global successes?

How about...

SAP (Germany) - Most of the Fortune 500 run on their software.

Spotify (Sweden)

Novo Nordisk (Denmark) - most of America is taking their drugs.

Airbus (France) - Has out competed and out delivered Boeing for years.

Ericsson and Nokia (Finland and Sweden) - Most of American telecom systems use tech from them, essentially the western alternative to Huawei in telecom networking.

Adyen (Netherlands) - One of the worlds largest payment processors, processes most of American big tech payments.

ASML (Netherlands) - Responsible for building effectively every modern chip in the world outside of China.

Maersk (Shipping and logistics)

Siemens (Industrial Tech)

Infineon (Semis)

And there are so many more I'm missing btw. It's funny how incredibly biased you are, but the reality is that Europe and the USA are totally dependent on each other, tech wise.

If every European company which the US is dependent on immediately stopped trading with the US, the US would collapse as a country. And yes, the opposite is true also. But it was you who argued that Europe effectively has no successful companies, what rubbish.

If SAP appears in a list of successes then clearly EU is fucked.

I'm talking about massive global financial successes.

Also, if SAP is "so bad", where are the amazing American competitors? From what I heard, the Oracle equivalent is even worse than SAP.

Build your own startup to compete with them! I'm guessing it's not as easy a product to make as people may assume.

SAP isn’t a company to be crazy proud of, but it doesn’t make it not a success nor does it mean “EU is fucked”.

May I remind you that in the US, Facebook is in that same list of top successes? Have you ever heard the phrase “the top minds of this generation of Americans are all working on ads”?

Also, if huggingface is “technically” American, then fuck me, Stripe is technically European. Hell, their CEO is insanely pro europe, pro EU, and a big enabler of projects like EU Inc and lately, the Rhine Group.

I mean EU can cope all it wants, the most successful startup in Germany being a weapons company is all that you really need to know. It is sad how far these countries have fallen and I am German myself.

Germany isn’t exactly great at startups, it’s one of the worst countries in europe to create and scale one. Helsing is doing great in spite of that ecosystem, and thanks to good timing and current geopolitics.

That itself does not reflect on all of EU. Since the UK left, Germany has probably been the worst “special child” of the lot to be honest; their notaries and trade unions are the primary challengers to EU Inc for the most ridiculous reasons for example.

But the talent is here.

That's an embarrassing example that shouldn't have been at the top, but most of the rest are good.

Yet on most metrics IBM is a success.

Lego (Denmark).

They may not be a financial and industrial juggernaut like the others listed, but cultural significance doesn't have to be all about money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com