Having now manged to read the article the author does seem to have a chip on his shoulder and is writing this from a distinct political stance making glib remarks like “our spying American friends” doesn’t really help in this context does it.

In addition “rich white men” comrade who do you think owns all those Mittelstand companies - Germanys far less diverse than the US or the UK in that regard.

Mittelstand is all very well but there are a number of problems with then in that they are very tightly controlled secretive family businesses - there appears to be no worker participation in the ownership of these companies what so ever.

Mittelstand companies have also recently benefited immensely from the Euro selling all those Porsche Cayennes to Greece

I think possibly German concentration on traditional engineering means there is less hinterland to build tech start-ups from – and I suspect that IT training has been starved as mech and electrical engineering probably played the political game better.