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Comment by progx | Hacker News Reader

Ah ok, they only talk about our Car Industry, as always.

I don't see any other business that has "experimental software engineering" in germany. And yes we have some lighthouses, like every other country too.

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What they don't mention is the fact that there is no German IT company of international importance. The only exception is SAP and they were founded in 1972 and IMO have a good chance of being disrupted in the near future if they don't start innovating soon. There may be some promising startups that have appeared over the last couple of years, but there is no Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook or anything even remotely like it.

That does not mean that there isn't lot of software being developed, just that you focus on 'international importance'. A lot of software development goes on for industries you typically don't see much of.

Exactly. A lot of critical software gets written for industrial automation, and you never have a chance of seeing it on GitHub.

Spot on. I'm working and living in germany, and this is one of the biggest problems, in my opinion, for the future of this country. You rarely find some startup here that is truly innovative – the fews that are usually don't get funding. It's a dead end, and I don't see it changing.

From what I found is that there isn't a competitive salary for software engineers in Germany. From what I've seen through out Europe the salaries have been rather low.. thus workers will try to immigrate to the US.

There is also the Software AG (Revenue: €1.120 billion (2010)) … From my experience the software is very much swallowed up by SAP and the culture of hiring for the rest consulting companies which markets customizing for additional software. So the interruption will most likely not take place. This process is facilitated because of manufacturing being so much big business. It is very hard to interrupt in B2B. And the service-driven American economy is in a huge advantage because of a culturally similar testing ground and much more ability to invest here. Then you can just export.

There was this Siemens ad recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y49KJKXI5Mg

The point isn't so much that there are German IT companies, the point is that pretty much every company nowadays is an IT company.

Well, RapidMiner is the number one data mining tool. And it started near Cologne.

Nonsense. In industrial applications there's mostly german SW controlling the world market. They don't care that you never heard about it.

Not true at all. There are not many high profile IT companies in Germany, true. But there are countless companies that produce A TON of software (Daimler, Siemens, Bosch, ThyssenKrupp, Continental, Schaeffler, Infineon, EADS, Rohde+Schwarz to name only a few). This software is crucial to industries all around the world, it just isn't visible like things coming from Microsoft et al.

My work in Geoinformatics could also be called "experimental software engineering".... I work out of a University of Applied Sciences near Frankfurt. Not connected to the car industry. I think the article was spot on in identifying the huge investment that goes into research in the country, although they might have strangely overemphasized the Fraunhofers (while forgetting institutions linked to Leibniz or the DLR/ESA or just the massive employment through universities such as mine...)

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