lack of competitors for Google is bad
I've seen free higher education, or at least heavily subsided education. There is a great safety-net available too in most European countries. These two should make for a greater tech culture, at least abstractly.
Now I've worked with Americans and Europeans who had an MS or PhD in CS (full disclosure I started to get a MS, but had to stop because I couldn't do that, a marriage and 60 hrs a week for work). Most couldn't code worth a damn. They could probably discuss abstract CS concepts. They couldn't leverage those to solve a problem. It could be that the higher education is perhaps a hindrance to getting things done?
There could be a difference in how the two see failure. America seems to be open to it. Europe seems to be opposed. I think this is reflected in the history of the countries. America wanted the people who felt penned in by their countries hierarchy. Europe wanted those people gone.
Perhaps it's a combination of the two that's lead to the European problems. Education is seen as an end in itself, while the environment is such that people are told not to aim to high lest they melt there wings?
1. The internet was developed in the USA. 2. Language.
The first point simply means that whatever was done with the internet, the USA got the first crack at it. In american TV it's common now to tell people two tweet about the show they're watching, with hash tags on screen and whatnot. In germany, europe's technology powerhouse, it's still extremely common for a person to have never even heard of twitter, if they have internet at all.
Further: Anything you do in tech has profits that scale with the audience you can reach. Companies starting out in the USA are able to access all of the USA, all of the UK, and anyone from any other country who has learned one of the most wide-spread languages on the planet; with exactly zero special consideration at any point. Companies in Europe have two choices: Either they build with localization in the product from the start, which is hard, and provide both their local language and english, which also costs more; or they ignore the local market and work entirely in english; or they stick to their own language entirely and ignore the world.
In addition to that, due the great employee safety neat, which also means that employees have protection from things like capricious firings, taking risks is more expensive for european companies.
Whichever way they go, european companies either have to live with less growth potential, less ability to take risks, or spend more to get the same opportunities as their american counterparts.
Why is the Internet lacking in Germany? Is it because there are few German sites?
Localization in general adds a whole additional dimension of complexity. Every place you would normally just stick a word or phrase between quotes now suddenly has to pull that in from an array or database somewhere.
> Americans will overlook grammatical errors.
I'm saying without proper translators you end up with engrish.
> Why is the Internet lacking in Germany? Is it because there are few German sites?
General lack of interest, and smaller set of offers.
Keep in mind that the east half of germany didn't even have a telephone net into most people's houses until 1989, when germany was reunified. As for the content: Just recently it was brought up that in the usa elder people increasingly turn to youtube. An example brought up was a wealth of wood-working videos. Trying to find german wood-working videos on youtube only gives you semi-commercial advertisements for big machines.
As for Engrish, why is that bad on a first release. Yes, American's will laugh at it, but I doubt it will be enough to kill something that provide real value. Heck, Americans produce Engrish. That's never stopped us. If a German company tried to get ok English for their service/app/whatever version 1.0, they could take the money and improve for 1.4.
Quite the opposite actually. The better your life if you don't take a risk, the less likely it is that you will take a risk. And because people usually overestimate risk, risks are usually worth it.
Sad if true.
The rest of the answer is that the US possesses an integrated, massive, comprehensive economic system. From capital markets, to VC markets, to every major industry, to the top universities on the planet, to a massive existing infrastructure related to science, engineering, programming, internet services, a total ecosystem from top to bottom. No other country on earth can match the total sum, and Europe as a whole is not integrated well at all.
US startups have at least one very important handicap: over 300mln people speaking the same language. On
For Europeans it's a very strong growth barrier, we can easily grow within one country, but then we hit the wall.
Most of Europe is not at all like what you're describing.
http://www.techdisruptive.com/2013/04/16/breaking-down-the-o...
When Google puts its own products before organic search results then that clearly is monopolistic behaviour i.e. attempting to extend dominance in one sector to another.