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Where Is Europe's Silicon Valley?
An anonymous reader writes: A New York Times story delves into the conundrum faced by Europeans: Why are there few, if any, technology companies from Europe with the size and reach of American tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple? The article hypothesizes that, though employment regulations and other business and legal factors play a role, it's actually deeply embedded cultural differences that are the primary cause, citing less aversion to risk-taking, less stigma from business failures such as bankruptcies, little or no stigma from leaving and rejoining a company (seen as disloyal in European cultures), more acceptance of disruptive innovation, and a less rigid educational system that allows individuals to find their own form of success.
Then you could have all those big companies, with US tax credits, foreign H1B workers, and all their profits in Ireland. You should try it! It's great!
One could just as easily wonder where there aren't many $othercompanytype in the US.
My old company was headquarted there and I saw a number of tech companies around when i went to visit back in 08. no idea what its like now
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
This is probably difficult to understand for Americans, but the key factor that makes SV so amazing is that venture capitalists over there are a century ahead in terms of taking risks than anywhere else in the world (save for, maybe China at this point). Instead of betting in a few large projects, they bet on few smaller projects. Most will fail but those that succeed usually return huge profits.
In contrast, everywhere else, investors are much more concerned about minimizing risk and focusing on commodities such as building houses, selling mattresses, etc. Silicon Valley is so different that you can find VC offices next to an ice cream store in the middle of the street.
In California! Of course! So is Russia's and China's.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Neither Google, Facebook nor Uber is about innovation. It's about implementing an idea that's obvious in its time and bringing it to customers. The 5% inspiration, 95% transpiration stuff. And they did it very well.
The US's distinct advantage: Immediate access to a 320M people market with the same language
and very similar culture. Thus able to reach critical masses much faster, hence ability to collect
more venture capital, grow bigger etc. Less need for internationalization in the early phases (no, it's not just
about translation!).
Other factors may also play a role, but I think the above one is the main factor.
No reason to worry, though, Frau Moser. Diversity has other advantages, and the world would be a boring place if
everywhere would be like Silicon Valley, even though I like it.
Why make a change (that no one wants, no one asked for) to a UI element that's served perfectly fine for 15+ years? Certainly it's not for us, the audience. Please Dice, explain.
All of with lead to a more equal society in Europe instead of a winner-takes-all-screw-the-rest situation like in the US.
Large corporations are risk averse. They avoid innovation because that is a massive gamble, and you don't gamble with the money of the rich. Many small companies is better for the market (and the world) than a handful of huge American heavyweights.
Silicon Valley has hipsters now?
You must utterly despise companies like P&G, G.E. and Dupont. Crap I mean they are so yesterday they actually make things.
Watching things like Cringeley's two series about the start of the computer revolution I cannot imagine something like that happening in Europe because the culture here is so different. Apart from a constant desire for stability there are still people walking around saying things like 'my grandfather was a miner, I'm a miner and, by God, my son will be a miner as well'. In America that would be replaced by 'my grandfather was a miner, I'm a mine superintendent and my son will own the mine'.
There are more than enough huge technological companies in Europe, but their focus aren't consumer products or websites for hipsters. More like mechanical and chemical engineering.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Illinois has a $65bn (yes billion) deficit.
If you want to start an IT business here in the EU, it is hart to get venture capital. It is easier to go to Silicon Valley and get money from European lenders than to do so on European soil. While the US has such a good reputation for being innovative they have an advantage in getting money. The labor regulations are not a problem, because they are mostly ruined in the last decade and they only come into effect when your company is larger and your people work for longer time.
As anti-business and anti-success as the American tax code is, the tax codes of most European countries, in general, are worse. When Hollande put France under a 75% top marginal income tax rate, even Sarkozy started making plans to leave the country. Think about that for a second. The ex-president was going to leave to avoid the taxes.
You're not going to lure top talent to your country to try and make a billion dollar business when you promise to tax most of their income at 75%. With proper planning, in the US you'll be paying about 50% tops in California, and 40% in some other states.
1. One logical type of location would be adventurous, investor-friendly corners of Europe: Ireland, Iceland, Scotland (which is already promoting a "Silicon Glen").
2. But a better bet might be industrial rust belts like Upper Silesia in Poland, or Birmingham, which like its American namesake is redneck heaven (the term there is "chavs"). These are places which already have dense industrial infrastructure like power and rail service, but it's now underutilized as the heavy industry has moved elsewhere. Tech could be a good replacement.
3. The Paris suburbs and Hauts-du-Seine: People don't realize how tech-friendly France is. It leads the world in applied nuclear and is a close second to the US in aerospace.
4. The Swiss watch country of Jura and Geneva: long experience in precision electrical and mechanical engineering. Rural towns like Lengnau are now looking for a clean industry to succeed it.
The last time I saw the Largest Corporations in the World list, Switzerland had a ton of flags all throughout the list.
I think tax laws (which are small in Switzerland) and culture are big contributors to the reasons why Europe doesn't have more big tech companies.
I have a lot of friends throughout Europe and another thing is that generally to be rich in Europe is to be looked down upon quite harshly in a general sense. Way more so than in the US.
Not all of them, unfortunately. Anyways, keep them. Keep your silicon valley, your banks, and your mass-media. Keep everything that is under their control. I prefer democracy, national sovereignty, and a lobby-free country.
Modded down immediately. Had I said the same thing about gypsies or muslims, probably it would have been modded up instead. Which proves exactly what I was saying.
Guys, you can mod down my post, but you cannot mod down reality.
But then they were stuck on thinking, how should the committee be structured to oversee the proper evolution and rollout of these technologies, across people of diverse cultures and languages, and countries with diverse laws on copyright and privacy?
While lots of SV folk simultaneously thought, how can I use this new platform to personally make 9 figures USD?
There are many reasons but I think the best one is that there is a brain drain.
Why set up in Europe that doesn't have good laws and tax breaks for start ups anyway... when you can just move to the US and be surrounded by the best and the brightest from the whole world?
Its worse than the europeans realize because we've pretty much filled SV to capacity and now we're seeding Seattle with more of it and Austin, Dallas, a little in Los Angeles, and even something in Boston.
The US draws them in like a loadstone. The Euros are going to have to offer very attractive subsidies to keep those people in Europe. Think of the sort of pull Europe would have to have to start pulling American tech startups to Europe. That is how hard the US is pulling... If the Euros haven't noticed this then they're not paying attention. The US wants ALL your bright minds. All of them.
America is drinking your mental milkshake. *sluuuuuuuurp*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Oh, you mean like Siemens, Philips, Ericsson, BAE Systems, STMicroelectronics, and Logitech? Or possibly much smaller ones like Raspberry Pi, Nginx, AVG Technologies and F-Secure?
Mostly, the big European technology companies actually make stuff.
Amazon isn't at all related to Silicon Valley either. Google is a new company. Even Apple wasn't even around when the term "Silicon Valley" was first used. So these companies come and go. The old silicon companies no longer dominated, though they're still around, but low tech stuff is taking over; web applications, social media, etc. Really, when people talk about high technology they're not first thinking about Twitter...
Meanwhile in Europe, Nokia was gang busters for awhile. Oh but wait, some say, it's defunct! But so are many other silicon giants that have withered away too. Besides, Nokia is still around it's just smaller. And while it was big it was a very large incubator of other tech companies. In Germany we have Siemens (not at all my favorite) which has fingers in lots of high tech stuff. Anyone working in a high tech company that actually makes stuff is dealing with other high tech partners and customers all over the world.
Isn't that where all the taxes go?
ARM for example is as pervasive as any other big tech company but "shares the wealth" with thousands of other companies instead of trying to drive them out of business and take their customers all for themselves.
In Europe there are several areas where technology thrives. However, they are not in the area of Internet technology. For example the Southwest of Germany is a hub of machinery technology. And there is another cause: In Europe computer science is often called informatics and originates from mathematics. There is no mathematics industry (beside present day banking). In the USA computer science originated from electric engineering. And finally, we do not have one big market, we have 28 countries every country with its own language.
When I want to create a website for the US, you can start with an English only site and still there are 380 million people able to understand it. In Europe you cannot. You have to support different languages. Even if many people can speak English, you cannot address all people with an only English site. The news of country A will not report on a service in country B. And the US invented the Internet so you had an advantage in that area.
Europe 110 years ago ruled the world, period. Compared to that time, our influcence in the world is nothing. Since then we had a horrible 30 year war and countless genocides. America on the other hand never had any war on its main land. After that war, europe was split in two: one russian hemisphere and one american. And both americans and russians are clinging on their part, with now most of europe being an US colony. If we can't fight the russians ourselves, but have to hide behind the american army, how can we ever claim to be sovereign, and call the US an "equal partner"?
In the IT industry, I'm against of having our own "europe data cloud", like russia and china have them. The internet is something global. Rather, we should have a globalized market with different competitors from different countries. Also, europe is very strong in the free software world. Qt was initiated from norwegians, and stayed under control of european companies for a long time, KDE comes from Germany.
When many people learn english in europe, they favour united states english over british english, even if GB is in europe. This is partly thanks to hollywood, partly to the strong american economy. There is no inner-european patriotism at all. People are still thinking in their "nations", and reduce the EU to their negative parts. These all problems that have to be solved together, because they are interconnected.
> Why are there few, if any, technology companies from Europe with the size and reach of American tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple?
The value of those companies is mostly imaginary. In contrast, european giants like Siemens and Alstom have so much tangible assets.
The other thing is, europeans have centuries of experience concerning the sheeniganism of jews. In any economic activity, they promise wonderous novelties, but there is always a crash eventually and the gentiles' money simply disappears as a result and re-appears among the Temple treasures. Thus, europeans are reluctant to jump on the "disruptive innovation" bandwagon, while americans are led by their noses by jew-controlled press and media that dominates the new continent.
Anyhow, infotech is a totally jewish-dominated business and gentiles (goyim) are wise to be sceptical. Euro countries like France make their own electronics for defence (SPECTRE in the Rafale jetfighter, for example) but don't want to dive into the commercial side, where they would be sure to crash. Cue Finland's regret with the Nokia story. They nurtured it, but the amero-zionists wrecked it and eventually walked away with the carcass, in exchange selling inoperable JASSM cruise missiles to the finnish nation.
"Stockholm is the home of billion dollar startups in Europe, and by one measure the Swedish capital is second only to Silicon Valley as the birthplace for the world's most successful internet companies." http://www.zdnet.com/article/s... On the other hand there is a lot of other cities that also makes the list. Like London and Helsinki among others.
What I wonder is: Where is Texas' Silicon Valley or Oregon's ?
Why does California have Silicon Valley and Hollywood ?
Birmingham was the workshop of the world and the midlands still has a lot of tech industry a large number of the f1 teams are based there
You're a dumb fuck, that's reality.
This sort of comparison doesn't make all that much sense. First of all Europe isn't one country like the US. People in the comments here and in the New York Times article makes sweeping generalisations about tax rates, laws and regulations in Europe, when those differ substantially between countries. There is a lot of cherry picking here to make a point. Doing a startup or going a bankrupt isn't necessarily difficult all over Europe. I can only speak for Norway where I am from and starting a company here is not hard. I've done it at I have several friends who have done it. Some more successful than others and I've worked for multiple tech startups. Nobody here in their right mind would commit suicide over a failed startup.
I just wanted to mention these things because I think it is a tired accusation that Europe is failing in this area because it is not business friendly. That is frankly not the issue. The problem in Europe is that nobody has a 320 million market. Sure Europe is 500+ million people, but these are people in different countries with different regulations, cultures and languages. We have had a number of successful tech companies here in Norway but they don't show up on the radar because we are just 5 million people. E.g. we got a very successful company that does house listings, buying and selling, job adds etc. But such a company can't quickly expand. If they want to expand they need to learn about the laws and regulations of the next market. The jargon and language used etc. It is not easy. E.g. the way you describe house size in Norway is not the same as in the Netherlands.
A second major obstacle is that we don't have VC capital even remotely as accessible as in the US. That is simply a cultural thing. American's are of course much more risk taking than most other people on this planet. We also don't think as big as American's. We get content much more quickly. People are as mentioned also more loyal to their employers. You can't change that with business laws and regulation as that is part of the culture and it is not all exclusively bad. There is a flip side to everything. The US is a country which is poor at manufacturing while Germany and Japan excels at this. This is helped by a culture of loyalty which allows companies to spend a lot of money on investing in skills of employees without risking that their investment is lost because people suddenly leave for the competitor. As an employer you would not spend say 5 000 dollars a year on training if you could use that to increase the salary and steal skilled employees from somewhere else.
And thirdly while Europe isn't one homogenous mass that could be compared to the US, neither is the US really either. I'd go so far as to claim that Silicon valley is a west coast thing. Why is there no Silicon Valley on the east coast? Doing startups simply isn't such an honourably thing on the east coast. There is more status in being a big shot banker. In many ways the west coast of America has a unique culture created by all the luck seekers all the way back to the gold rush which can't be recreated easily elsewhere regardless of business regulation.
Trying to do this is really just stupid. Each country should find their own way. Denmark has a sort of food silicon valley. In Norway we have strong business clusters around oil technology on the west coast. Lots of different countries have different specialised clusters based on what they are good at. Replicating silicon valley when one already exists is a waste IMHO.
And you're an obese, alcoholic, cretin american, whose brain has been carefully brainwashed by decades of trashy TV shows for a mentally diseased audience, so that you wouldn't be able to realize how your country works.
Didn't we have this discussion yesterday? Jimmy Wales told us it was London.
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
They are all in Ireland, Google, Amazon, Apple, you name it!
I'm going to assume you are talking about web-centric start-ups that become behemots (since you chose Google, Facebook and Netflix as example).
There are 2 reasons :
A. Europe isn't (as) unified a market as the USA. At least for consumer-oriented products/services. Different languages for one. Different legal systems and basically culturally it is much less uniform than the US. This is cruxial for your growth velocity. If you can target 320 Million consumers, you can get big faster than if you have to have a targetted approach for 10 groups of 30 million consumers.
B. Venture capital. More specifically series B and C of funding. It is so much easier to get $30 million from VCs in the US than it is in Europe. SO the market speaks and when you have a start-up in Paris and you need to raise tens of millions, you pack-up and leave for California or NY.
To clarify and respond to the morons who would say it is because of the evil socialist government and its taxes : Starting up in Europe it REALLY easy. it is actually MUCH easier and less risky than in the US.
In Paris there are at least 20 incubators where you can get 100-500 kEuros and offices for 18 months for 4-8% of equity. There are a lot of tax examptions for innovative young companies. Plus you are very unlikely to make a profit, and taxes are on profits...
Furthermore the E.U government has tons of funding for innovative start-ups. A company I interviewed for 3 months ago had just raised 800kEuros from private investors, after incubating for a year; In the same time it took them to raise that money, they won a challenge with 2 million euros prize for the government.
The thing is there is no VC in europe, and the BNP and RBS of the world don't want to lend money to start ups, because they don't understand their business models, and they cannot quantify the risks.
Europe achieves what progressives want: low inequality through redistribution, taxation, and other policies. That means that if you're below average, you get compensated better than you ought to be, and if you're above average, you get compensated worse than you ought to be based on your ability and productivity. It shouldn't be surprising that this is not an attractive proposition to people with skills and talents, so many leave if they can.
look man, if parent post wasn't at least partially true, you wouldn't have things like SF residents up in arms over companies like Genentech or Google using private busing. There is a very very clear differentiation between the haves and have not's. Kind of a bad comparison *now*, but prior to becoming the 'rust belt', the northern Midwest produced 'things', as well as a huge middle class across multiple industries.
Tricking people into clicking on ads, or electronically stalking them not only fails to produce wealth outside of shareholders, but it has a negative social value as well. (though that's arguably just an opinion.)
Yeah, Europe definitely has a problem with antisemitism. Not sure that explains what the article postulates.
Look to countries that are deregulating their economy for economic collapse followed by massive civil unrest up to and including civil war. You silly dipshit. Unless you were born prior to 2008, you literally just fucking saw what happened when countries let big business run amok.
That tech giants like Apple, Google and Amazon are a good thing? On any other day everyone here would be criticizing them, and quite correctly. Give me a a hundred smaller, meeker innovators any day over three giant corporations who may be innovative to start, but eventually end up sucking all the air out of the room. Looks and Microsoft from the early 90s. They were good then, but we are STILL trying to get over there incredibly bad products.
Also, I was speaking with someone raised in Estonia the other day, and they reminded me that Skype was developed there.
http://estonianworld.com/technology/skype-estonian-start-ecosystem/
customers require to replace their shoes Nike Free pas cher . (The Washington Post, 2007) There also exists the opportunity in developing products like sunglasses and jewellery. These high value products seem to be connected with high profits compared to the company main line. (The Washington Post, 2007) Nike can also develop its business along international market, building on its well-built global brand image recognition. Today, many international markets have the disposable earnings to expend on premium priced items and high priced sports products. For instance, emerging global markets like China, Hong Kong and India are having a new wealthier generation of buyers. In addition there is also coming global sports events like the Olympics games to be held in China and the European football championship where the company has a good market opportunity to support its global market. (The Washington Post, 2007) Threats As a global company Nike is duly exposed to international environment of trading. The company purchases and sells its products in diverse currencies and thus expenses and margins can not be steady over prolonged time. This exposure can imply the company could be manufacturing its products and/or selling them without making profit nike tn . This aspect faces all international brands. More so sports shoes and wear market is very competitive.
We're wealthier than you and it itches doesn't it
Not really. I'm from Norway. https://en.wikipedia.org/?titl...
Furthermore, given the massive wealth disparity in the US, most european countries probably have wealthier middle classes than the US. It would be interesting to see countries ranked according to their per-capita GDP, excluding the richest 10% of the population. I've never found such a rank.
That said, I would rather live in a second-world country rather than a first-world one that is ruled by the jewish lobby, which cannot even be mentioned otherwise one gets modded down.
Defecit, or debt? That kind of deficit should kill a state rather quickly.
Piss off you southern shite.
Wish I had mod points.
I would point out though that Apple were one of the original investors in ARM. They even helped with the early (though not the initial) silicon design.
The article is also wrong on other points. I've had two companies in the UK, the first failed (and I didn't really feel any "stigma". It just didn't work out); the second (which contained mainly the same people as the first) was bought up, which is why I'm over in Sunny CA now rather than back in London...
The social net is actually a lot stronger in the UK I feel (as someone who's lived in the US for the last decade), so having a company fail on you isn't the enormous burden that it is in the USA. There's a lot of ways/government help to get back on your feet in the UK that still don't really exist in the USA; and, of course, there's things like government-sponsored healthcare so you don't *need* to be employed just to cover your arse on essential things like that.
Just my $0.02/£0.01 (rounding up)
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Illinois has a $65bn (yes billion) deficit.
It also happens to have some of the most powerful unions and pro-worker laws in the country. Chicago is basically the US equivalent of Greece.
lucm, indeed.
The point of employment should be that it is social and you feed and give job to the workers.
Nice pipe dream, but no, it's just not a realistic expectation, nor should it be. When you start a business, which is the most likely thing on your mind:
- "I'd like to pay a lot of people to do stuff"
- "I've got an idea that could revolutionize the way we do X, and make me a lot of money in the process"
If it's the first one (i.e, owning a business just for the sake of owning a business) then you're basically guaranteed to fail. The purpose of running a business is to create a product or service that people actually need enough to pay you money for.
The purpose of running a business is never just to give people jobs, and the only "businesses" that exist for the sole purpose of giving people jobs are scams (ask Google about "network marketing" "multi-level marketing" or "affiliate marketing" jobs. The only "product" they truly put out is to tell people that they have work for them, but they fail to mention that this work actually costs the "employee" more than what the "employee" actually gets paid.)
Yes, some of them grew up and moved down here when they realized that San Francisco is no place to raise children. I feel sorry for this new generation of kids in Silicon Valley who have hipster parents.
PS - I can't explain Amazon and Microsoft, they aren't in Silicon Valley and live in their own little culture up in Seattle.
Name them, so we can see if you're telling the truth, or just lying.
Granted the US is the biggest economy
Maybe I misunderstood your comment, or maybe this is a common misconception. You always hear that the US is the world's largest economy. Last time I checked, the EU had a larger GDP than the US.
And they own the current president.
Chicago? i thought it was Detroit ... oh wait ... Greece has not failed, yet, it's just doomed.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
1. The unique status of dollar as a reserve currency allows cheap and virtually unlimited borrowing. US companies effectively get loans subsidised by the rest of the world. This is going to change as the era of US power is coming quickly to an end.
2. Large and unhealthy monopolies are prevented by competition law in Europe.
3. European banking sectors is a little better regulated, making the kind of financial games that are played in the United States impossible. Look at stock values in the United States - there is a mega bubble. The earnings to value ration is just ridiculous.
4. Outside the United States, government is not just an extension of corporations. We actually elect governments on the basis of the needs of the people, rather than corporations. People in Europe aren't having stupid debates about 'socialised healthcare'. We just look at the United States as an example, sitting right at the bottom of developed nations. There is no argument to be had.
Europe did not put its tech sector all in one basket; it is spread out instead of being all in one place.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The US operates a constellation of satellites over the EU under that use modified radar to decode neural information such as thoughts, ideas, etc. This network is used to steal IP from the EU at the conception stage. What should have been a large EU company, then turns up in the US with major ties to the CIA/NSA.
Not us Italians at least. We'll simply claim anything any non-Italian (barbarian) may invent was already done by Leonardo Da Vinci or whatever. We're so clever and we're the best in the world. Because... Because! :)
There are plenty of locations all over Europe that pretend to be European Silicon Valleys.
The most obvious is Plateau de Saclay, in France. Having founded a software company there, I can tell you it's nothing like the real thing.
Their innovative gene lines either lie in the ground rotting, or they immigrated to the United States. Perpetual war has its consequences both in people and their culture.
E Proelio Veritas.
> Not really. I'm from Norway.
Norway has the world's second smallest jewish population, right after Japan. Thus, they are fortunate to be able to maintain coherent and honest societies, free from the diversionary activities of jews, who only seek their own profit and the goyim's demise.
Neighbouring Sweden knows fully well what people who help jews receive in return: they get executed (e.g. Raoul Wallenberg, Count Folke Bernadotte). However, this cannot be talked about openly, because Sweden is under the jewish-imposed dictatorship of "multi-kulti". Long ago, both Norway and Sweden were the landsof wikings, but nowadays only norwegians remain men, the swedish became sissies.
tell that to Greece, Spain and Italy.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Well then, might as well dismiss the US' GDP because of bankrupt states like Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, and almost 30 others.
"American tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple..."
All those mentioned are located in Luxembourg, where they pay their taxes.
Detroit is interesting because unions played a major part in destroying its car industry. At a time where US car companies badly needed to adapt to the new Asian competition, most of their money was spent paying for pension and benefits of people who had left the workforce years or even decades earlier. So they entered the death spiral of downsizing, outsourcing and such.
Same thing happens with civil servants and public workers in many cities in North America. Not only are the services severely downsized (such as in Chicago where they had to reduce the school calendar to be able to afford the gold-plated teachers conditions), but in many cases the cities have to spend tax money on pension and healthcare of retired employees who did not work harder than current ones, but simply happened to be in the workforce when the economy was booming and the unions had the cities by the balls. The result is that people who can't themselves afford a pension plan or decent healthcare and who will live in poverty when they retire have to pay for those lottery winners.
Another issue with unions is the lack of flexibility. They hold onto job descriptions to a point where it becomes totally absurd. Such as in the case of those people working in one of Warren Buffet's newspapers (I think the one in Buffalo); when the newspaper brought in a new machine to fold papers, they couldn't change the job of those poor union workers who used to fold newspapers manually. So until they retire, those people stand in line besides the conveyor belt where the newspapers exit the folding machine and in the air they make a move with their hand that is similar to what they used to do to fold the newspapers manually. They are known as "the blessers", and they are the perfect example of a situation where employees become wards of the company, not part of a team that is there to help the business.
lucm, indeed.
Ukraine fits the criteria listed in the GP comment. US fits it up till the civil war part.
While a lot of posters have mentioned things like regulations, taxes, cultural, size of market, availability of VC funding etc... as reasons, when you really look at it these don't hold water, since they don't explain why SV happened where it did and not in South Dakota, Kentucky or Idaho (where there are less regulations, lower taxes, work-oriented cultures that fail often [farming], and the same local US market and VC funding). What is really different is the genetic makeup of the people in the area who are more adventurous. They might have had their roots in Europe, Asia, India or other less "interesting" places, but took the plunge and set up to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (some literally - e.g. 49's), and only stopped because they hit a large impassable body of water.
Also, not very pc to say it out loud, but the guys who started Microsoft (Ballmer), Intel (Grove), Oracle (Ellison), Google (Brin), Dell (Dell), Qualcom (Jacobs) and many other US and SV success stories all have one shared ethnic trait that Europeans spent a lot of effort (over the last 2000 years) to suppress and finally kill off in the last century.
Wrong, Detroit designed cars that people didn't want to buy, nothing downstream of that made any difference.
What I understood was that Detroit had no problem designing cars that people wanted to buy. SUV's were and still are very popular. They just weren't able to make a profit building and selling them.
The SUV didn't exist when they started their decline with the import flood beginning 1969
The EU also isn't a country. If you're going to go and move away from standard per country GDP and just use any arbitrary GDP you'd know that the global market is far larger then the EU market. Now of course if you go by either by country or per capita, then you see the US wins.
Europe's Silicon Valley is NOT possible;
Unlike US dollar, Euro is NOT pegged to OPEC Oil;
Casteism
As a german software developer who has worked for two different SV startups for 5 years until 2001, I believe that the massive cultural diversity also plays a huge role. SV is (or seems to be) the promised land for bright and adventurous people from all over the world. Different cultural background, different ideas, way of thinking, different strategies regarding problem solving, etc.
It also helps A LOT that the Bay Area is an attractive place to live, not to mention the California sun, which, from my experience as somebody from northern Europe, has a huge impact on optimistic and positive thinking.
From my experience, US companies also have a much better reward and motivation system for hard working employees than companies in Germany, for example. Over here, it is much more difficult to climb the ladder and everything is much more regulated and leaves less room for professional growth based on personal effort and ability.
For employees, the advantage of not being in the US are the social benefits, including 30 days of payed vacation and sane working hours, no hire-and-fire mentality. Of course, this comes as a disadvantage for companies. Can't have it both ways, I guess.
Gemalto, enough said.
Pension funds are required to be fully paid funded up front, unless you're a state government. That means that at any point in time, the expected cost of an employee who retired that very day has already been paid out. Retired pensioners? Not a single dime is paid out byba company--their last payment was made the day he retires.
The issues between unions and industry is much more complicated then industry let's on. Yes, unions sometimes ask too much. But companies can push back or compromise. German industry works hand-in-hand with unions, for example. And Germany is an industrial powerhouse.
True, the EU isn't a country. It's a union of European states... just as the USA is a union of American states.
There is a difference of course, in that the USA has a much stronger and more influential central government, with much less power afforded to its member states than in the EU; but in essence, the concept is entirely the same.
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Protip: when comparing two things with a list of points, state - ideally just before the list - which way round your comparisons are phrased. Wrong: Blah blah Tiger yada T34 yada yad. Yada yada yada yada. Slower. Bigger gun. More complicated to build ...
Correct: Although the Tiger had a bigger gun, it was slower than the T34, more complicated to build ...
At the bottom of the
Speaking from the UK (as a Software Engineer incidentally): the lack of tiny companies that take a vast cut of wealth while hiring very few people and not producing much of anything except abstract constructs like IP isn't really worrying me. And the reason is transparently obvious: WW2 moved a vast amount of the Europe's intellectual talent to the US, the Pentagon funneled massive funding to public sector research, then transferred the IP to the private sector.
I'd love to see a reference for you paper folders anecdote. It sure is a strong talking point...
Management has been very successful at demonizing unions for the past century. Now people are starting to catch on that management is a huge part of the problem as well. May you be as successful with your lies.
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does their combined debt exceed the GDP of the entire Union?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I'd love to see a reference for you paper folders anecdote.
There's an summary of this incident in the book "Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist".
lucm, indeed.
Thank you.
Founded in i38o, the Evening News, which was establishment and Republican, had been run by the Butler family, which also owned a local television station and a fortune in American Airlines stock. In recent decades, the proprietor had been Kate Robinson Butler, a grande dame who traveled with her poodle in a Rolls-Royce. Butler had built a lavish printing plant, rimmed with distinctly nonnative tropical plants, and had gone to similar expense to avoid trouble with unions.* Employees who hac once tied the papers by hand had continued at their posts after the work was automated. As papers came off the runway, the workers would pass their hands over the conveyors, as if offering a sacrament. They were known as "blessers."6 But the family's stewardship had ended with Butler's death, in 1974. Now the paper was up for sale by her estate.
Sounds like classic mismanagement to me, less of a union problem.
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