[Silhouette]

Everyone in Europe would like Europe to innovate more. Unfortunately every time European governments add more regulation they usually also make it harder to do that.

You need to find the sweet spot. Too little regulation is harmful. Too much regulation is also harmful. The EU and US are near opposite ends of the spectrum at the moment and neither is an ideal place to be. The US produces many more financially successful big tech businesses but those businesses do a lot of things we don't like. The EU doesn't produce many successful big tech businesses in the first place.

[calculated]

I don't agree with everyone in Europe wanting to innovate more. I'm a Bulgarian citizen and from my PoV a small group of people only want to innovate. One good thing that I've noticed is that the snowball here is slowly spinning up - we have a good university trying to be on a IVY league level as much as it can (for Bulgarian levels it's good, for EU maybe just about average) which teaches people tech or whatever they want to learn. Some part of them have really sharp skills. But a big portion of them don't really care about innovation, they still have the mindset of their parents/grandparents which is: I get my bachelors, I maybe get a masters, I work one job for the rest of my life and that's it.

I'm more a fan of the EU because I think these sorts of regulations are good. The thing they do wrong here is that they do it slow. E.g. they introduce the universal USB-C port, companies won't be motivated to innovate on that tech since they know it'll take ages for the EU to update the law. So after all yeah finding a sweet spot of course is the best, the thing is that we don't know how to find it.

[aliqot]

> I work one job for the rest of my life and that's it.

Fight tooth and nail to preserve this. We're living in the future here in USA, trust me on this, gig economy and corporate churn sucks. You don't want to get on this ride.

[BlueTemplar]

Is it bad that companies don't innovate on the power outlets any more ?

(BTW, USB standards are up to 240W already, it would be a decent power cable itself alone if not for the fire / power loss / safety / cable size issues that DC causes...)

[alufers]

I don't think that creating a web based word processor, cloud storage and an email hosting service is something that is impossible for a whole continent to do. Especially considering that o365 isn't exactly the gold standard when it comes to software quality.

[Silhouette]

And yet the developers on one continent have done so with commercial success while those on another have not.

Obviously there are plenty of skilled software developers in Europe so the question we have to ask is what else is different.