Define success. If it's high stock market cap calculated by multiplying the number of shares with the last trade price Europe doesn't have many of those.
I’d flip the question and ask you by what metrics Europes tech sector is performing comparatively well. Employment? Average salary? ARR? I struggle to think of a metric that’s a positive outlier.
Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction. Companies are there to make these possible, not to maximise the stock trading price. Some achieve that by making EUV lithography machines, others do chemicals or pharmaceuticals.
Are you aware that you can use the developer tools in your browser to set the price of the stock or your bank account balance to anything you like? You don't have to crumble your infrastructure, run from the mentally ill homeless people or bankrupt sick people to see those numbers.
If you insist on extra steps, you can sell a stock to your friend at ridiculous price and say that that this company is now bigger than the worlds' economy combined.
> Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction
Apart from longevity[1], everything else is subjective so do you have any evidence? From what I see based on a quick search, happiness level seems same in US/Canada vs Germany/France. eg. Rankings by this[2] measure: Canada(15), USA(23), Germany(24), France(27). Or scores by this[3] measure: Canada (6.9), USA(6.7), Germany(6.7), France(6.6)
[1] Even longevity is full of caveats and nuances. When you look at life expectancy by ethnicity, a given ethnicity has similar life expectancy across different advanced countries (eg. Japanese-Americans vs Japanese in Japan). It doesn't even seem to be correlated by income in the US, because latinos have a higher life expectancy than whites[4] even though later group is richer than the former.
> Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction. Companies are there to make these possible, not to maximise the stock trading price.
No? This is exactly the opposite of why companies exist, they are specifically there to increase the stock price via development of their products. That we get better happiness via rising wealth standards is just a coincidence, albeit a very useful and historically true coincidence. And even then, companies can last quite a while trudging along but it will stop at some point if new innovation is not kept up in the form of new companies (as older companies are usually at capacity for hiring). Look at the youth unemployment rate in many European countries compared to the US.
> Are you aware that you can use the developer tools in your browser to set the price of the stock or your bank account balance to anything you like? You don't have to crumble your infrastructure, run from the mentally ill homeless people or bankrupt sick people to see those numbers.
Changing a measure does not change the underlying thing it's measuring, no more than I can time travel by changing a clock. Obviously people are talking about what those numbers represent, not the numbers themselves. GDP is a useful enough concept as I mentioned above, one that correlates well to overall citizen wealth. Europeans are generally quite a bit poorer than Americans, even with the addition of the value of free (or rather, "free") healthcare. Tech employees are even more so advantaged, as their health insurance is excellent while they make multiples of their European counterparts. It is not "libertarian" to acknowledge this fact, and it's one of the main reasons you see many European tech people moving to the US and Silicon Valley.
Right, that's why at the heart of the tech innovation peple are running from mentally ill homeless people the insulating themselves in gated communities to pretend like living in a german village. Huge success.
I wouldn't obsess too much with the GDP too, its not as good as a proxy to the important stuff as people are trying to make it. An appendicitis surgery generates much more economic activity in USA than in Europe and Americans don't end with better appendixes.
If we are talking about tech companies, as stated in the great-grandparent comment, tech employees in the US have as much or more vacation time as Europeans. I can easily take multi-month vacations if I so choose (with some prior planning and assent of course), and that is a similar story for other tech employees too. The difference is that we just get paid much more for the same work.
They are allocated a good number of PTO hours, but Americans are really bad at taking them. I also could take that long of a vacation too, technically, but I never have and realistically never would.
I guess, that's on them then. One could say the same of those types of Europeans who don't take vacation either. Personally I'm taking everything I'm allocated.
Aren't those American companies (other than Samsung)? I mean, they're all global/multi-national like most big corps, so it's not as clean as that. But it seems like you're actually agreeing with the parent...
Except Intel, all the hardware is produced in Taiwan or abroad at TSMC.
Samsung and Intel ( + all others) buy their fabs at ASML.
Cars: my preference is still German ( and Toyota). Tesla is really low build quality and it's claims for FSD ( as it's "technological innovation") is a joke. But, Waymo is ahead though.
If you zoom in on the just the hardware production market then yes sure, although that seems more an artifact of a small number of highly specialized manufacturers than evidence of startup friendliness, otherwise I'd expect to see a bunch of competing manufacturers rather than a handful of huge ones.
In the context of this conversation also, when we say "tech" we're usually talking about much more than just hardware production (especially software). A huge chunk of the value-add is from the software and other use cases that the tech company adds to the hardware. But even just looking at hardware, a ton of that hardware is designed in the US and just sent out for manufacturing. The physical manufacturing is just a piece of the whole.
But even all that aside, none of those major manufacturers seem to be in Europe, so I don't see how even zooming in on the hardware makes a point about Europe not having barriers and/or friction.
As an aside, to be clear, I'm not making any value judgments here by saying just because things are done somewhere means that is better. There's a lot more to the equation than just that, which is easily illustrated with a hypothetical example. If you enslaved a population you could get a lot of business by doing things cheaply, but it obviously wouldn't be a "better" place just because it's the easiest/cheapest place to get business is done.
Those have 1% of the revenue compared to the top American tech companies (individual, not combined). The rest are private and I suspect have even less revenue. If those are the best examples of "tech successes" you can think of, you're proving the parent commenter's point.
I don't know why the parent is calling out those companies, strange list.
Europe has plenty of very successful, influential, and tech heavy organizations. ARM and AirBus come immediately to mind. Car manufacturers such as VW or BMW. Software companies such as SAP. Some of the largest banks and fossil fuel companies in the world.