"Europe" is about 750,000,000 people in about 50 countries. There are huge differences in both culture and economics between one country and another and often even among different parts of the same country. It's probably not a great idea to generalise to "Europe simply cannot compete anymore in technology and tries to legislate away its problems".
One of the main reasons Europe doesn't have a lot of big tech companies is that a lot of its most innovative and successful companies get bought out by the giants in the US before they reach that scale themselves. I expect this is going to happen less in the future because of the recent shifts in opinions though.
Or maybe they leave voluntarily, because the EU is simply not a place to do business? Because the EU has been regulatory-captured by aging tech entities such as Siemens, IBM and SAP?
Mistral, Zendesk, Basecamp, etc. left Europe for the US early on. If we take into account European founders who started their companies in the US right away, the list is even longer.
The EU and Europe are different. 27/50ish (depending on who you ask) countries in Europe are EU member states and they collectively have about 3/5 of the European population.
My own country - the UK - is (in)famously not a part of the EU and I don't think anyone would seriously claim that we have no technological innovation or successful tech businesses here in Cambridge. The city is practically overflowing with tech startups either spun out directly from university research or keen to employ people from the local tech community.
But what tends to happen is that when one of those companies reaches a certain stage the founders will cash out. Not everyone needs to be the next Bezos or Musk. Not everyone needs to see their company of 20 or 50 or 100 people grow to 5000 with international divisions set up before an eventual IPO. Not everyone wants to go through multiple rounds of VC funding and then have to run their company under the influence of the VC's people on the board. There are a lot of founders who would be very happy to take an eight figure payday after 10 or 20 years of working on the business and then have no need to work any longer if they don't want to and the freedom to do almost anything they want for the rest of their lives. I've personally known a few of them. Some did effectively retire. Others later started something new. But one thing I don't recall a single one of them ever expressing is regret over the timing of their exit.
If anything I'd say what is missing here is a culture where people feel the need to carry on past that stage in their startup's growth. And so instead of that successful business continuing - perhaps after some other form of exit for the founders - as a local company that might eventually become big enough to buy up other successful startups we instead see them get taken over by companies ultimately run from the USA because they're the ones with enough resources for an acquisition at that scale. Of course there have been a few that did become much bigger before an eventual exit - ARM is probably the most obvious one locally and for all the tragedies in the Autonomy story it was another - but they are the exception and not the rule here.
To come back to the car business we were originally discussing today - I doubt very much that we will build the next Tesla or BYD or even Polestar here in Cambridge - but I could easily imagine a startup here developing the next generation of car control system and then selling the IP to one of those companies as the exit strategy.
I'm not going to include Russia or Serbia or even Turkey, when talking about European statistics on entrepreneurship, because the EU is the overarching force that dictates widespread European policy. Talented entrepreneurs from Russia or the Balkans go to London or the US to set up shop anyways (my cofounders being an example).
The UK's business policy since Brexit has been largely dictated by factors outside its control, in the hallways of Washington DC and Brussels. The UK is no longer the forcing function on EU business policy that it was before - it's quite frankly the other way around now.
On founder culture and aspirations, it might be fair to say that the social welfare net provided by the EU countries is generous enough that it discourages entrepreneurship, compared to say the US or China or even India. I won't fault the social net ever, but the fact of the matter is that a growing economy is necessary to facilitate a growing social net. But EU policy has been drafted to strongly favor the incumbents over the startups, to favor the Goliaths over the Davids - even if David happens to be a middle market company trying to make its mark. It's also why EU companies in that position strongly favor American partners instead of European ones - Goliaths don't want to innovate, but they want new innovation regulated so that it doesn't hurt their bottom line.
Another factor is that 10 years since Brexit, the EU still hasn't created a viable enough exit alternative that could replace the London of the 2010s. While it's much easier for an American company to go public, EU policy does not make it easy. Which is why founders look at acquisitions or PE as a much more viable route to exit.
> I could easily imagine a startup here developing the next generation of car control system and then selling the IP to one of those companies as the exit strategy.
That's already happening across the EU, and herein is why it's very difficult to create homegrown champions. American companies and Chinese companies are encouraged to control the entire vertical chain, it being a matter of policy in the latter. EU companies have to resort to licensing agreements and a potential future acquisition.
Are either privacy breaches or remote attacks really still in any way theoretical dangers? There have been numerous demonstrations of vehicles or their occupants being monitored, disrupted, or stolen as a direct result of the modern remote/online tech they usually come with now. I know quite a few people - myself included - who are wary of buying any new car that has all this junk tech built in and prefer to stick with older models for now.
There's research demonstrating attacks or showing horrible vulns like Subaru's remote unlock, but I've never heard of someone's car actually getting stolen or tampered with by a criminal by hacking it over the internet. Normally it's more local methods like key fob spoofing. Maybe I missed a story.
That and for me in particular, my car isn't any more secure, it's a P71 so I was able to buy a spare key on eBay.
The arithmetic is a little different in every country because of local rates of pay and taxation but it's worth remembering that in most of the world except for the richer parts of the US developers do not get paid what those US developers have been making in recent years. There are a few exceptions but the norm is several times less even in major economies in Europe or Asia.
Another challenge for US tech companies is that - if you'll forgive the bluntness - their "brand" is now toxic in most of the world. Almost everyone is trying to distance themselves from US tech as fast as they can. Governments and big businesses are starting to invest seriously in alternative solutions and local resources. It will happen over time but I don't see much the US tech companies or the US government can do to stop the train now the wheels are turning.
So there's a serious risk for US tech companies now of a double whammy where their already relatively high R&D costs increase even further and yet they're also facing much stronger competition in international markets or maybe even excluded from some of those markets entirely.
If we also reach the seemingly inevitable point that "capable enough" LLMs can run locally - or at least as a private resource provided internally by large organisations - there is very little moat left to protect not only US Big Tech whose stocks have been heavily driven by expected returns from AI but the whole US tech industry that is banking on productivity gains from that AI tech. Then they also won't be able to capture most of the entire global supply of components like GPUs/RAM/SSDs because it won't be cost effective any more - and that is one of the few practical moats they have built (however accidentally) that would be a significant barrier to direct competitors setting up shop in places like Europe and Asia.
It's going to be interesting to see how US tech companies respond to these effects over the next 5-10 years. The giants are all aboard the AI train and can't back down now so there will probably be some casualties there if - as again seems inevitable - the bubble bursts at some point. But then there's a very long tail of still very successful US tech companies that might be paying US salaries and using AI-based tools but aren't themselves focussed on developing or providing those AI-based tools and they're the ones who are going to need to find new ways to compete effectively within that kind of time frame.
I'm very excited for a tech sector disconnected from silicon valley. We've forgotten that you can get a lot of scrappy stuff done in a shed for quite cheap when you're not trying to inflate hype bubbles constantly.
I often think the saddest part of all about the US VC culture is how many businesses that could have been successful by any normal standard - just making millions instead of billions - must have failed because they gave up a viable business model with real customers and modest but steady growth in their quest to become the next unicorn.
Whatever was really happening in that incident it seems clear that it was not a simple matter of having registered some domains with Cloudflare and then getting a shakedown for $100k+ because of that.
If anyone else chooses to read the post then I suggest skimming the comments (that are mostly hidden by default) as well.
The point isnt the apologists that pop up whereever CF gets mentioned, the point is that they more or less have a built reputation for deceptive loss leader marketing.
Maybe early/MVP product engineers should know better, but CFs own education materials do not teach you to expect that.
I have no financial or professional connection to Cloudflare as far as I know and that's partly because I'm not sure I like the way they operate and the level of control over everyone's access to the Web they now have. But if we're going to criticise then I think it should be on a reasonable and preferably objective basis. The claim I challenged appears to be the complete opposite of that unfortunately.
> Whatever was really happening in that incident it seems clear that
... CF for all their faults probably weren't the bad guy, when they discovered a "customer" absolutely taking the piss with capacity and doing incredibly sketchy things with domains to get around regulatory issues.
I have a courtesy hire car from a breakdown service at the moment with "unlimited mileage". I suspect they mean "unlimited mileage doing the sort of thing you do normally", and that "Unlimited, cool, I'm driving this thing from Scotland to Dagestan" would be met with opposition and a large invoice.
If you were in Scotland or Europe more generally, it'd be illegal for "unlimited mileage" to not actually be unlimited mileage.
If CF decides you're subject to an invisible limit which they won't even tell you and you have your domains at CF, they hold your domains hostage. Luckily, these guys had their domains somewhere else so they weren't hostage. Don't be the one who is.
Cloudflare didn't give them the option to quit hosting with CF and port their domains out. It held the domains hostage because the domains were registered through CF.
I feel like a lot of the AI advocacy today is like the Cloud advocacy of a few years ago or the Agile advocacy before that. It's this season's silver bullet to make us all 10x more effective according to metrics that somehow never translate into adding actually useful functionality and quality 10x as fast.
The evangelists told us 20 years ago that if we weren't doing TDD then we weren't really professional programmers at all. The evangelists told us 10 years ago that if we were still running stuff locally then we must be paying a fortune for IT admin or not spending our time on the work that mattered. The evangelists this week tell us that we need to be using agents to write all our code or we'll get left in the dust by our competitors who are.
I'm still waiting for my flying car. Would settle for some graphics software on Linux that matches the state of the art on Windows or even reliable high-quality video calls and online chat rooms that don't make continental drift look fast.
I don't think it's fair to call AWS a scam. It's complicated and powerful and it charges a lot for many services compared to a DIY approach. But you can see the prices transparently on its site, it provides a free tier to try most services out, it is fairly good about long term support for services and how it handles forced upgrades when they become necessary, and generally it has an OK reputation for customer support even if something unexpected and very bad happens. You're certainly paying a price for the convenience and the brand but I don't think that's a scam if you're making an informed choice. If you want to save money then you can replace RDS with Postgres running on VMs but the trade off is then you have to manage your database infrastructure yourself.
If memory serves, this was not kept on NHS hardware or even NHS controlled compute.
Does anyone have a verifiable source for that? It would be extremely controversial if true and even among the big civil liberties and privacy advocacy groups in the UK I have never seen anyone make that claim.
The defence to using Palantir by British government departments and public services has typically been that Palantir only provides the technology and the data itself is still held and processed in the UK under the native organisation's control. Even this is still controversial because of issues like the CLOUD Act and the general reputation of Palantir.
But that is a long way from allowing the mass export of sensitive personal data to a US firm without the data subjects' knowledge or consent. That looks just plain illegal under our existing data protection legislation. Green lighting it - even in the panic phase during COVID - would probably be controversial enough to end a few political careers at least. It might even leave enough of a cloud over the party in government at the time to affect a future election.
That argument doesn't really hold when the barriers of entry are so high. Believing that one of the biggest tech firms in the world is doing something undesirable and having a better idea that many people would in fact pay for is not the same as having the resources to become a unicorn with a huge global customer base that can practically implement that idea.
Plus, specifically for Microsoft, competing doesn't mean an alternative to Windows. It means an alternative to the entire enterprise stack, especially Office & M365.
Google hasn't enticed the big entrenched MS orgs to move over to Workspace, so if Google can't how can a smaller startup ever hope to accomplish that in the face of these behemoths that can just outlast them in a race to the bottom until they are insolvent or get bought by said behemoths?
Microsoft doesn't just sell an OS, or some services, they sell "IT in a box"
In the end this kind of thing always comes down to trust and choices. Microsoft has by its choices and actions lost the trust of many of its customers. Some of those customers did not have a viable alternative available and so had to accept whatever Microsoft was offering even if they didn't really like it. For those who have had viable alternatives some will have chosen them and presumably will continue to do so. With the shift towards using online services at work and the decreasing reliance on desktop applications more of Microsoft's customers are probably finding they do have viable alternatives.
Speaking only for my own small business in the UK we have never understood how it can be possible to comply with our legal and regulatory constraints on issues like privacy/confidentiality while using an operating system that is under the control of another company with a proven track record of forcing updates that are incompatible with those standards. Issues like pushing saving/uploading to OneDrive or the potential implications of Recall if they do push it out are very serious concerns if you're working with any kind of sensitive data.
For us the "last ever version" of Windows was Windows 7. We aren't confident that we could legally use Windows 10+ for a lot of our real work. We are too small to run the enterprise editions where they don't dare try to remove control from corporate IT departments in the way they have been forcing on everyone else. So apart from occasional testing for products where the users are likely to be running on Windows we exclusively use other platforms now. I don't see that ever changing back unless there is a root and branch reform of Microsoft starting with totally new senior leadership because it's no longer a technical decision or based on the capabilities of the products.
It is completely impossible to comply with European privacy law if you are using up-to-date Windows for your business.
The US CLOUD Act compels companies to provide access to data on machines they have the technical ability to access.
Starting in Windows 8, Microsoft granted itself the ability to pull locally-stored documents out of (non-onedrive) folders on all machines for "debugging" purposes.
Since then, EU courts overturned the Privacy Shield deal with the US because our laws are in direct contradiction with their privacy protections, so no, there isn't some backstop that lets Microsoft be the good actor if they get a bogus warrant.
If the EU could ban Windows, I'm sure they would have done so already.
Note that this policy began in the Windows 8 days, and didn't originally have the Microsoft 365 branding attached to it. Now that Windows 11 mandates login, they changed the wording.
I am still trying to work out what Teams is "setting up for me" when it takes several seconds from opening the bookmark in my browser to having a UI where I can read the chats. It's running on a PC that can render complex graphical scenes in real time but it takes half a minute to see "LGTM!". (Shaking head emoji goes here.)
Then again Teams is still barely an amateur compared to the incomprehensible slowness of Jira.
One of the main reasons Europe doesn't have a lot of big tech companies is that a lot of its most innovative and successful companies get bought out by the giants in the US before they reach that scale themselves. I expect this is going to happen less in the future because of the recent shifts in opinions though.
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