10 ms·

> Like it or not, the West generally is in a state of decline. Europe is in a state of decline. The US is doing fine. The difference between the US and Europe

by brwck 4y ago

> Like it or not, the West generally is in a state of decline. Europe is in a state of decline. The US is doing fine. The difference between the US and Europe is that we went up the value chain ( Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Nvidia, etc ). Europe did not. Consumer electronics is relatively low level tech. It was "gifted" to the japanese and then the koreans and eventually the chinese while we moved up the chain to the more valuable internet, social media and software development. Where is europe's microsoft? Their apple? Their facebook? Their google? There is no "the West". No more than there is "the East". Edit: Also, it isn't consumer electronics that's the issue. It's the future ( the next rung up the value chain ) - AI, big data, quantum computing, bio-tech, green energy tech, etc. Will europe even participate because currently it looks like it will be only the US and China competing.

rayrey 4y ago
Too strict of labor laws that stifle innovation
- dahwolf 4y ago
  Nonsense. Europe simply doesn't have venture capital. Neither do most countries and regions, hence they move to Silicon Valley.
  - p1esk 4y ago
    Why VCs don’t want to invest in European startups? Or are there no European startups to invest in?
    - manuelabeledo 4y ago
      There are. Most of them move to the US, though.
    - pjc50 4y ago
      The industry is a lot "closer" than people expect; it runs a lot more on handshakes and people going to the same parties than on cold numbers, so not only do startups have to be in the US they have to be specifically in SV. Two decades ago at a UK chip design software startup, the founders started a US branch and migrated there for just this reason. (The SVB bank run shows how strong the "being in the right whatsapp group message chat" is)
  - outside1234 4y ago
    It's not the whole story but it isn't nonsense. You literally can't restructure a company in Germany without doing a year long song and dance with the worker's council. This is not agile enough for a startup.
    - Pet_Ant 4y ago
      You don't have that problem in Canada, and you have many of the same advantages but you don't have nearly the amount of startups and definitely almost no big ones. It's really Winner-take-all market.
      - speed_spread 4y ago
        Yep, Canadian tech companies either get bought out by American firms or self-sabotage into oblivion (Blackberry, Nortel).
      - 908B64B197 4y ago
        The problem (and opportunity for US investors) is Canada has almost no VC, and the few they have are extremely risk averse. One one side they held back economic and social growth of ~1/3rd of the population for more than a century through systemic racism and discrimination. On the other side, the government has created little incentives for capital owners to take more risks thanks to policies that artificially propped up real estate (enormous immigration quotas, lax laws on foreign money entering the country, no market correction post 2007 crash). Why invest in hard to understand and uncertain tech when you can simply build luxury houses and sell them to wealthy foreigners?
        TMWNN 4y ago
        > The problem (and opportunity for US investors) is Canada has almost no VC, and the few they have are extremely risk averse. Based on all the stories we've heard over the past week from VCs and entrepreneurs about how SVB was the only bank willing to open accounts and extend credit to startups, I think many people underestimated that bank's importance in the Bay area economy. (I've also been startled by just how important SVB's UK, Canada, and even China branches seem to have been for their startups.) While SVB wasn't present in most other areas of the US, there is an extensive network of regional banks (of which SVB was one), so the odds that one is going to offer a no-revenue tech startup in Nashville or Phoenix or Worcester the financial help it needs to get started aren't bad. Now compare that to Canada, which has the Big Five national banks, tiny credit unions, and almost nothing else; apparently this makes borrowing money much, much more expensive than in the US. I hear that Australia is the same way.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  It's also the sheer amount of laws and regulations around opening and running a business that makes it really hard for small organizations to get started. There's a LOT of paperwork around the EU, and as soon as you want to sell to the neighboring countries it's a lot of additional paperwork, red tape and regulations (it's better than it was still). A founder from Europe explained the 4th person to join the company as the 2nd employee (their first hire was an engineer) was a non-technical person whose job was mostly to fill out grant application forms. There are hundreds of different grants for companies with a long list of criterions. For example, they could have the countries government (so the taxpayer) foot the bill for a fraction of an employee's salary if he or she was a refugee from certain target countries. Of course, the local government had a similar scheme with a completely different application process and slightly different criterions. None of the grants had anything to do with their tech or how viable the business was by the way.
- franczesko 4y ago
  How labor laws are connected with innovation and how they stifle it?
ajross 4y ago
> Where is europe's microsoft? Their apple? Their facebook? Their google? There is no "the West". No more than there is "the East". One place to start looking would be their local Apple, Meta and Google offices. This is true, in a sense. Big tech giants are headquartered in the USA because the USA made a bunch of choices that make it easy to start a tech company there. But as they grow, they become multinational giants. There is a *ton* of FAANG revenue moving into and through Europe in all directions. Europe is just fine. I mean, this is like asking why California fell so far behind Delaware in startup valuation. It's true, but not meaningful.
- some_random 4y ago
  They have offices in Europe to tap into the low cost talent in the area, nothing more.
  - sailfast 4y ago
    Or...perhaps a lot of very highly skilled engineers and researchers? London isn't where you set up shop for "low cost talent"
  - ajross 4y ago
    And why are their headquarters in silicon valley except to exploit the local talent pool? With the exception of actual manufacturing, every site decision in a tech company is about labor availability. So Europe gets value from tech in proportion to its concentration of talent, same as everyone else. Is Europe falling behind on tech talent? Clearly not. So it'll do just fine (where conversely the bay area is largely tapped out at this point, there's no place to put more talent even if it could find it).
    - mejutoco 4y ago
      An additional reason for the location could be that vcs/founders are located there. I have seen a similar pattern, where a company has an office in an unusual place because one of the founders lives there, and does not want to relocate.
sohtym 4y ago
The FAANG companies are 25 years old at this point, they aren't that relevant to today's situation. Europe has had many large companies going, but most got acquired by their US competitors. In part because they could use offshore assets and also avoid taxes once acquired. But that is also only partly relevant, because the same is true of the US. If the US is doing so well by that metric where are the next US FAANG companies? The reality is that neither Europe nor the US moved up the value chain but sideways to primarily offer services. That isn't because of manufacturing. Many think so because they don't know much about manufacturing. It is because of the cost of living. Western economies can't support a knowledge based ecosystem. I can have things made in Europe, or China. It doesn't matter. Where can I go and develop a product for years, or work my way up in a product company, or eventually hire a hundred people to do it, all without suffering? The answer is nowhere because the market is dominated by service focused companies that require less start time and have a less variable success rate. In China, its almost in every decent city.
- ikekkdcjkfke 4y ago
  Nokia, Ericson, cars, oil sector ++ dont worry
  - marvel_boy 4y ago
    Ericsson (with two 's'): just a integrator of third party equipment, European cars: they will not outlive the EV paradigm. Yes, Europe is dying.
    - riffraff 4y ago
      > European cars: they will not outlive the EV paradigm and yet WV sold >800k electric vehicles in 2022, Stellantis sold >500k and BMW sold >400k.
      - bobthepanda 4y ago
        Yeah, that’s an odd take. I would probably peg Japan as most likely to be left behind by EV, to the point where Toyota is spreading FUD in Japan about EVs being a dead-end in favor of hydrogen fuel cell cars.
scriptproof 4y ago
Maybe you bury europe before it dies. There are sectors still successful: - Airbus. - Space. - Nuclear. - Trains. - Startups. - Lithography. - etc...
oezi 4y ago
This is just strange thinking to equate decline with some sort of technological leadership. Counterpoints: - The US is still at a trade deficit with Europe despite the strength in dominating Internet technologies. - US society is much more polarized than Europe both in economic equality and political affiliation. - Europe has some tech unicorns. Some like Spotify or Arm might ring a bell. But then again does it really matter where something is incorporated? Financial markets are very globalized anyway. So a European citizen can buy Apple stock and profit in the same way as an American one. Some holds the other way. The German car makers raking in billions each year are owned by international investors all over. Last on Greentech: there are players such as Vestas and Siemens very much involved in renewables.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Depends how you define "Europe." I look at a lot of articles from The Guardian and I'd say the UK seems to be in full on disaster mode, whether it is the government trying to criminalize dissent because everyone from labor unions to schoolchildren to right wing anti-immigrant folks are protesting. Inflation is really out of control, fresh veggies are missing from the supermarket, the "small boats" situation makes any concern people have about the border in the US seem like nothing.
  - lazyeye 4y ago
    "I look at a lot of articles from The Guardian and..." "I watch a lot of Fox news and.."
  - _n_b_ 4y ago
    The Guardian comes with a certain bias for disaster-mongering, especially (but not exclusively) at the expense of Tories; all of those things are real problems, but take it with a grain or two of salt. Source: I live in the UK and still eat fresh veggies.
    - hilbert42 4y ago
      "The Guardian comes with a certain bias for disaster-mongering" Perhaps so. But from my perspective of Australia the UK looks as if it's on the slide (I'm not smug when saying that as I reckon things here aren't much better, we've always been a mob of ostriches). My family/cultural heritage is mostly UK so I have no pleasure in watching the decline. I've also relatives in the US and France and I've lived and worked in both Europe including the UK and the US so I view what's happening from a broad Western perspective and I'm very gloomy about what I see. It's too complicated to give a quick summary of the problems but if forced to do so in a sentence then I'd say it's cultural. The West is being driven apart by widening ideological views, there's less cohesion, fewer common values and aspirations now than there once was. On the other hand, the exact opposite is happening in Asia, people there know their time has come and that confidence and optimism drives cohesion and common values. BTW, I've also worked in Asia for a short while so I've some feeling for what's happening there.
barrkel 4y ago
Europe moved further up the value chain into luxury products ;)
sschueller 4y ago
All of these things require microchips and without ASML they wouldn't exist. I don't agree that Europe is on the decline. They are just in a different industry than the US.
- lttlrck 4y ago
  They would exist, they just wouldn't be as small/power efficient. Also, "necessity is the mother of invention".
- hilbert42 4y ago
  I worry about ASML. It's interesting that ASML is mentioned here when talking about an ailing Philips as it's a spinoff of the latter. My concern is that in the European environment it stands alone—it stands out amongst European manufacturers like a pimple. It's IP is already under attack from China and the chances of it hanging out indefinately over the long-term I reckon are pretty slim (but I truly hope I'm wrong). The trouble is that being the only standout in its environment (Europe) it becomes fair game, especially so when the cultural ethos isn't strong or is missing (NL and other European governments/EU should be doing more to protect it). Also, ASML isn't helping itself by objecting about being blocked from selling to China, short-term gain will likely be its long-term loss. To survive long-term, ASML needs to be amongst other like firms in a culturally similar environment and that's not the current situation.
duped 4y ago
Electronics (consumer or otherwise) isn't "low level tech." This isn't a game where there's a definitive tech tree. Electronics design and manufacturing is not a solved problem and innovation is getting wild these days (esp in consumer devices, like wearables, XR, IOT, etc). Something to keep in mind is that consumer electronics are at the leaves of the industrial tree - AI, big data, energy, quantum computing, etc - those are branches.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by brwck 4y ago

rayrey 4y ago

Too strict of labor laws that stifle innovation

dahwolf 4y ago
Nonsense. Europe simply doesn't have venture capital. Neither do most countries and regions, hence they move to Silicon Valley.
- p1esk 4y ago
  Why VCs don’t want to invest in European startups? Or are there no European startups to invest in?
  - manuelabeledo 4y ago
    There are. Most of them move to the US, though.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    The industry is a lot "closer" than people expect; it runs a lot more on handshakes and people going to the same parties than on cold numbers, so not only do startups have to be in the US they have to be specifically in SV. Two decades ago at a UK chip design software startup, the founders started a US branch and migrated there for just this reason. (The SVB bank run shows how strong the "being in the right whatsapp group message chat" is)
- outside1234 4y ago
  It's not the whole story but it isn't nonsense. You literally can't restructure a company in Germany without doing a year long song and dance with the worker's council. This is not agile enough for a startup.
  - Pet_Ant 4y ago
    You don't have that problem in Canada, and you have many of the same advantages but you don't have nearly the amount of startups and definitely almost no big ones. It's really Winner-take-all market.
    - speed_spread 4y ago
      Yep, Canadian tech companies either get bought out by American firms or self-sabotage into oblivion (Blackberry, Nortel).
    - 908B64B197 4y ago
      The problem (and opportunity for US investors) is Canada has almost no VC, and the few they have are extremely risk averse. One one side they held back economic and social growth of ~1/3rd of the population for more than a century through systemic racism and discrimination. On the other side, the government has created little incentives for capital owners to take more risks thanks to policies that artificially propped up real estate (enormous immigration quotas, lax laws on foreign money entering the country, no market correction post 2007 crash). Why invest in hard to understand and uncertain tech when you can simply build luxury houses and sell them to wealthy foreigners?
      - TMWNN 4y ago
        > The problem (and opportunity for US investors) is Canada has almost no VC, and the few they have are extremely risk averse. Based on all the stories we've heard over the past week from VCs and entrepreneurs about how SVB was the only bank willing to open accounts and extend credit to startups, I think many people underestimated that bank's importance in the Bay area economy. (I've also been startled by just how important SVB's UK, Canada, and even China branches seem to have been for their startups.) While SVB wasn't present in most other areas of the US, there is an extensive network of regional banks (of which SVB was one), so the odds that one is going to offer a no-revenue tech startup in Nashville or Phoenix or Worcester the financial help it needs to get started aren't bad. Now compare that to Canada, which has the Big Five national banks, tiny credit unions, and almost nothing else; apparently this makes borrowing money much, much more expensive than in the US. I hear that Australia is the same way.
908B64B197 4y ago
It's also the sheer amount of laws and regulations around opening and running a business that makes it really hard for small organizations to get started. There's a LOT of paperwork around the EU, and as soon as you want to sell to the neighboring countries it's a lot of additional paperwork, red tape and regulations (it's better than it was still). A founder from Europe explained the 4th person to join the company as the 2nd employee (their first hire was an engineer) was a non-technical person whose job was mostly to fill out grant application forms. There are hundreds of different grants for companies with a long list of criterions. For example, they could have the countries government (so the taxpayer) foot the bill for a fraction of an employee's salary if he or she was a refugee from certain target countries. Of course, the local government had a similar scheme with a completely different application process and slightly different criterions. None of the grants had anything to do with their tech or how viable the business was by the way.
franczesko 4y ago
How labor laws are connected with innovation and how they stifle it?

ajross 4y ago

> Where is europe's microsoft? Their apple? Their facebook? Their google? There is no "the West". No more than there is "the East". One place to start looking would be their local Apple, Meta and Google offices. This is true, in a sense. Big tech giants are headquartered in the USA because the USA made a bunch of choices that make it easy to start a tech company there. But as they grow, they become multinational giants. There is a *ton* of FAANG revenue moving into and through Europe in all directions. Europe is just fine. I mean, this is like asking why California fell so far behind Delaware in startup valuation. It's true, but not meaningful.

some_random 4y ago
They have offices in Europe to tap into the low cost talent in the area, nothing more.
- sailfast 4y ago
  Or...perhaps a lot of very highly skilled engineers and researchers? London isn't where you set up shop for "low cost talent"
- ajross 4y ago
  And why are their headquarters in silicon valley except to exploit the local talent pool? With the exception of actual manufacturing, every site decision in a tech company is about labor availability. So Europe gets value from tech in proportion to its concentration of talent, same as everyone else. Is Europe falling behind on tech talent? Clearly not. So it'll do just fine (where conversely the bay area is largely tapped out at this point, there's no place to put more talent even if it could find it).
  - mejutoco 4y ago
    An additional reason for the location could be that vcs/founders are located there. I have seen a similar pattern, where a company has an office in an unusual place because one of the founders lives there, and does not want to relocate.

sohtym 4y ago

The FAANG companies are 25 years old at this point, they aren't that relevant to today's situation. Europe has had many large companies going, but most got acquired by their US competitors. In part because they could use offshore assets and also avoid taxes once acquired. But that is also only partly relevant, because the same is true of the US. If the US is doing so well by that metric where are the next US FAANG companies? The reality is that neither Europe nor the US moved up the value chain but sideways to primarily offer services. That isn't because of manufacturing. Many think so because they don't know much about manufacturing. It is because of the cost of living. Western economies can't support a knowledge based ecosystem. I can have things made in Europe, or China. It doesn't matter. Where can I go and develop a product for years, or work my way up in a product company, or eventually hire a hundred people to do it, all without suffering? The answer is nowhere because the market is dominated by service focused companies that require less start time and have a less variable success rate. In China, its almost in every decent city.

ikekkdcjkfke 4y ago
Nokia, Ericson, cars, oil sector ++ dont worry
- marvel_boy 4y ago
  Ericsson (with two 's'): just a integrator of third party equipment, European cars: they will not outlive the EV paradigm. Yes, Europe is dying.
  - riffraff 4y ago
    > European cars: they will not outlive the EV paradigm and yet WV sold >800k electric vehicles in 2022, Stellantis sold >500k and BMW sold >400k.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      Yeah, that’s an odd take. I would probably peg Japan as most likely to be left behind by EV, to the point where Toyota is spreading FUD in Japan about EVs being a dead-end in favor of hydrogen fuel cell cars.

scriptproof 4y ago

Maybe you bury europe before it dies. There are sectors still successful: - Airbus. - Space. - Nuclear. - Trains. - Startups. - Lithography. - etc...

oezi 4y ago

This is just strange thinking to equate decline with some sort of technological leadership. Counterpoints: - The US is still at a trade deficit with Europe despite the strength in dominating Internet technologies. - US society is much more polarized than Europe both in economic equality and political affiliation. - Europe has some tech unicorns. Some like Spotify or Arm might ring a bell. But then again does it really matter where something is incorporated? Financial markets are very globalized anyway. So a European citizen can buy Apple stock and profit in the same way as an American one. Some holds the other way. The German car makers raking in billions each year are owned by international investors all over. Last on Greentech: there are players such as Vestas and Siemens very much involved in renewables.

PaulHoule 4y ago
Depends how you define "Europe." I look at a lot of articles from The Guardian and I'd say the UK seems to be in full on disaster mode, whether it is the government trying to criminalize dissent because everyone from labor unions to schoolchildren to right wing anti-immigrant folks are protesting. Inflation is really out of control, fresh veggies are missing from the supermarket, the "small boats" situation makes any concern people have about the border in the US seem like nothing.
- lazyeye 4y ago
  "I look at a lot of articles from The Guardian and..." "I watch a lot of Fox news and.."
- _n_b_ 4y ago
  The Guardian comes with a certain bias for disaster-mongering, especially (but not exclusively) at the expense of Tories; all of those things are real problems, but take it with a grain or two of salt. Source: I live in the UK and still eat fresh veggies.
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    "The Guardian comes with a certain bias for disaster-mongering" Perhaps so. But from my perspective of Australia the UK looks as if it's on the slide (I'm not smug when saying that as I reckon things here aren't much better, we've always been a mob of ostriches). My family/cultural heritage is mostly UK so I have no pleasure in watching the decline. I've also relatives in the US and France and I've lived and worked in both Europe including the UK and the US so I view what's happening from a broad Western perspective and I'm very gloomy about what I see. It's too complicated to give a quick summary of the problems but if forced to do so in a sentence then I'd say it's cultural. The West is being driven apart by widening ideological views, there's less cohesion, fewer common values and aspirations now than there once was. On the other hand, the exact opposite is happening in Asia, people there know their time has come and that confidence and optimism drives cohesion and common values. BTW, I've also worked in Asia for a short while so I've some feeling for what's happening there.

barrkel 4y ago

Europe moved further up the value chain into luxury products ;)

sschueller 4y ago

All of these things require microchips and without ASML they wouldn't exist. I don't agree that Europe is on the decline. They are just in a different industry than the US.

lttlrck 4y ago
They would exist, they just wouldn't be as small/power efficient. Also, "necessity is the mother of invention".
hilbert42 4y ago
I worry about ASML. It's interesting that ASML is mentioned here when talking about an ailing Philips as it's a spinoff of the latter. My concern is that in the European environment it stands alone—it stands out amongst European manufacturers like a pimple. It's IP is already under attack from China and the chances of it hanging out indefinately over the long-term I reckon are pretty slim (but I truly hope I'm wrong). The trouble is that being the only standout in its environment (Europe) it becomes fair game, especially so when the cultural ethos isn't strong or is missing (NL and other European governments/EU should be doing more to protect it). Also, ASML isn't helping itself by objecting about being blocked from selling to China, short-term gain will likely be its long-term loss. To survive long-term, ASML needs to be amongst other like firms in a culturally similar environment and that's not the current situation.

duped 4y ago

Electronics (consumer or otherwise) isn't "low level tech." This isn't a game where there's a definitive tech tree. Electronics design and manufacturing is not a solved problem and innovation is getting wild these days (esp in consumer devices, like wearables, XR, IOT, etc). Something to keep in mind is that consumer electronics are at the leaves of the industrial tree - AI, big data, energy, quantum computing, etc - those are branches.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]