As a "European" from The Netherlands, I feel I need to say something about the inflammatory title of this article. Europe does not "suck" at technological innovation, there is simply no such thing as "Europe" at this scale. Like the article says: Europe is still 27 very different markets.<p>As a US consumer, you are used to a being part of a massive and hugely uniform market that also happens to speak the language of international business. As such, nearly every successful innovation company will try to enter that market.<p>Don't be fooled, however, into thinking that everything you use is American, simply because it is in English. I am sure most would not think of Distimo, eBuddy, MobyPicture and Skylines as European, yet they are all from the tiny country of The Netherlands.
And Europe does not just sprout small tech startups either. TomTom (NL), Siemens (DE) and Philips (NL) are all huge players in their fields.<p>Yes, making a lot of money with innovation is easier in the American market and the conditions for founding a startup are still best in The Valley, but saying that innovation in Europe sucks really makes no sense. Perhaps most the innovation is of a different nature and scale, but it is certainly there. It is a shame that this article does not attempt to uncover these things, but instead tries to score some cheap points with one liners.<p>P.S. Did you know Python and Vim are both Dutch as well?<p>P.P.S. Did you know that most European countries hardly produce any wine? Europe is more than France, Spain and Italy.
The article isn't based on any sort of objective measurement, so we can't say objectively that europe has less technological innovation, only subjectively.<p>I live in Belgium, and in my opinion I've had plenty of opportunity to do interesting innovative work. 6 years ago I wrote an SVG renderer in actionscript, on top of a DXF-to-SVG convertor in PHP. 5 years ago I wrote my own rich web grid component, backed by a metaquery system that allows users to point-and-click together arbitrary filters. 3 years ago I switched to a web app architecture of javascript components over JSON-RPC services.<p>IMHO, that was interesting and innovative work, but you've never heard of the product it went into (myMCS), because the company I work for focuses on the european market and has decided to do that without seeking external financing. That's typical of european tech companies. They operate on a local market, and they take on less risk so they don't grow as aggressively. That doesn't mean there's less innovation, just that it's less visible.
Europe is great at technological innovation.<p>Why do Americans make more money in software?<p>* Pure inertia from the early cowboy days of Silicon Valley, which gave us great universities and lots of private investment capital looking for <i>returns</i>. (Contrast with academic grants.)<p>* A more straight-forward focus on technology-for-moneys-sake (really anything-for-moneys-sake) and marketing<p>* The U.S. development culture, to Dijkstra's eternal chagrin, is much more "Worse Is Better" so we tend to ship early, often and win the market, even though our stuff kind of sucks.
While the US has brought the world many great technological innovations, "Europe" on the whole doesn't suck at it. And Europe is not France, it's a continent with many different countries.<p>If we are talking about the internet, these things were made by Europeans: The World Wide Web, Skype, C++, PHP, MySQL, Rails. Just to name a few things.<p>The car industry is also pretty high tech and the European car companies are doing well while the government run car companies of the US suck. A few of the many car related innovations from Europe: the car itself, ABS, Electronic Stability Control.
I'd rather have my car powered by a German engine (well, it's manufactured in "lazy" Spain by a German company, but it's European all the same). It consumes way less gasoline compared to US cars, and it's also a lot more reliable.<p>Some of you could say that reliable, low-consuming car engines do not count as "technological innovation", that we should give more praise to technological "innovators" like Facebook and Zynga. Then again, having FB or FarmVille down doesn't cause any wars, while being able to drive cars that consume less gasoline might avoid a war or two.
It just isn't true. Europe just does not "suck" at tech innovation. Some europeans move to the US to have a bigger impact, and/or because that's where tech money is.<p>The US evolved a giant media+capital machine to make this happen, and this means making it hard for others to do the same - by being more attractive, in real terms of course, but maybe even more so in people's minds. I see articles criticizing other regions of the world for not having as much success as part of this (very natural, imho) process.
An interesting data point. Look at the top 5 languages in the TIOBE index. Of them C++, C# and PHP were all created by Europeans. (In fact all 3 are Danes by birth.) To the best of my knowledge their founders live in Texas, Washington and California respectively.<p>This is not a small problem for Europe.
The title of the article is misleading. Yearly revenues do not necessarily mean technological innovation. There is plenty of innovation in Europe (and a lot of it gets sold to US companies who get to increase their annual revenues with it).
ARM Holdings was the first company that popped into my head when I read the headline. Without ARM there would be no Facebook/Twitter because inexpensive mobile computing probably wouldn't have been invented yet.
Small markets doesn't seem to explain it. Germany alone has the world's fourth-largest GDP, which sounds like a pie worth slicing. Despite this, Russia, whose GDP is less than half as large, has a bigger (iirc) tech industry than Germany. I think the latter explanation -- market restrictions -- is more likely, and research spending probably contributes as well.
Also Europe isn't causing massive bubbles every other year that throw half of the world into a depression. Just wondering if this is related, not trying to start a flame-war or whatever.
European Innovation Scoreboard: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Innovation_Scoreboard" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Innovation_Scoreboard</a><p>It show the gap is getting smaller with US innovations.
But the article is stupid. They do not suck at innovation.
<i>Why is Europe so bad at technology development? Heterogeneity, among other things.</i><p>Hang on a second... so Europe's technical founders are disadvantaged by being able to serve particular niches?<p>I get that being able to sell to hundreds of millions of people gives you a great market by numbers. What I don't understand is why targeting by culture, language etc., is viewed disfavourably.
Surprised that `ctrl-F incent` yields no results in the article or the comments. Sounds like a simple matter of incentivization to me. When you live in a relatively socialist country that puts discouraging penalties on rewards, why take a risk?
I think it's a cultural thing. Americans (and American immigrants) are risk takers. So even if you are Danish, French or Egyptian by virtue of immigrating to a new home, you have exhibited a high level of risk taking behavior. It is only natural that this behavior turns into more entrepreneurial and innovative ideas.<p>But I have to agree with other commenters that regulations and laws play a huge part. Americans are definitely better at that. So, you might have all sort of labor protection, multi-week vacations, free healthcare and benefits in Europe, these laws are usually a burden on small businesses (where most innovation takes place).