I don’t think it’s that Europeans don’t want to work weekends. If that were the case you would see South Korea and Japan run circles around silicon valley.
In Germany at least it’s conservatism and a failure of imagination.
The average German Engineering student doesn’t dream of flying to Mars, he dreams of buying an expensive BMW.
>The average German Engineering student doesn’t dream of flying to Mars
The German economy doesn't run on individuals going to Mars, it runs on process innovation, optimisation, and decentralised development between research facilities, a good university system, and companies.
On average the German worker productivity is very high. That's a measure of good allocation of resources, not software unicorns or Mars rockets. If German engineers would just be dreaming about holidays and luxury watches that wouldn't be the case.
If you look at the increase in total factor productivity (comparing how much aggregate outputs you get out of aggregate inputs, basically measuring technological efficiency), the last decade has been anaemic. SV venture capital software culture is good at capturing markets and shifting economic rent from markets towards centralised platforms, it's not driving innovation and we don't really need to emulate it.
> it's not driving innovation and we don't really need to emulate it.
Then don't emulate it and the US will continue to own nearly everything in tech that isn't inside of China.
I've been reading sentiment like that out of Europe for over two decades now, with predictable results that just keep going around in a circle and getting the Europeans nowhere.
SV and the US tech industry are great at creating markets as well, which you entirely ignore. What did the global cloud services market look like before AWS built it (even Alibaba's cloud offering is a mere intentional clone of AWS)? In terms of sales it barely existed. Every major tech market has been established by SV money and US tech companies, not European companies.
There's no evidence that Europe has been more innovative with their approach. It's quite the opposite given the vast majority of major technologies have come out of the US dating back to the 1950s. Europe's contributions pale by comparison, and that's why their companies pale by comparison.
Even ARM - one of Europe's few innovators in tech - had to be started by two US companies, with one of the partner companies being European. It's only fitting the US own that company again considering.
The leader in AI and quantum computing is the US, with China a close second, and Europe a distant third. And if you narrow that down to the EU, it's even worse now that Britain has left.
And when it comes to scaling, you get things like vast numbers of lucrative jobs, high paying engineering salaries from creating global giants. You get an immense virtuous cycle from it, including for seed funding start-ups and larger VC activities. Microsoft will grow its revenue more in the next two years than the total size of SAP (which is Europe's largest softare company and most valuable tech company). The revenue gap between them used to be more like 3 to 1 (circa 2001), now it's over 5 to 1 and persistently expanding.
AWS is on its way to being an $80-$100 billion sales global juggernaut, while SAP runs in slow motion. There's no reason Europe couldn't have done that, in theory; in practice, it has been two decades and Europe hasn't been able to do it.
"Innovation" is a gloriously worthless word (you can tell because Bill Gates was so very fond of throwing it around while he was at Microsoft, it's a dodge word). If something can't be supported with actual results, people jump to proclaiming things about innovation or the lack of it.
Besides, where is the supposed innovation in Europe's tech scene over the last four or five decades? What innovation? Where are the hundreds of amazing, innovative, successful European tech companies that are supposed to stand as a counter to Silicon Valley & Co.? They don't exist. Europeans will claim that's because they're all being acquired by richer US tech companies, which is false; that certainly happens occasionally, and it's happening at a small scale, because there aren't very many of those companies to purchase.
>Besides, where is the supposed innovation in Europe's tech scene over the last four or five decades? What innovation? Where are the hundreds of amazing, innovative, successful European tech companies that are supposed to stand as a counter to Silicon Valley & Co.? They don't exist
Virtually every industrial machine on this planet has made something in it build in Europe. France builds high speed rail at a third of the cost of the US. Europe has countless of pharmaceutical giants.
Again, I put it simply. The per capita income and productivity in Western Europe is roughly as high, maybe 10% lower than in the US. If Europe had 'no tech', how is Europe rich?
You have a myopic view of technology that excludes the majority of the economy, which is everything outside the world of bits as Thiel puts it, which constitutes 90% of the actual national GDP, including in the US by the way.
'AI' or 'Quantum computing' isn't some sort of economic super weapon. The German economy is 4 trillion dollars large, what is the market for quantum computing, or even 'AI'? By the way we have heard this accusation for decades. In the 70s and 80s we were accused of living in the industrial stone-age, while Britain becomes rich on being a leader in the sector of the future, finance. Where is Britain now? At a national productivity level 30% below France and Germany, turns out in the long-run finance wasn't as hip as people thought, particularly not for anyone living outside of the city of London.
I'll start to get worried about lacking in tech when software is delivering historical economic growth, rather than becoming a tool for social engineering and reshuffling money from the bottom 80% to the top 20%.
That's not to say by the way that there's not genuinely innovative aspects to software, cloud computing actually is something that Europe could catch up on if only for security and geopolitical reasons but the overwhelming majority of software giants in the US contributes nothing to innovation. Facebook and Twitter destroy democracies and heat the planet up with datacenters, nothing more. If there was a word for de-innovation, that's what I'd label those companies.
> At a national productivity level 30% below France and Germany
Where you got that number? UK has higher GDP per capita than France and it's lower than Germany but not by 30%. Also the UK is just coming out of a messy divorce. I'll give it 5-10 years to figure stuff out.
>Where you got that number? UK has higher GDP per capita than France and it's lower than Germany but not by 30%.
because you're not looking at output per hour worked. The Brits work about ~1670 hours per year. The French about ~1470, and the Germans ~1360. If you look at the output per hour, The UK comes in below Euro average, roughly on a level with Italy and Spain.
Flying people to Mars is a bit silly, as was flying people to the Moon. Yes, it can be done with insane amounts of money but to what end? It'd not like Mars will be colonised anytime soon or that anyone would like to live there. We haven't colonised Antarctica. The Russians were more pragmatic with robotic exploration.
Expensive BMWs are equally silly. The company generally produces nice vehicles, but they also make hideous atrocities like the X4 and X6. What's worse is that Daimler followed suit and that every car company is producing SUVs now, that aren't any good off road and have lots of aerodynamic drag on road.
German Engineering students work on interesting projects like swarm drones playing team games. I suspect these are quite obviously projects with military applications or space exploration.
In Germany at least it’s conservatism and a failure of imagination.
The average German Engineering student doesn’t dream of flying to Mars, he dreams of buying an expensive BMW.