Things can change. Easy to forget that Alan Turing and a certain German called Konrad Zuse both get credit for having invented the modern computer. Generally, people seem to like to give that honor to Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse does not get a lot of love. Not that it matters either way; but this is a country that co-created modern computing. Pre and post-war Germany featured a lot of rapid change and technical innovation.
I'm based in Germany and I share the sentiment that things have been a bit backwards here in terms of a widespread reluctance to let go of paper based administration. This was awkward 14 years ago when I moved here and at this point it's just beyond pathetic. But things are changing. Germans are well aware that people outside of Germany are noticing how far behind they are and are shaking their heads at those silly naive German paper fetishists. So, there's a lot of domestic pressure to actually start fixing this. The covid crisis in the last few years forced a lot of Germans to do things with their phone that until then were completely unheard off in this country. Like paying for stuff or proving that they didn't have covid. That used to be a thing where paper and rubber stamps were the only acceptable solution.
So, I look at this as something that can change quite rapidly after not having changed much at all for decades. The will and money are there and Germans are starting to remember that they can actually get some stuff done when they put their mind to it. We're also seeing this with the current energy crisis. That crisis has unlocked budgets all over the public sector. And "digitalization" (as it is referred to here) is part of those budgets. Germans love efficiency and people have been pointing out that they haven't been very efficient. Which is embarrassing and annoying. So, they are fixing it now. There are now countless of bureaucrats tasked with actually showing some results for the inflated budgets they've been given. We're talking hundreds of billions of euros here. It's not all going to be spend wisely but some of it will yield results.
>Easy to forget that Alan Turing and a certain German called Konrad Zuse both get credit for having invented the modern computer.
Nobody forgot that, just that past successes are in no way indication of future successes.
Otherwise SV would have been in Germany/UK instead of California. But that hasn't happened.
Same how in the late '80s to early '90s everyone was saying that Japan's tech sector and economy would completely overtake the US's and yet that hasn't happened but the reverse happened. From then on US tech sector steamrolled everything. Will that last? Maybe, maybe not.
I'm based in Germany and I share the sentiment that things have been a bit backwards here in terms of a widespread reluctance to let go of paper based administration. This was awkward 14 years ago when I moved here and at this point it's just beyond pathetic. But things are changing. Germans are well aware that people outside of Germany are noticing how far behind they are and are shaking their heads at those silly naive German paper fetishists. So, there's a lot of domestic pressure to actually start fixing this. The covid crisis in the last few years forced a lot of Germans to do things with their phone that until then were completely unheard off in this country. Like paying for stuff or proving that they didn't have covid. That used to be a thing where paper and rubber stamps were the only acceptable solution.
So, I look at this as something that can change quite rapidly after not having changed much at all for decades. The will and money are there and Germans are starting to remember that they can actually get some stuff done when they put their mind to it. We're also seeing this with the current energy crisis. That crisis has unlocked budgets all over the public sector. And "digitalization" (as it is referred to here) is part of those budgets. Germans love efficiency and people have been pointing out that they haven't been very efficient. Which is embarrassing and annoying. So, they are fixing it now. There are now countless of bureaucrats tasked with actually showing some results for the inflated budgets they've been given. We're talking hundreds of billions of euros here. It's not all going to be spend wisely but some of it will yield results.