This boggles my mind. Why doesn't Europe look at the US tech companies and think 'huh I wonder why they can build those things and we can't... I wonder what the difference is...'
We can build those things in Europe, we have the know-how, what we lack is that glorious risk friendly VC funding and the huge, homogeneous consumer friendly market the US is, crucial for rapid product scaling/expansion.
The EU market is super fragmented due to differences in language, culture, income and regulations so it would be nearly impossible to successfully scale a service made for Swedish consumers to the Italians for example. As another example, the Norwegians only pay with card while the Austrians only pay in cash.
That's why almost every EU country/region has it's own local website for jobs, classifieds, real estate, etc. All this fragmentation coupled with the lack of risk friendly VC funding means there's no chance for big players the size of FAANG to rise up from Europe.
When ambitions software companies from Europe have a good idea and want to grow fast, they just launch directly in the US market, ignoring the EU for the beginning. It's simply a much easier and profitable market.
> When ambitions software companies from Europe have a good idea and want to grow fast, ...
Aral Balkan made a compelling argument at the EU parliament:
"You are acting as an unpaid Research and Development department for silicon valley. Because if a startup here succeeds, it gets bought by Google or Facebook. If it fails, we pick up the bill."
> When ambitions software companies from Europe have a good idea and want to grow fast, they just launch directly in the US market, ignoring the EU for the beginning.
Another variant I've observed is launching in the EU first, hiring locally at low cost but also having low profits. Then once the idea is validated, the move to US (sometimes literally moving the company headquarters) seems obvious.
Do digital products released in the EU have to support European languages? Or is the typical citizen's English not good enough for that to work? It seems like there's a lot of money being left on the table by not confronting the language hurdle.
It's not just language, it's how connected the social graph is. The centre of gravity for each country is within that country. If you want something to spread with virality, you need to start fires in each country separately; and even then it may end up with the stigma of being "that X thing" where X is some other country.
Booking.com did it very well, but of course the audience for that is intrinsically mobile and cross-border.
