Comment by jmfldn

4 years ago

Why does the US dominate digital products?

1. Enormous internal market

2. Extremely wealthy

3. Well-developed capital markets for investment

So it's an enormous, wealthy country where there is lots of investment. Obviously there are other factors but these seem blindingly obvious as starting points.

I find the UK's inability to compete with the US web giants depressing. I don't like the idea of relying on a few American companies for search, cloud infra and so on. I'd love to see us build a British Google for example. I don't like the guy at all, but I agree with Dominic Cummings that we should focus our efforts on something like this.

I'm not arguing for web service nationalism but, for economic and security reasons, way more nation states should be looking to encourage the building of their own web backbone companies. It would also be good for general Internet resiliency to not have so few companies and single points of failure.

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jmfldn

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wiether  4 years ago

> I'd love to see us build a British Google for example.

Here in France we have (had ?) Qwant[1] that never really worked because at first it was about having a search engine at the level of Google, then being user privacy focused (like DDG), then being focused on kids, then on music, then...

But from the beginning it was failing because they were just providing a proxy for Bing's results. They were not even providing a sanitized version of those results. It was Bing's results with a different UI. And then, because they needed money, they focused on some topics (like the kids, which provided them public money) or music (income from partners companies). Also there was a lot of political/bureaucratic crap involved within the direction.

So it looks like the issue is that it was people with money that said "we are going to be the French Google". But they hadn't enough money to do so and being "the French Google" is not enough.

If we look at DDG, first it was a bad search engine but they focused on their promise about user privacy. And then they improved their search engine from there. Now they are a credible alternative to Google because they have something that Google don't, while on the core feature (search engine) they are almost the same. If you want to compete, you have to offer something different while providing the same core features.

I think ProtonMail (Switzerland) is a good example. At the moment they don't provide a webmail as good as Gmail, but they provide great email service while focusing on user privacy. They are trying to compete against Google on email like DDG dig on search engine. And that's why it's more and more popular.

So there's probably a mindset issue : don't compete for the sake of competing. Offer something different and then try to reach the competitors level on the core feature. You can't beat a multi-billion giant at its own game.

[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant

  • _Wintermute  4 years ago

    Qwant seems like its entire purpose is to siphon money from the French government by tapping into their anti-US tech hysteria.

Hakashiro  4 years ago

I just recently saw someone posting on LinkedIn that 500k for a Senior Engineer role was too low.

Half a fucking million.

All good European engineers are leaving to USA. And I would too.

  • bitcharmer  4 years ago

    I will take my 250k in London vs 450k in New York any time.

    USA is just a third world country with a Gucci belt. My family's value system is completely incompatible with how America operates and what drives people and organisations.

    I have many senior dev friends who think the same.

  • jmfldn  4 years ago

    I guess this is a Silicon Valley megacorp right? Who could afford those wages?! Over here in the UK, if you're absolutely shit hot, principal engineer type material, I guess £150k + is common. Maybe more if you're a true elite engineer, but US wages are surreal. As others point out though, we get a lot of great public services, state pensions and so on. All a tradeoff.

    • nostrebored  4 years ago

      In what world are you valuing good public services at like 200k a year?

      Regardless, even in Australia wages for tech workers are higher than most of Europe.

      Europeans are truly in denial about what they’re getting. Nationalism is a great blindfold.

      4 replies →

stjohnswarts  4 years ago

If you compare US States to European nations it's easy to see that despite political polarization businesses in the states are extremely interactive and it makes easy for huge corps to grow throughout the USA.