Comment by rmoriz
3 months ago
The dilemma of leaders way behind is to find the right attack vector. Of course, you won't be able to become competitive by just "put more effort" into the existing stuff and hence everyone is eager to hope for a "Wunderwaffe" like flying taxis, quantum computing, blockchain, AI moonshots or whatever. In the end they all fail because the existing issues and problems won't be fixed, leading to the next failure. This happens over and over again, but voters still believe the promises of politicians.
Worse, there is a whole European industry sector hunting for subsidies doing build-to-fail projects, for example "google competitor", "European cloud" etc.
This competition is the solution, not the problem. Europe is what's left of western society after the US have completely lost it. My humble opinions, ofc.
I can agree in some ways but the issue remains (as an European) that our collective economies don't really grow anymore.
So there might be more competition, but it's either marginal, or it's to weak to compete with other international companies (like the once in China for example).
Why do they need to grow? Unlimited growth is normally classified as cancer. The only real need for growth is because of unsustainable economic practice.
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Europe has been "stagnating" at about ~80% of American productivity levels for decades now. However, if your reference is growing and your ratio is roughly constant, that means you are growing too.
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Most of the time one can't compete by mimicking. We lost on European cloud but European hosting has never been as strong.
We’ve seen a massive consolidation in hosting, domain, collocation and even B2B access providers in Germany. Some were sold to US companies, others are purchased and now owned by private equity companies. They are now centralized and based of existing revenue streams. Managed services are getting consolidated to reduce infra overhead but no new intellectual property or regionally optimized/local services are provided.