Comment by bluecalm
5 days ago
It's a culture thing. There are even smaller markets like Taiwan that developed industries EU didn't. Western EU countries are very risk averse, anti-business and has too conservative hierarchy to develop this kind of culture. You can see it as early as in school system where the focus is on rising the floor while forgetting about the ceiling.
They'll blame it on WWII but both South Korea and Japan were similarly devastated and both managed to develop world-class technology industries in the ensuing decades.
Europe is the outlier and it's pointing to something fundamentally wrong that it was only able to produce a handful of interesting technology companies in all these years.
You're just blinded by propaganda. Europe has produced thousands upon thousands of interesting technology companies - it's just that very few of them are information technology companies.
Claiming that something is wrong with Europe in general because it didn't produce interesting technology is an utterly ridiculous and uninformed take.
I think it is a marketing failure. The web was mentioned before, but ARM, Wifi, Bluetooth, the CD, all European inventions. There are core parts of the internet that are completely dominated by a European company but nobody knows. If we go back to the past, everyone had a Nokia phone at some point. There are services companies like Booking and Spotify. Then Linux and Python are from Europe as well.