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As technology upends industries and lifestyles at breakneck pace, the Old Continent is not producing any of the online giants like Google, eBay or Facebook. Its best and brightest prefer to emigrate to Silicon Valley, or sell their ideas on to U.S. firms before they have a chance to establish themselves.
The European Union's top executives in Brussels are trying to rectify that with a long-term plan of reforms and incentives but face an uphill battle. The 28-nation bloc is, above all, lacking in the risk-taking culture and financial networks needed to grow Internet startups into globally dominant companies.
Europe's relatively cautious attitude to investment stands out as one of the biggest hurdles—and among the most difficult to change. Investors in Europe want to see that a young company can generate revenue from the start. Europe's many high-technology companies are focused on manufactured goods that can be sold right away to generate revenue—industrial equipment, energy turbines, high-speed trains, medical devices, and nuclear energy.
By contrast, Internet companies often have little to no revenue at the beginning. Twitter and Facebook, for example, first focused on building up their user numbers. Only once they were established as global forces did they put more attention to making money, through advertising and other strategies.
This difference in mentality stands out as one of the key reasons that Europe has fewer venture capital firms and less investment in startups than the U.S. or Asia.Over the past five years, U.S. venture capitalists spent $167 billion on new business ideas compared with some $20 billion by their European counterparts, according to the National Venture Capital Association.
http://phys.org/news/2015-09-europe-isnt-googles-facebooks.html
(Score: 5, Insightful) by M. Baranczak on Wednesday September 23 2015, @05:20AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 23 2015, @07:23AM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday September 23 2015, @12:42PM
Exactly. Europe has most of the world's finest heavy industry that actually produces tangible goods. Aside from them, Japan and Korea are right behind them and China isn't letting grass grow under their feet either.
The USA was infected with the cancer of greed. Short term growth and cost cutting reign supreme. Tech companies are easy money. All you need if office space and some computers. Pride in Engineering is nonexistent. Look in an American made piece of machinery and an equivalent European one. The European, especially if German, will have an enormous attention to detail and aesthetics. Very progressive thinking is used and it really shows.
We also have an insane culture of nostalgia and adversity to progress. Especially if that progress is foreign. America is doomed by its own culture of ignorance.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 23 2015, @06:06PM
Not with medical devices, at least. Carl Zeiss runs Windows 7 on their ophthalmic imaging machines--new machines that are still being shipped this week. These machines have a lifespan of around 10-12 years and are running an OS that will not get security updates beyond 2020. They have built in Wifi radios/routers and always on connections to the network. Zeiss has no upgrade path for the OS other than "buy a new $80,000 imager every 5 years".
If the Germans have such an attention to detail and devotion to efficiency and performance, why aren't these machines running embedded Linux or BSD which could be patched indefinitely? They are just as lazy, incompetent, and locked into proprietary toolchains as US software engineers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday September 23 2015, @09:12PM
They make more profit by selling a new $80 000 unit in five years.
Welcome to the corporate world. Things are not designed to be best. They are designed to be most profitable.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by K_benzoate on Thursday September 24 2015, @01:26AM
They make more profit by selling a new $80 000 unit in five years.
No, they don't. Medical practices buy new machines when the old ones literally stops working--no matter what. What actually happens is they just keep using the insecure imager with the unpatched, abandoned, operating system. So Zeiss doesn't make more money. The practice doesn't get a secure machine. Patients don't get secure medical records. NO ONE WINS. Thanks capitalism!
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday September 23 2015, @09:31PM
It's not only Zeiss but many, many others who use Windows for automation.
My best guess as to why this is prevalent is because going back to the 90's, Windows was the commodity PC operating system that was already entrenched in businesses. Open Platform Communications, or OPC was developed to specifically bridge the many different and often proprietary automation protocols to Windows applications and networks for SCADA systems. Windows was then able to push into automation at the HMI and SCADA levels. The same OS that runs Wordperfect also runs your SCADA system pulling in data from the shop floor for analysis in quattro or Lotus 1-2-3. Oh the convenience!
And going back to as early as 2000, realtime extensions were developed for Windows by 3rd parties (Ardence RTX being one of them). Pretty much a dual-kernel running along side Windows handling RT hardware, networking, memory and interrupts. Even gets its own core or cores. This enabled Windows to work its way down into the PLC itself. Windows PC based Automation controllers with deterministic real time response were now a reality. And conveniently, it all runs on Windows and developed right in Visual studio using C++ and .net languages like VB and C#. It's far easier to find a programmer who can pop into VS, start a project and hammer out some code.
Windows allows for one big homogeneous computing environment. It also makes managers sleep easier at night. Sad state of affairs but it's not all Windows. There are plenty of Linux automation platforms out there. They just aren't as popular. Probably because the development workstations can run office or something...
(Score: 1) by GDX on Friday September 25 2015, @02:30AM
One think about the Windows based automation is that tend to be very difficult to convince management to go Linux or even some flavor of BSD, a old colleague from university told me that they needed near five year to convince their management to let then test Linux for automation and another three to let then use it in production. Most due the management and lawyers not understanding the GPL license and the big Microsoft/Windows inertia that came from the DOS era. Ironically the management now are pretty happy as they have more control on the platform.