Lately a hot topic in EU was raised by some politicians like Mario Draghi and president Macron of France about the lack of competitiveness of the European economy.
Mario Draghi in EU competitiveness: Looking ahead is criticizing EU as being over regulated and against innovation and free initiative.
Macron was even more direct: “The EU could die, we are on a verge of a very important moment,” the French president added. Macron: EU has only 2 or 3 years to stave off total US, China dominance
In this context there is a lot of talk on Reddit , X, LinkedIn about what is wrong with EU and how we can fix this.
The best comment I found on this topic was from a Reddit user that gave a very complete list of reasons why IT “sucks” in EU, why there are no EU unicorns and the number of successful start-ups in EU is almost non existent or under the radar.
Here’s my “top 10 reasons” why IT sucks in Europe (which are not what everybody thinks)
- Incompetent VCs that can’t take a pinch of salt of risk and only feel secure investing in “proven businesses” (read – copying anything from the US) – yes I’m talking especially about German VCs
- Market and language heterogeneity between EU countries, and a lot of impedance matching in advertising your products elsewhere (especially in the US)
- Corporate bureaucracy in adopting digital solutions (also see 8)
- Public corporate bureaucracy (of course) – though it’s better in the likes of Ireland (though not taxation), Estonia, etc
- Low resourcefulness of European IT workers, especially those in Western Europe
- Bad entrepreneurial culture in Europe in general
- Bad understanding of marketing, incentives and prices in European companies (my favorite example: Qt)
- Keeping the boomers in management positions in the older companies (but do we really need email?! – most infamous example was Nokia who had “Android before Android” but the boomers though it was just a fad)
- American companies hiring a lot of your best workers even before you sent them a fax with your offer (/s)
- Lack of just taking general risk, experimenting, aversion for the inquisitiveness (and to be fair it’s much better than most of the world, but still worse than in the US)