alt Hacker News"Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity. Yes, we have European Union which helps a lot, but it is not complete (and certainly wasn't in the time when Microsofts and Googles of this world started), making that all-important initial scaling way more difficult than it is in the US.
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> "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity
It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it.
Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.
Excuse denied. All they had to do was nothing. Instead they over-regulated way too early, before the industries could grow enough to support operating in such an environment. Now they are behind and will likely never catch up. The future of European tech is government handouts/scraps, collected by force from American companies.
if we talk beaurocracy EU is very well consolidated: "you can't do that", everyone says consistently.
Right but as an entity it can also do quite the damage. Cookie popups come to mind.
This is true, but it's also a fixable problem.
The issue I've seen is that there isn't really the political will to fix it. Europeans broadly seem uncomfortable giving up national sovereignty when it comes to digital issues (including those that impact scaling businesses), so they implicitly choose the status quo that makes it hard for software/internet businesses to succeed.
Literally in this thread you can see Europeans who are against greater federalization. And their objections are entirely understandable, but at the same time, can't exactly have your cake and eat it too. If you insist on 27 different sets of regulations to protect certain interests, however valid, you can't exactly be surprised when that makes scaling businesses rather challenging.