alt Hacker News> Because it struggles to compete with the US monopolies doesn't mean that it doesn't have a software industry. It's hard to compete with TooBigTech when they are being anti-competitive, and whenever the EU tries to apply antitrust laws, they get bullied by the US.
Is there anything that stops today anyone from starting a new Google or a new Microsoft or a new Apple in Europe? Concretely no. What's stopping this is that most governments in Europe are taxing companies to death to fund social services that end up in deficit anyway.
It's getting tiring of hearing of the big bad Microsoft that stops poor Europe from competing properly.
The EU tech salaries are ridiculously low and the tax burden is unreasonably high. Add on top of that an aversion to risk from the banks and VC funds in Europe and this is what you get.
> Is there anything that stops today anyone from starting a new Google or a new Microsoft or a new Apple in Europe?
The same thing that stops anyone from starting a new Google or Microsoft or Apple in the US, probably.
And that's apparently not regulations.
> It's getting tiring of hearing of the big bad Microsoft that stops poor Europe from competing properly.
Who says that? I don't. What I say is that the big bad monopolies stop others from competing properly.
But the big bad monopolies being US companies, they are protected by the US government who doesn't really care about having US competition in the US, but cares about domining over the rest of the world.
> The EU tech salaries are ridiculously low and the tax burden is unreasonably high. Add on top of that an aversion to risk from the banks and VC funds in Europe and this is what you get.
Again, a handful of companies completely dominate the software industry in the US, too. Is that because of ridiculously low salaries and unreasonably high tax burden in the US? I don't get the reasoning.