top | item 41963523

(no title)

goethes_kind | 1 year ago

My reading of this: the EU wants to give its old fashioned SME software houses a chance with their software products, against the likes of FAANG that typically offer the software for free.

Of course this also hurts EU startups, but that does not concern Brussels because the whole EU establishment is always defending the incumbents. And this is imho one of the reasons the EU is falling behind, because incumbents don't react well to paradigm shifts. It's a losing strategy. For all its many faults the US seems to have realized a long time ago that you cannot protect incumbents at the cost of startups.

discuss

order

fsckboy|1 year ago

>For all its many faults the US seems to have realized a long time ago that you cannot protect incumbents at the cost of startups.

I think it wasn't an American realization as much as it was a success of "the American experiment" 250 years ago, a European experiment undertaken by Europeans living in North America, taking European ideas from the Enlightenment and applying them broadly, to politics, to religion, to the economy, and it flourished.

The tendency to protect incumbents was harder to root out back where the incumbents were more firmly entrenched.

If you want to take the "loose analogy" approach even further, consider that the Enlightenment was also the integration of Northern European ideas stemming from individual self reliance because you need to when it's cold as fuck outside, as opposed to southern European/Roman Empire successful ideas of depending on huge bureaucracies to gather and apportion more abundant resources.

this is not a proof of anything, just a pointing out/noticing type set of ideas. To me it seems tied in to other intellectual trends we see in history, where the , e.g., Romantic era was a movement in music, and in art, and in literature, and in politics/social theory, seemingly unrelated areas moving in concert, a reflection of how our brains work.

(probably similar ideas can be found outside the West, but it's not something I'm that educated about)

_DeadFred_|1 year ago

No, Americans.

Europeans were the ones that drove us away using things like threats of death, actual death/murder/vigilantly sprees/burning our homes/crops, creating mass starvations, etc. all because our families were of the wrong faith or ethnic background according to the Europeans.

People that had no fall back, who had traveled across a very hostile ocean, and lost plenty of loved ones in the process, and were determined to carve out a life for themselves in a European centric world that had shown itself up to that point very much against them. Americans that were determined to keep that government power/tyranny of the majority that had been used to murder/opress/expel them in check.

American's had/have a much different attitude than 'European'. There's a reason many of us think of it as a pretty museum not a place to emulate. Europe didn't want us. Funny how Europe is so quick to forget this bit of our 'common' bond.

whimsicalism|1 year ago

exactly. The EU needs to focus on fair play for all market participants urgently, it is quite literally making them poorer.