
Tech Talent: How the UK lost six potential titans - m-i-l
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37373937
======
AJRF
As a Software Engineer in London I have noticed a gigantic push from
recruiters to get some talent to move to Berlin after Brexit.

The sad thing is I now consider it a net gain to move, whereas before London
was the best place to live.

~~~
oneloop
Bullshit, London hasn't been a good place to live in at least 20 years. You
just hung around because you were used to it. London as good things (lots of
money, lots of entrepreneurial people), but being "nice to live" isn't one of
them.

~~~
SpeakMouthWords
Would you mind unpacking that further? I love living in London and would be
keen to hear your grievances.

~~~
oneloop
I know that some of these can be sorted by having an obscene amount of
money... which I don't.

\- insane rent. i'm living in a single bedroom

\- poor quality of houses. i can hear the steps of my flatmates outside my
rooms

\- crowded: neighbourhood in london are either shit, or if they're not they're
so crowded you can't do anything. you go to a coffee shop and every seat is
taken or if it's not you have to seat between two guys. on the street you can
barely walk, bump into people all the time, etc

\- travel time: this just sucks my soul away. there is no casual meeting
someone, meeting someone is always a taxing excursion.

\- Here's one that I've never seen mentioned: is it just me, or is there an
abnormally high amount of poserism in London? It's fucking posers everywhere,
trying to show you how they know THE BEST place to eat THE BEST food and drink
THE BEST wine. Who gives a shit? Is your life so uninteresting that you spend
it thinking about food?

sigh. After brexit I've started learning german, so maybe I'll try Berlin
next.

~~~
artimaeis
> "\- Here's one that I've never seen mentioned: is it just me, or is there an
> abnormally high amount of poserism in London? It's fucking posers
> everywhere, trying to show you how they know THE BEST place to eat THE BEST
> food and drink THE BEST wine. Who gives a shit? Is your life so
> uninteresting that you spend it thinking about food?"

I can see your other points - but this one seems kind of strange. I've not
lived many places, but I'm pretty sure everywhere has people talking about the
best restaurants, breweries, bars, etc. It's a part of culture - food and
drink! It's a thing literally every human partakes in.

Beyond that - is your life so full of engagement and interest that you
literally don't think about food? That just seems pretty exceptional to me.
Not trying to judge - there's a reason that products like Soylent exist! Some
people legitimately don't care, and I get that. But let other people enjoy
whatever they want to - and try not to get upset if they share that with you
(:

~~~
oneloop
No, it's not full of engagement, I'm definitely not saying I have a nice life,
at all. But I don't think about food, no. Very very uninteresting. And I can
understand someone whose mentality is "you have to eat, might as well make it
tasty". But some people it seems have nothing else in their life. And it's not
just their food, it's also making sure that you know about their food. It
can't be my imagination that people do this. You just need to look at
instagram to see it's full of pictures that people take of their food. Ok, so
maybe it's not specific to London, maybe it's just my bitterness.

~~~
artimaeis
Hah, I think I see where you're coming from. It's definitely universal - the
people who have to put down what you're eating or doing because they did
something SO MUCH BETTER last weekend or whatever.

Those people suck. People who pull out their phones to take a picture of their
food rather than their company tend to be showing where their interest lies.
Meh.

------
gaius
Sorry, but Sinclair was _never_ a potential titan. His problem was always he
was happy to shave off 50% of the capability to save 10% of the cost. Tho'
this is a mentality that is all too common in the UK - just look at our
defence procurement.

A _real_ story would be that of De Havilland and the Comet airliner - Boeing
and Airbus should never have existed, the UK had that market sewn up until the
government of the day blew it...

~~~
flukus
Shaving cost was a good goal when computers were still too expensive for the
average home though. Another notable one was what could have been an IBM
competitor:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_\(computer\))
.

Britain was a great innovator back when individual inventors could manage a
project, they never seemed to transition into corporate innovation though.

~~~
gaius
FTA:

 _But the firm got unstuck when it tried to enter the business market. Its
Sinclair QL was designed to outperform IBM 's PCs, but its tape-based
Microdrive storage was unreliable and the British company did not offer the
kind of telephone support the corporate sector required._

His failure wasn't in terms of price but of price/performance.

~~~
silvestrov
And the QL didn't have a real business quality keyboard. It was just cheap and
hard plastic keys.

It was too expensive for a home computer and too much of a toy for a business:
between two chairs.

------
jkot
I am surprised it does not mention Psion. With better management we could had
iphone 10 years earlier. Psion Series 5 has no replacement even after 19 years
(keyboard, display, battery life..)

~~~
Ulti
I'd say most netbooks or tablets replaced it for all of those things now...
But you're right that Psion were super innovative. More important than their
series 5 hardware was the operating system. EPOC was a 32bit embedded OS long
before anyone else was doing them. It was nice to program for and dealt with
multiprogram which even the first iPhones didn't think about.

~~~
pavlov
32-bit EPOC became very popular (for a while) as Symbian, but the "nice to
program for" aspect was definitely lost in Symbian's heavy-handed multi-vendor
committee approach to software design.

------
danielhunt
I'm not English, I don't live in the UK, but the approach and wording in this
article bothers me.

Are these companies "sell outs" because they sold, or because they sold to
foreign companies?

Shouldn't they be lauded as successes for having been sold in the first place?
Is this part of the problem that the root of the article (as I see it) is
actually talking about?

~~~
pyb
The issue is that these companies were doing really well, got acquired as a
result, but then mostly shrivelled to nothing. Let's hope ARM doesn't get
cursed that way...

~~~
zigzigzag
Well, no, they weren't. With the exception of ARM that genuinely is doing very
well, quite a few of the others sold out because they weren't doing well. In
the case of SwiftKey it sounds like they were losing money and decided to
double down on it by giving it away for free and then charging for things
nobody cared about!

SwiftKey's problem is that they had a tiny window of time after inventing it
where they could have charged lots of money to power users before the Android
team just included their invention in the core product. Apparently they were
unable to capitalise on that time and ended up selling to Microsoft who now
gets to fund their loss-making product. Although I loved SwiftKey as a
product, business wise I'm not sure that's a loss for the UK.

~~~
pyb
SwiftKey is not in the same league as the others apparently, but I didn't know
that much about it.

------
h1d
Softbank is a cellular phone company not a competitor to ARM... And Softbank
said it will double head count and keep the offices in the UK.

I guess any sell out is termed "lost".

------
rwmj
They missed Imagination[1], which seems to be suffering from (allegedly) poor
management decisions at the moment, but is the hardware behind the graphics in
many mobile phones.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagination_Technologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagination_Technologies)

~~~
gaius
The BBC is funny like that, they latch onto companies that they worship (e.g.
Apple, Google, ARM, Flickr) and ignore all the others in the same sector. I
suspect they see no further than the products their own staff use, or more
cynically, individuals there are positioning themselves for lucrative job
offers they hope will come rolling in...

~~~
14113
I think it's possibly that the journalists don't actually know the sector
beyond the big "flashy" names, like ARM or Sinclair.

------
jakozaur
More to come... Skype though wasn't strictly UK, has a huge engineering office
in London. Microsoft just announce it will close it.

Some of the losses are inevitable. Even in San Francisco Bay Area a lot of
titans has died/been acquired. The most fundamental metric is net new
titans/value created. New Startups - old titans that are winding dow.

------
ar7hur
I think they missed the most of important of all, DeepMind.

~~~
bbctol
Was DeepMind 'lost'? It was bought by Google, but it's stayed in the UK (even
if it might have made more sense to be folded into Google Brain) and iirc the
founders are very keen that it stay in London.

------
smcl
Autonomy being on the list is a little weird - given that it appears to have
been all smoke and mirrors.

------
guard-of-terra
Last.fm is still an amazing resource thanks to its listening statistics that I
participate in.

------
tazjin
As an EVE player this headline made me feel a bit uneasy.

~~~
bobic171
I doubt they would be pimp fit though.

------
matthewmorgan
Unfortunately the UK couldn't innovate faster than others could steal

------
thaiphanvevo
I dunno, if the UK can pull off smaller government then they might continue to
be attractive to businesses chafing from the high regulations and taxes of the
EU.

~~~
barrkel
The EU doesn't control member country tax rates and most of its regulations
are to harmonise products sold within the market - ie products would have to
meet the regulations to be sold in the block no matter whether they are
produced inside or outside the EU.

Other regulations affecting things like working hours or environment wouldn't
necessarily be great for the UK to cut back on. These are designed to prevent
beggar-thy-neighbour policies that turn into a race to the bottom in a zero
sum game. It's better for everyone to agree to the same rules here, game
theoretically.

And less freedom to hire people from the continent would just push up labour
costs.

So personally I don't think there's any upside from Brexit here. That would
have to come from somewhere entirely hypothetical, like significantly better
trade deals than the EU currently has.

~~~
zigzigzag
The EU very much wants to control member state tax rates, hence the recent
Apple case and the VAT changes they made.

There are lots of EU regulations that are basically pointless busywork. Look
at the cookie rules. Huge cost and expense to implement millions of warnings,
no benefit, and their plan is to double down on them.

~~~
barrkel
They didn't make VAT changes in the Irish case. They ruled that Ireland didn't
apply its own laws fairly and with equal treatment. It's a highly contentious
issue and is being appealed by Ireland, particularly since it's retrospective
and involves a massive clawback. It makes the rule of law look shaky in
Ireland. It's not likely to stand as is for that reason alone, IMO.

Some countries - particularly ones with larger economies - want to stop
smaller economies undercutting their tax bases. The current laws mean that
profits get taxed in the country where the company doing the sales is based.
There is some talk of changing this so that the profit is more balanced based
on where the sales are targeted. I think this is fair; this again comes under
beggar-thy-neighbour common rules.

~~~
zigzigzag
My sentence was perhaps overly hard to parse. It was a list of two things,
related only by the general area of tax. Not that the Irish case is VAT
related. Indeed it's not.

I was talking about the change to EU wide VAT rules that force sellers to
charge VAT at the buyer rate not the seller rate.

------
muzster
It will be interesting to see how quickly this post will disappear from the
front page of HN ( especially when SF wakes up)

Edit: My comment is relevant. How relevant is the UK tech scene in the world ?
one measure would be HN ranking during the day.

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