>This is a company with a deeply scummy past, who did everything to throttle competition when they had the upper hand.
This applies to literally any billion/trillion dollar big tech company ever, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Dell, Facebook even Apple and Google. They all abuse their market dominance at the expense of their competitors when they get there. It's literally the M.O. of any major corporation.
Microsoft was just the first major successful big tech software company to make it there.
VW, BP, Deutsche Bank, Airbus and especially LVMH and Nestle, would like to have a word with you.
You're making it sound like the lack of major European SW megacorps comes from some benevolent voluntary decision on our side, when the truth is that Europe is full of unscrupulous, corrupt and exploitative megacorps like the ones I listed above, except in SW, since we missed the SW bus entirely due to reasons I will go into detail below, and so the US dominates that field entirely.
Firstly, don't have the capacity to pump trillions of EUR into our stock market like the FED does and we also don't have the military capacity to invade any country that would threaten the EURO or our oil/energy markets.
But most importantly, the US is a single market with 300 million consumers with a high purchasing power, making scaling of SW products and services much easier than in a fragmented market with about 24 different languages and many more different cultures and differing regulations, with some EU member countries having conflicting interests on many important topics, making scaling of SW products across EU members a nightmare if you're not flush with cash. Which is why we're full of thousands of small local companies that don't have any international leverage.
And before anyone brings up ASML for the thousandth time as some silver bullet example for EU tech dominance, please note that ASML's golden goose, EUV, is a product of US Cymer wich ASML bough, and of Sandia labs research which ASML licensed, so the US has veto rights on what ASML can do with the EUV tech and who they can sell it to (spoiler alert, not to China).
>But most importantly, the US is a single market with 300 million consumers with a high purchasing power, making scaling of SW products and services much easier than in a fragmented market with about 24 different languages and many more different cultures and differing regulations, with some EU member countries having conflicting interests on many important topics, making scaling of SW products across EU members a nightmare if you're not flush with cash. Which is why we're full of thousands of small local companies that don't have any international leverage.
And what stopped Japan from achieving what Europe couldn't?
Japan has (or at least had) several advantages that Europe still lacks. Single language, high and concentrated population, highly technological consumer markets, massive government and corporate investment in semiconductor and software.
For a while, Japan's was beating the US in semiconductor advancements. If the Japanese software scene failed, I'm not convinced of how it would have happened the way same Europe's had.
>But most importantly, the US is a single market with 300 million consumers with a high purchasing power, making scaling of SW products and services much easier than in a fragmented market with about 24 different languages
Germany alone is a big and rich enough market to scale. Add the UK and France and you're very close to the US population.
> VW, Deutsche Bank, Airbus and especially LVMH, would like to have a word with you.
Sure, but we're talking about tech firms (this is an article about Microsoft's place in the tech world). All the FAANGs are American. Big tech is American.
edit: I see you edited your comment (many times) to align with this part of the discussion.
Haha, nice. Though, a work colleague's brother was doing laser research in academia in Europe and got offered a 4x pay increase to continue his research in the US academia. Make of that what you will, but it seems like the US stil has no issues attracting top talent in some fields.
How did you come up with that conclusion from my statement?
I explained why I don't trust any major corporation richer than God, as they're all guilty of bad practices and why you shouldn't trust any of them either.
This applies to literally any billion/trillion dollar big tech company ever, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Dell, Facebook even Apple and Google. They all abuse their market dominance at the expense of their competitors when they get there. It's literally the M.O. of any major corporation.
Microsoft was just the first major successful big tech software company to make it there.