There was a lot of government money, directly or indirectly, involved in keeping Apple afloat and before that, bringing noticeable revenue. Then there's more state rather than federal, if you care about the difference, money from school systems hooked onto Apple II, which made it so that it was produced up to early 1990s.
Similarly a non-trivial point in financial history of Sun was contracts that indirectly depended on NSA.
Then you have third-order money flows, where lots of govt money flew into various projects, which enriched people enough that they could buy Apple products.
I'd argue that the biggest difference is that the government money was very free flowing, and often goal-oriented and who actually got it was a detail that wasn't even taken into account unless you failed to deliver. Meanwhile a lot of EU funding grants, depending on country, involves a lot of paperwork instead of just govt buying from you.
Educational use of the Apple II wasn't about policy though, it was just that the Apple II was already incredibly popular and had lots of software (Visicalc for example, the first spreadsheet) available. It's commercial success drove educational adoption not the other way round.
Conversely the BBC Micro was picked as a winner by the BBC back when it's predecessor systems were also-rans. This drove educational purchases, and ultimately led to ARM.
Honestly the main thing that drove the US tech sector was the invention of the integrated circuit, and massive scale. Europe back then was still very balkanised, the EEC (which became the EU) was only just getting going.
Fully agree with your last point, Europe was and still is much more bureaucratic.
My last point was explicitly also about how it enabled your first paragraph. Apple II at the time wasn't cheap, nor were other computers. Government grants for computers in education created a market that could be then targeted by Apple (and anyone who thinks Apple didn't dedicate serious resources into capturing that market is naive at best)
This is however a key thing that the US is doing better than the EU.
US - I help you by buying your product
EU - I will buy the product of your foreign competitor, but you can apply for a research grant, that only pays for half of your investment and comes with bureaucratic overhead that cost more than we pay you
> I'd argue that the biggest difference is that the government money was very free flowing, and often goal-oriented and who actually got it was a detail that wasn't even taken into account unless you failed to deliver. Meanwhile a lot of EU funding grants, depending on country, involves a lot of paperwork instead of just govt buying from you.
That's an interesting point. I believe this paperwork is there to prevent corruption somehow. Yet, from the unshakeable position and government ties of the old industry one might conclude that the result was exactly the opposite.
The purpose is not to avoid corruption, it is to have the ability to plausibly deny ts existence by having paper trail of a faux-fair process that was followed.
This is valid, but in reality Apple wins because they are fundamentally better managed in most ways that most European companies, point blank.
That's a hard pill to swallow because it doesn't boil down to simple things like R&D spending by sector.
Also, it means there's not that much the state apparatus can necessarily do.
It's a fantastical misunderstanding of markets to suggest that 'government does stuff and then we win'. Obviously government is very important in systematic ways, and even more so in direct ways to help nations get over their limited size to do things like 'Airbus'.
And while Steve Jobs probably would not have thrived in Europe, he did however in the US and there isn't quite a corollary in Europe.
There are so many factors.
And most paradoxically - many of the factors that hinder Europe from expansion, have benefits in the other direction. German culture is much more formal, the gears run pretty well there, but they also are more resistant to change. Attitudes towards work/live balance means a high standard of living, and that's worth something of course.
Etc.
One thing worth nothing that nobody seems to talk about so I tend to highlight it, is the media participation in industry. In the US, CNN will talk about 'RobinHood' and 'Bumble' and 'Tesla' endlessly. The amount of free PR and narrative building is incalculable.
Most of the rest of the world is not like that.
How do you compete as a little European entity that nobody talks about, when CNN is giving millions of 'free impressions daily' to your competitors?
As one of many differentiation.
Of course, in China, you have a managed economy in which the winners are effectively chosen, and the state backs them.
Normally - this does not work.
But when you have a nation that is 'behind' typically you an have some central planners make rational investments in 'infrastructure' and specific industry. Much like the post-war planning of Korea and Japan. After a while, the marginal returns to 'low hanging fruit' dissapears.
China continues with that approach into the high tech world. While they build 'highways' (much like US strategic investment in the highway system in the 1950's) - they're also building out consumer payments (Ali), taxi services (DiDi), networking (Huawei) etc. - in a quasi capitalist way - things which, in the Western world we opted to have done in private markets.
Frankly, the biggest difference between USA and Europe is that USA is comparably homogenous market, especially in high-tech, whereas EU even with common market isn't.
It also means that Micheal Dell starting a company building computers in garage from parts, like many many companies in just in Poland, let alone EU, he had ready made, near-zero extra cost, market of 235 million people that spoke effectively the same language, required no export declarations, and had nation-wide ways to market.
This is a real differentiator.
BTW, China is internally very very competitive, though it appears they put focus on smaller companies than big american style corps (even though they have such as well, obviously)
Government subsidy / R&D spending would help with all of that. Less efficiently run? Ok, that extra money gives you more resources to try to make up for it. Take some extra moonshots. Give things longer runways.
Foreign companies hiring people away? Now you can pay more to compete.
Less well publicized? Buy yourself some attention just like US companies do.
You aren't trying to build the most immediately efficient company with the subsidies, but you're trying to keep local competition in the market, and be less at the whim of external companies.
Money is not usually the problem so 'subsidy' is not it.
A good example is that European companies are not interested in dealing with little startups that are not powerful. They like to deal with 'big brands'. They are unable to make institutional decisions based on more calculated merit, and instead go the safe route.
Entrepreneurs taking smaller risks.
Entrepreneurs not understanding how the VC cycle works.
A lack of proper exits.
The list is long.
Europe has plenty of money and 'competent, regular professional managers' but a dirth of the kind of focus required to make big plays.
Do you have any actual sources about the government keeping apple afloat? Or are you saying since they had educational contracts they were being kept afloat?
Does Airbus have government contracts? Does Ericsson or Nokia? Do you believe European governments contracts with these companies are keeping them afloat?
Apple's federal sales division was one of the strongest sources of revenue during Apple's lowest points, thanks to very good integrated sales & support team that kept islands of Macs in various governmental locations, often doing specialised tasks as graphics/audio workstations and the like.
But to get those contracts there had to be appropriate spending by government, and that's what I meant in my comment.
Apple and Huawei are very recent phenomenons in Europe.
GSM, and today's mobile networks, are essentially products of subsidized European national telcoms.
The problem is rather that Europeans have historically been ineffective or slow at understanding end-user "cultural" products. American pop culture still dominates, while locals usually seem like poor imitations.
But the value produced by FANGs is essentially cultural, rather than technological or industrial. This thinking is suspicious and foreign to European engineers. Boomer engineers and industrialists really struggle to grasp this and it's still a point of contention even though few know how to articulate it.
I'm probably using boomer to refer generally to "stale mindsets".
But the current state is the result of sequences of decisions made in the preceding twenty years. Until it was literally demonstrated by Apple, they entirely dismissed the idea that most value in phones would be generated through an open ecosystem.
There are plenty of people with stale mindsets in the European industrial giants struggling to grasp how electrification and AI will affect their legacies.
I've been there when first EU deployments of iPhones (3G) happened. The only more closed ecosystem was that of cheap value phones that didn't even have J2ME, and that one was still more free on few axes.
It took at least two generations of apple products IIRC to shed american closed ecosystem approach which was rightly seen as total shit - but that knowledge didn't percolate much outside the very small group that had iPhones or worked in telecom high enough to know details of how sausage was made.
There are many things to talk about what Apple did differently, but "open" was not it. Arguably the bigger issue was how due to how Microsoft and Nokia dropped the ball on system software (which resulted in certain lock-step issues with hw), allowing reasonably cheap chance for Apple to appear as huge jump (arguably, UX-wise it was big change, but being used to smartphones I found early iPhone very, very clumsy)
Value produced by Google? How about value drained by Google, esp. privacy and advertising.
About the only value produced by Google being Google Docs and Android. Well, and the rare FLOSS improvements related to these.
Facebook? Similar. Taking over culture is not value. We had better services at around time it was created, but the huge money combined with network effects did the number on them.
Netflix, well. Let's say we had VoD services before them, some even better. Their major cultural win is making exclusive series with the huge money they got invested.
Amazon has one improvement in their sales systems with the remote warehouses. Plus AWS.
Apple at least designs phones.
All of the companies benefited hugely from big cash investment, somehow EU companies don't get these. It's not a matter of culture either, there's plenty enough startups around. But US money is always more and bigger.
Similarly a non-trivial point in financial history of Sun was contracts that indirectly depended on NSA.
Then you have third-order money flows, where lots of govt money flew into various projects, which enriched people enough that they could buy Apple products.
I'd argue that the biggest difference is that the government money was very free flowing, and often goal-oriented and who actually got it was a detail that wasn't even taken into account unless you failed to deliver. Meanwhile a lot of EU funding grants, depending on country, involves a lot of paperwork instead of just govt buying from you.