5 pointsby alephnerd5 hours ago1 comment
  • ZeroGravitas3 hours ago
    > Apple and Google power the mobile phones used from Dublin to Dubrovnik.

    Remember when regulations bought Nokia and killed it while trying to leverage their monopoly into yet another area of business their tech wasn't good enough to win on its own merits? Stupid regulations.

    • alephnerd3 hours ago
      And yet Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, Oppo, HTC, Sony, etc continue to exist, scale up, and/or directly compete against Apple or Google.

      There was no reason another Nokia couldn't have developed in 15 years, especially given how a number of the brands listed either didn't have a mobile phone business or didn't even exist when the iPhone was launched.

      Yet the biggest barrier for any sort of scale-out within Western and Northern Europe is bad terms and non-responsive local government.

      There's a reason CEE states with more dynamics and business friendly administrations like Poland and Czechia converged so fast to Western Europe.

      • ZeroGravitas3 hours ago
        Which of these phone companies were startups in the last fifteen years?

        The Chinese ones? And that's the argument for less state intervention? The success of Communism? Who also make all the Apple and Google phones not, in their own words due to low cost, but because they can't find that level of Hi-Tech manufacturing skill located in any non-communist state-planned economy.

        • alephnerd2 hours ago
          The PRC embraced capitalism back in 1976 albeit with a state component.

          Additionally Xiaomi and Oppo both developed entirely via private sector capital in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Furthermore, I listed other Korean and Taiwanese players that also continued to exist despite historically not being the mobile phone business until the iPhone announcement as well as Japanese players that were able to pivot and survive in a smartphone driven world.

          The failure of Nokia itself highlights the failure of the European ecosystem.

          Smartphones, AdTech, FinTech, Cloud, Fabless Chip Design, EVs, etc were all greenfield sectors in the late 2000s that any country could have staked a claim in. Plenty did, but the European states didn't outside of FinTech somewhat.

          The crux of that issue is because there is a severe aversion to funding, developing, and incubating early stage founders and firms, and much of that stems from a mix of regulatory and policy failures within European states that make early stage ventures unrealistic or bias in favor of protecting large incumbents.