Holy Schmoly! Finnish PM Gets Startups' Anxiety
Helsingin Sanomat ran a story on Mari Kiviniemi, the Finnish Prime Minister, who has expressed her thoughts on European state of affairs regarding digital media. She states that, "it's no co-incidence that the digital superstars, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, are all from the US, where they share a large, functioning domestic market". What she's saying here is that the European non-functioning markets should be better built for both consumers and online companies generating value.
Mari Kiviniemi stated her concern on the issue in her talk in Brussels, where the heads of EU nations are meeting currently. According to Kiviniemi, Europe is significantly lacking in the online content business as well as devices mainly due to the inefficiency of the European domestic markets.
The reason is very simple. "In Europe, companies have to work with 27 different frameworks of copyrights, consumer law, politics in telecommunications or simply physical IT infrastructure", she continues. I find this extremely welcoming, and the change to make our domestic markets work better would be appreciated by all.
And multiple languages and cultures, did she forget about that? Good luck unifying them with a directive :)
sim, I think that'll always be a problem and naturally you can't sort that out with any amount of legistlation. However, the problem lies in the ineffective domestic markets of Europe - it's a pain to try and get something big happen in Europe due to the amount of red tape.
Languages and cultures are a problem that can be solved pretty well with existing technology already. No directive needed to address that.
Clearly, companies like Google were not built for American market only, and if any European company says they cannot grow because Europe is such a difficult market, how can they dream of going global?
While the US companies have a slight advantage of their large English-speaking home market, the European companies have an even bigger advantage of being able to start on much less saturated markets.
It would be helpful for certain industries to have a unified set of laws that will make it possible to trade or do business across Europe without knowing the local laws in every country. However I don't see that as such a big problem for growth start-ups other than those dealing with physical goods sales.
For physical goods we also need a delivery network that is super efficient, like they do in the US. With Amazon finally offering free delivery to many European countries, this seems to be happening, so we're definitely getting there.
Jani, I'm sorry but I just cannot agree with this: "Languages and cultures are a problem that can be solved pretty well with existing technology already". Looking at your background and current projects, I can understand how you'd say that - but cultural issues are not something that are primarily solved by throwing technology at them. Just ask the folks at Alcatel-Lucent for example ;)
Physical goods delivery in Europe will not reach US levels anytime soon. Though for e-commerce, improving it dramatically is pretty crucial, so any moves like Amazon's are most welcome.
sim, well then we just agree to disagree. I am not sure if we're thinking of a different point of view though, since you mention Alcatel-Lucent. I understand that it may be a challenge to run a multinational company with staff that comes from multiple cultures, but I was referring to building successful products aimed at the European markets. We can handle the case of serving people from different language or cultural background pretty well using the technology we have, if we just put some effort into it.
My point really is that if a company cannot survive in Europe due to different cultures, there's not much hope going global either. There are cases where staying local works fine, but most starts should try to hit the global markets early on. Blaming the different cultures or languages is a poor excuse, as the European companies should be *better* at taking on global markets than the American companies.
People might be interested in the Economist story on the same topic: http://www.economist.com/node/17361454