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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17487 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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It also seems to be demonstrated by the fact that India, despite supposedly being full of “high skilled” tech workers, hasn’t produced any high tech companies. There is no Indian OpenAI, spacex, Tesla, Google etc.

Nowhere other than the US and (to a much lesser extent) a handful of East Asian nations (China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan) have produced major tech companies. China only produced them because of local ownership rules and heavy state backing. Japan and Korea have big hardware companies but are bad at software, Taiwan got lucky with chips but has little else.

So really it’s the US and China.

There are kind of too many to list that disprove your point. Germany has BMW, festo/festool, SAP, Siemens, etc etc. England has rolls Royce and BAE, and honestly countless others. France has Dassalt, Ariane, and Airbus.

I mean it honestly just goes on and on.

My point is that India is implying a radical claim, that their country is uniquely full of highly desirable high tech genius workers. France, England, Germany, etc. aren’t making that claim and yet they appear to have high tech companies.

China could make that claim, and if they did it would be valid. China has tons of high tech companies (although some might claim it is stolen technology, but whatever).

India has no high tech companies, and it seems to follow that since they have a high population and still not innovative companies, they must be uniquely bad at innovation. There should be VERY FEW (if any?) Indians coming to the US on the claim that there is no America alternative.

That isn’t the case. It seems like something else is going on.

Ariane? The space company with 3 launches in the past two years? That's a smaller manifest than SpaceX last week.

Is your point that there are no high tech aerospace companies in France?

No; Arianespace is clearly a high tech aerospace company. But the phrase you responded to was "major tech companies", and if you'll forgive my moving the goal posts back to that, retaining ~1% of a market vs a competitor you got decades of head start against is not "major".

SpaceX accomplishments are of such magnitude that Arianespace once called them "a dream" (derogatory). It's cool that they can still reach orbit, but they're just not in the same league ... and what's most damning is they have no plans to fix that! They're not like Blue Origin, with big plans that are just running late; their remaining market is a political sinecure, so they're content with it. They're not a company you want to name to contest the differences between US and EU innovation, they're a company you want to name to demonstrate it!

I’m not comparing US and EU innovation. I’m saying that India, despite having a billion residents, has little to no high tech or innovative companies.

Ariane is not necessary to make my point. You’re arguing against the words here, not the point.

How are BMW or BAE the equivalent of Google or Amazon? The former are legacy industrial manufacturers, akin to Ford or Lockheed.

I Amazon is the yard-stick you are measuring by, the US (with Apple and Amazon) and South Korea (with Samsung) are pretty much the only games in town.

FAANG is dead, long live AAS.

Does India have an equivalent to Ford or Lockheed?

Because I’ve ridden in many Tata cars and…it doesn’t seem so.

I think it’s that they have a high population, have English as the de facto national language (since southern Indians refuse to speak/learn Hindi), and are poor, which drives emigration.

For the second point, we can even look at this place. I can’t name a single ethnically Chinese poster here (I’m sure there are one or two), but there are many Indians / South Asians. Chinese people may emigrate to the West today once they’re wealthy when they want to buy citizenship / a bolt hole somewhere, and some PMC Chinese families send kids to study in the US, but smart Chinese engineers wouldn’t even know where to begin in terms of emigration if they didn’t study in the West.

Nokia, Thales, Bosch, Ericsson, BAE, SAP, ASML, Logitech, Et Al would all like a word.

If Thales and BAE count as big tech, then so does Lockheed and Boeing. There’s no equivalent to FAANG.

Yes. The largest best companies are in the US. But a decent chunk of the second best are in Europe.

If Thales and BAE count as big tech, then so does Lockheed and Boeing. There’s no equivalent to FAANG.

How many billions in assets and net revenue, or thousands of engineers in it's employment, does a company have to have to be considered "big tech" in your eyes? Netflix is a relative small-fry by said metrics, and arguably not even a "tech" company (they're more of a movie studio) when compared a company like BAE or Lockheed.

Are you limiting "tech" to software companies? Otherwise I'd point to a few European examples like Nokia (pre-acquisition) or Ericsson or AMSL. Acquisitions are also probably skewing your count.

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