Why Can't Europe Do Tech?

It’s been a long time since the region produced a consumertech giant. Now’s its chance

- Jeremy Kahn

Jeez, Europe, what more do you need? Great universities. Fantastic transit systems. More than twice the population of the U.S. The finest cars, watches, wine, beer—OK, the Americans do better beer now, but still. So many glorious advantages. And yet Europe, as ever, continues its reign as the globe’s consumer-tech underachiever.

The heyday of Nokia Corp. and Ericsson AB is a distant memory, and Europe doesn’t have anything remotely comparable to Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, or Facebook, or Alibaba or Tencent, companies with market values ranging from $400 billion to $1 trillion and counting. With apologies to Stefon, Europe’s hottest tech business is Spotify ($34 billion); the only one into nine figures is SAP ($140 billion), the German maker of the world’s most boring business software.

The good news for Eurostartups is that they’ve got their best chance in a good, long while to make something of themselves. China’s national champions are struggling to expand in markets for which they haven’t adequately tailored their services. And Silicon Valley is two years into a string of unforced errors: Fake news. Cambridge Analytica. The new MacBook Pro keyboard. On Aug. 13 the Associated Press reported the latest outrage—Google has been tracking app users’ locations and storing that data even if users change their privacy settings to forbid it from tracking their location activity. Facebook Inc. and Google are persuasively if unintentionally making the case that the world needs alternative visions of the future—all Europe needs to do is find some.