Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought. Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to bootstrap a startup culture here.
I've worked for a European company acquired by big tech in the US. My experience was that the Americans were quite full of themselves and didn't want to learn how we operated. There was a vibe of “things are going to change around here, no more free rides, the grown-ups have arrived.” Awful management decisions were made, most of the talent left, and the team from the original company now only exists on paper.
n=1 and all, but I've heard similar stories. European tech companies have very different cultures and ways of making money, shaped by our laws and consumer expectations.
Skype, for example, was used as a pay phone and a simple messaging app before Microsoft bought it. You put in a euro, and you call and message your friends. It mutated into a bloated Microsoft Live app with several different front-ends, including some integrations with Office and various subscription services that sold the same thing in multiple ways. Core features stopped working, too. I'm sure someone liked the Frankenstein monster that it became (I don't kink-shame sadists), but most of the original users, and especially Europeans, did not.
If Microsoft had a purpose for Skype except for taking out a competitor, I'd say the decline would have been the result of managerial incompetence and American managers' lack of understanding of Europe. But of course, once a competitor bought Skype, there was no reason for it to exist anymore, so perhaps that is the reason it died.
Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big tech often fails to do business here within the local culture and laws, too.
I too have worked for a European company bought out by a large American company.
They too didn't understand our culture. They completely ignored the parts of our business that were scalable and taking off, and focused instead on nebulous "synergies". They actually seemed more interested in us taking on their branding than what we actually did. They'd push down demands to chase some latest trends but when we needed something back from them they struggled to give us the time of day.
They also immediately tried to give pay cuts and force immediate redundancies and seemed shocked to discover they couldn't legally do that. So instead they had to polite request that people in our company take a pay cut. I only know of one person naive enough to take them up on that offer.
I left a few years post acquisition, it was clear things would not get better we were just left rudderless because we'd previously been run by the founder for ~25 years and now were run by no-one with no direction.
What both of you are describing is just what normally happens with MOST acquisitions (regardless of the nationality of the acquirer).
Most acquisitions don’t turn into YouTube or WhatsApp/Instagram-level success for the acquirer. The academic literature on CEOs empire building via acquisition is that most of the time it’s value destructive.
I love a good US vs Europe debate but acquisitions aren’t an area where either corporate culture excels. European acquirers are equally as careless with their gobbled up playthings.
What I gather about the differences between American and European attitudes towards work hours and vacation leads me to believe that there's actually a material difference between American and European acquisitions. I'm certain that new Euro bosses don't walk in expecting to be able to pull everyone back from summer holiday on a whim, but I've heard of just such a thing happening when we Americans rolled in.
> I've worked for a European company acquired by big tech in the US. My experience was that the Americans were quite full of themselves and didn't want to learn how we operated.
Yup, that's also my experience. Americans are just like the unofficial President - they don't take "no" for an answer when they demand something, no matter what, unless you manage to get court judgements because that actually threatens the bottom line.
> Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big tech often fails to do business here within the local culture and laws, too.
I always remember when Wal-Mart tried to come to Germany... and had to leave with its tail tucked in because they just couldn't cope with stuff being done differently here [1].
>Walmart employees are required to stand in formation and chant, “WALMART! WALMART! WALMART!” while performing synchronized group calisthenics.
Do they still do this to this day? This is definitely an -ism of the early 2010's but I figured corporate stopped pretending that "we're family" by the close of the decade.
The smiling argument makes perfect sense. I hear several EU countries simply have a more blunt approach and pretty neutral mannerisms towards strangers. Americans would call the approach "cold", so there's definitely a cultral difference.
> I hear several EU countries simply have a more blunt approach and pretty neutral mannerisms towards strangers. Americans would call the approach "cold", so there's definitely a cultral difference.
Yeah. To put it blunt: When I want to get smiled at, I either woo a partner or go to a brothel.
That sure is a funny way to refer to a president who was elected by both the popular vote and the Electoral College. I'm no fan of Trump, but it sounds like a form of derangement syndrome to believe that he wasn't democratically elected.
Edit: Parent more than likely meant Musk as replies to this comment explained, I should have figured that out but it's too late or early or some other excuse.
I assumed GP was referring to Musk. No one voted for him, but he can crash a presidental press meeting to ramble about DOGE propoganda.
But it is hard to tell. They are cut from he same cloth after all, simply separated by a generation of figuring out how to squeeze more out of their labor.
Yeah I agree parent meant Musk. It really is bizarre the power he's been handed. Crazy the party that supposedly backs 'small government' is fine with that even if it takes the form of an unelected fool billionaire being given unreasonable amounts of power and doing nothing but causing damage.
GP probably meant the immigrant billionaire standing next to him all the time, who can't even bother to dress properly to meet with (arguably) some of the most important people in your country, aka Elon Musk.
Nope, Nokia was killed via suicide-by-microsoft-exec. They took in a MS aligned CEO and promptly proceeded to destroy their own chance of competing (using Maemo/meego or android for their phones) by using MS operating system.
I guess one could call it leadership stagnation, but I would argue more it being just plain old stupidity
> Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought. Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to bootstrap a startup culture here.
What? None of those were EU government owned, all was private. Do people really have this sort of (completely incorrect) view on how things work in Europe? Not even donald was ever stating such ridiculous things
Not true, just some cheap internet meme for people too lazy to bother understanding economics and different principles US and European societies and markets work on.
And the claim of parent that income from sales would go to EU, which is not true, it went to Nokia owners who aren't in any meaning 'EU'. Its like saying any sale of any US private company to some foreign one goes to trump and his government.
Your post is typical lazy propagation of trivially verifiable made up claims, not sure even by whom or for what purpose, but this forum has higher standards
Actually, that's not correct. The controversy you might be thinking of was about Subway's bread in Ireland, where in 2020 the Supreme Court ruled that Subway's bread couldn't be legally classified as "bread" for tax purposes because it contained about 5 times more sugar than allowed under Irish law - around 10% of the flour's weight, not 10% of the total bread composition.
The Irish law stated that for bread to be considered a "staple food" (and thus qualify for tax exemption), the sugar content couldn't exceed 2% of the flour's weight. This is different from saying the bread is 10% sugar overall.
The actual sugar content in Subway bread varies, but it's typically around 5-6 grams of sugar per half a bread. That’s higher than traditional bread but lower than many other commercial ones.
Yeah, well in typical ‘murican style, anything from that side of the pond is EU. The differences are too small for me to care to learn the details. All I know is that what ‘muricans call food is not what Europeans call food, and ‘muricans are wrong
Ireland is within the EU and uses the Euro as its currency (unlike when the UK was in the EU and stuck to the Pound Sterling), so you were never wrong.
What are you talking about? Why would you multiply the bandwidth? 8 4090s is still 1000GB/s. While the M2 Ultra is 800GB/s with a top of 192GB VRAM. Metal can access ~155GB, so you need a bit more, but your comparison makes absolutely zero sense.
There are different ways to run LLMs on multiple GPUs, one of them (called tensor parallelism) in low batch scenarios would be multiplying bandwidth between different GPUs. So no, 8 4090s is not 1000 GB/s.
I’m developing inference engine, so I actually do understand how it works. As well as other types of parallelism and how exactly they do different trade offs
Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought. Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to bootstrap a startup culture here.