Why Can’t Europe Do Tech?

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.