As an American living in Europe for the last decade: there are actually quite a few small tech companies that are quite strong in their regions. I’m thinking of companies like Allegro.pl, which IMO is better than Amazon.
The problem seems to be that there is no real coherence to expanding local companies beyond their origin countries. Partially because of other competitors, which each country wants to promote their own, and partially because the whole infrastructure for serving ~30 states is a headache.
IMO major benefits would come from investing heavily into translation AI tech. Europe will never have one main language, and so it won’t have the single unified cultural market that China or the US have. But that can be reduced dramatically to make it as seamless as possible.
Allegro is really a top notch service, they already scaled to other EU countries, I hope they will go global one day. Same for BLIK (instant payments with a numeric code) and InPost (very quick packages delivery to package machines all over the country)
Now if there was some kind of interoperability standard... but anyway yes I can confirm: most "local" cloud providers are much too local for the taste of big consumers, and those big consumers (banks, insurances...) usually dictate the market direction. What is also helping is the amount of paperwork the big tech can provide to cya reasons - apparently the smaller folks aren't trusted to compete on the legal fronts.
The problem seems to be that there is no real coherence to expanding local companies beyond their origin countries. Partially because of other competitors, which each country wants to promote their own, and partially because the whole infrastructure for serving ~30 states is a headache.
IMO major benefits would come from investing heavily into translation AI tech. Europe will never have one main language, and so it won’t have the single unified cultural market that China or the US have. But that can be reduced dramatically to make it as seamless as possible.