this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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It’s so weird that a continent with the population, education and wealth of Europe struggles with.. software? These are all solved problems and software development becomes easier by the day. Come on.
We only struggle with what we produce not being bought up by American giants.
Writing the software isn't a problem. Having the company survive is.
Ericsson was doing great until it got swallowed up by globalization.
The one-two punch of the US and China shuttered a lot of viable global infotech companies.
It would be interesting to study those cases, to see exactly what failed. We’re not weak and should be able to survive in „globalization“ context. Anyway, now it’s (more obviously) a matter of security too.
Europe struggles with agile, in my experience
Agile is just one possible way to organize things and many developers don’t even like it or think that it improves productivity.
The company would have to be suitable for it. Force fitting the principles from agile manifesto isn't going to be useful.
Why exactly do you think that Europe‘s failure relates to agile? To me it seems more an incentive problem, which would be completely outside of software specific methodology
How Lack of Agile Ties to European Tech Limitations:
Slower Time-to-Market: The tech industry demands high-speed, iterative, and "fail-fast" development cycles to dominate consumer markets. European firms tend to have slower product development cycles compared to US counterparts, often favoring long-term planning over rapid, iterative, and agile software development.
Talent and Structural Rigidity: Rigid labor structures and high restructuring costs in Europe make it difficult to pivot, scale teams quickly, or adopt flexible, "sprint-based" agile approaches, unlike US firms that can rapidly restructure teams.
"Middle Technology Trap" & Risk Aversion: Many European companies excel in mature technologies (e.g., traditional engineering) rather than the rapid, agile software development required for consumer internet platforms. This leads to a risk-averse culture, where firms hesitate to make the massive, risky investments in software that define US Big Tech.
I didn't say it's the only factor, it's just one I've noticed. Other factors might be more important. At the end of the day, it's not like we can run experiments to see how the world evolves with different factors, in order to know precise causality and mechanisms.
Oh, that’s how you mean agile, as in opposed to rigidity, long term planning, bureaucracy, etc. in that sense you’re fully right. Though I imagine that much of it fades away if the incentives are right (e.g high pressure tends to weaken bureaucracy).
There are other rapid/flexible methods without sprint planning, dailies, etc. but this might be a bit too detailed for the general idea here.
Yes, that's right, agile in its general meaning. High pressure could change things but it needs to lead to permanent changes in incentive structures, as pressures come and go too fast.
I would assume this is more a Finland specific problem, AFAIK Slovakia for example has a private cloud for all government IT stuff.
Though that might be due to corruption in this state....
They didn’t used to. England in particular had a leg up during the PC revolution. There are also a lot of really great game studios there in the 90s.
And to be fair there still are some, but they broke al lot of ground in the early days. I don’t know what happened; American enshittification possibly left a bad taste in a lot of folks mouths.
The studios are still there in a lot of cases, but they are part of EA or other giants.