Ian bell wrote: >> >>The Europeans are clearly one of the leaders in the Open Source >>movement, though I believe that is also indicative of the more >>collaborative nature of businesses and business partnerships in >>Europe. > > > I tend to agree. From what I have seen of US corporate culture, it is > very different from that in Europe.
I would say that much more commercial development is done in the USA than Europe. The European software industry is, by and large, limited to 'local' software such as accounts, web page content and whatever. I think this is a management issue most of all. Whilst technical staff seem to have no problem in pan european cooperation, small and middle sized companies tend to be very fuzzy at a commercial level when it comes to spanning boundries. Interestingly, US companies are generally far better at operating in a pan European manner than the European companies themselves. In my neck of the woods (which is near KiCAD's 'home') I know of **no** software houses which are creating commercial software for the general market. This means there are many capable programmers who spend thier days doing simple and unrewarding jobs such as report generation, and hence in thier spare time they like to get thier teeth into real projects. Promising startups in Europe, both OS and commercial frequently fail to spread out over Europe until they get 'Americanised'. Examples: Star Office was a German Office suite, and despite being developed just a stones throw from the industrial areas of northen Italy, it was virtually unknown here. The Star Office developers took the product to the US where Sun turned it into Open Office, and it has become well known in Italy. Linus Torvalds moved to the USA in order to further his career in Linux development. Likewise the german SuSE Linux distribution became much more widely known in Europe after Novell's takeover. By contrast, look at companies that stay Europen. Target and EasyPC are extremely valid products when compared with Eagle. Yet Eagle is far better known on a global scale and they have a distributor in Italy, which the European companies do not have. In the Italian electronics industry everybody knows of Orcad, Eagle, Protel, PadsPC etc. yet the two leading commercial commercial European competitors, not mention KiCAD, are virtually unknown. If Europeans, as persons, are good at collaborating, European companies are not. There are many attempts to change this at an EU level, for example there are incentive programs for projects which involve comapnies in more than 1 EU member state. And yet the culture does not change. Take the 3 EDA packages mentioned previously, Target, EasyPC and KiCAD. Target valiously attempt to maintain thier own libraries updatable via Internet, and yet it is clearly a strain to keep pace. EasyPC have taken the approach of offering a commercial extended library package as an "extra" in order to recuperate the costs. If they had any common sense they would get thier heads together and maintain a common library package in order to better compete with the American majors such as Cadence. In this ng there has been much talk about the library limitations and quality of the KiCAD libraries. I have doubts that an ad-hoc user contributed library could ever reach the quality of well maintained commercial libraries. Users posting symbols they create to a central site is one thing, but carefully maintaining lists of thousands of components is a boring and time consuming task that only an idiot would want to do in thier free time. So, EasyPC and Target can go one bit further, not only do they colaborate on a central library, but they incorporate KiCAD into the game, offering commercialy maintaned library packages for use with all the products. It is the type of collaboration that European companies must learn if they are to grow. But why stop at software. We are all in the electronics industry, right, and here there is little difference. My top supplier is Digikey. They ship from a central wharehouse in USA and I can usually get nearly everything I need from stock and delivered in 2 or 3 days. Surely a European supplier should be able to go at least one day better? RS have an Italian base, including a wharehose in Milan. But the wharehouse in Milan does not stock everthing, so more often than not the goods are shipped in part from Milan and in another shipment from Corby. Interestingly the UK package often arrives sooner than the Milan package, any which way the goods are shipped as two seperate courier deliveries. I imagine the situation is similar with the other local bases in Europe. But RS have nothing like the range of electronics items that Digikey have, and the prices are sky high. Would it be stupid to suggest that they redesign on the basis of single European hub? It would save them money (reduce prices) reduce courier costs, and allow them to stock a larger inventory. Farnell by contrast ship from the UK, but not all thier compnents are local, they have a partnership with Newark components in the US. But if your order includes US items then you get extended delivery times and major shipping costs.....you are better off just ordering all from a US major such as Digikey! Conrad are a big german distributor who have teamed up with Target so that target libraries even have Conrad part number and prices in thier attributes field. Great if you want to limit your design to Conrad components, but thier selection is quite limited and again sometimes pricey. But by now you have got the picture. Unless these companies start thinking on a true European scale with centralised operations and partnerships between themselves for stocking ranges of electronic components then they will find themselves struggling to compete with US distributors despite the (theoretical) extra day and costs in delivery times. And finally some self criticism. I am English but based in NW Italy. Here the electronics industry is very much in the doldrums, and I have to scratch around for work. I invariably scratch around in Italy, but have no excuse for this. I have worked with companies as far away as Bologna, Veneto and Rome. There is a thiving electronics industry in Munich, which is nearer to me than Rome. There is a splintering of electronics activity in the area to the east of Lyons (Grenoble is 2 hours drive from here). Not to mention switzerland (Geneva 3 hours) which whilst not being in the Eurozone does have trade agreements. Many people cite language as a barrier, well althougth I speak fluent Italian, if I need to prepare a formal offer or specification I invariably get it re-written by an Italian as formal Italian is very sophisticated. By contrast inter-european business, at least in western europe, is invariably done in English, where I am at an advantage. There is not even a beurocracy excuse. Dealing with other EU coutries I do not need any customs paperwork or anything, just a normal delivery note and invoice as I would need in Italy. Yet I don't do it. I cannot imagine a small company in Boston having a block about working for a comapny in, say, Austin or Seattle, but the geographical differences are far greater. On a geographical scale it is like the Boston based company looking for work in the Maine and ignoring e.g. New York or Chicago. So there we have it. We Europeans are victims of our own introvert and introspective narrow minded outlook, and it seems only American companies can unite us. Perhaps it is because American companies are full of people from different European roots. Let's face it, if you go into Cadence I bet you can find plenty of people from Italian, German, Scotish, English, Spanish ......etc etc origins. You will never find such a mix in a European company!
