Having worked for both European and US companies, I would say that a) innovation is mutual (we learn from each other) and talent/mediocrity are pretty much evenly distributed.
The US has a more "dynamic" economy in some sense - for example the VC ecosystem is far better funded - but is detrimental in others (Byzantine health care system deters would-be entrepreneurs).
Guido van Rossum - Microsoft Distinguished Engineer
Bjarne Stroustrup - professor of Computer Science at Columbia University (City of New York)
Linus Torvalds - Nationality American/US since 2010 (should I write GNU/American/US? Someone educate me).
Erlang - I don't know anything about Erlang so I've got nothing to say.
Nokia - brutally ejected from the market by the Americans, bought out and sepukku-ed under Microsoft leadership. Now phones may as well be an Asian technology. Oversaw the collapse of European leadership in the mobile space, to the point where it is going to be a case study in how to fail at innovation.
Spotify - Leading EU tech success story. Makes up 50% of the counterexamples, along with ASML. Not detectable as a serious tech company when compared to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, etc.
HTML - I mean, we'd probably have managed without the Europeans on this one. Although useful, HTML isn't a very technical accomplishment. Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.
Most stuff you cheer here is basically a few tech giants out of Silicon Valley. The science kickstart for all that came from a bunch of scientists (like Von neumann) you got when winning WW2 from europe. In a time when many potential competitors were still rebuilding from ruins.
This is over now, europeans tend to no longer go to the us but still produce excellent scientists, Asian countries catched up and both continents start to leave the US behind in most aspects as a desirable place to live, except for 2 things: Military power and billionaires.
Enjoy your 5 tech giants while they last, but also keep in mind that these are international now and draw from nonamerican intellectual power also.
Don't forget that the USians would all be speaking Japanese if it wasn't for the technology they "borrowed" from the British.
American "RADAR" was a laughable non-starter until they got shown how to make magnetrons by Randall and Boot.
Of course Nokia was eclipsed by foreign competition (mostly due to terrible management), but it was still innovative in its time. Just as US companies today face competition from Asia.
> Although useful, HTML isn't a very technical accomplishment. Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.
Yes, but they didn't, did they? It's easy to look at something with 20/20 hindsight and say "anyone could have done this". Back in 1989 Berners-Lee had that insight.
a) blackmailing for some reason stops working
b) non-military related businesses are vanishing
c) increasing %share of your population has a degrading life quality
d) military costs become unsustainable for questionable ROI
… doubling down on military is a death spiral, especially when the funding money comes from slashing public services.
Yes, For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.