Does it really make sense to have German posts on the HN frontpage? I am German and understand this one, but I think the value of the HN frontpage would be greatly reduced if half of the articles were in a language I can't understand (granted, there is google translate, but still).
I suppose people are upvoting the title, which is in English ("Google buys the German Groupon competitor DailyDeal") rather than the linked web page. If I had submitted this, I would have been tempted not to submit the URL but rather to put the URL somewhere "underneath" the title (e.g., in a comment) with a note saying that the purpose of the URL is to provide evidence of the truth of the title -- much like the purpose of a citation in a scholarly article -- in an attempt to signal to the reader that I was not advising that the average reader to read the linked page. However such a submission seems to go against the implication in the instructions on http://news.ycombinator.com/submit that the purpose of a URL-less submission is "to submit a question for discussion".
Look at the BMW, Porsche, Mercedes from the first one to the current one. Germans are incredibly good at refining and improving on top of a good idea. They do that with extremely rigorous scientific approach. So, the copycat is often better than the original, because they took the good idea and pushed it ahead.
This is what I understood from the German culture after living there the past 6 years.
This analogy isn't exactly the best, considering that Germans came up with a lot of the automotive innovations in the first place… I'd be careful with quick cultural assumptions (Germans this, Japanese that etc.), a lot more often you'll have to follow the money, i.e. investment, banking system, etc.
Less appetite for risk, less imagination, lack of critical mass for innovation, less cultural diversity, smaller language sphere. Much harder to go without income because of prevalence of longer termination periods for contracts, compulsory health insurance etc.
I actually heard an American say at a conference here in Germany recently, "you all get free health care, so it should be easier for you to quit your jobs and start a startup".
That doesn't seem realistic. We have to pay for compulsory health insurance. Lots of people get public which means it comes out of your wages or benefits (at around 13%!), or they go private and pay a fixed fee. Not having health insurance is not an option.
I went without income or benefit for one month here and people flipped out. It was not something that they had seen before, and freaked out mostly about health insurance. Turns out I was covered under my wife, but if I was not married I would have been in some existential black hole according to the authorities.
Do you really think this is something that affects things on a grand scale? I know, there's the whole "Ramen profitable" thing, but a) is your EUR 280 health insurance that much of an hindrance (compared with SF rents), and b) how many companies are actually built on months and months of founders working on a strict sabbatical?
Given that the average working hours in Germany are slightly lower than in the US and you get a lot more vacation time, there should be enough time to build something while working your day job. Never mind -- as you've mentioned -- the bigger opportunity to build something while you're on the dole – and starting your own business to get out of unemployment will even get you special funding from the state.
So I don't think that the "Because socialism!" argument is particularly poignant here.
I think the bigger factors why there are not big startups here are the same as for why there are no Hollywood-type movies from Germany:
a) risk-averse investors
b) smaller market*
c) no big incubator (cf. Hollywood / SV)
d) no "culture" (closely related to c)
Personally, I don't think all of this is really permanent or that related to the "nature" of a country's people. Note that there were some pretty big and well-made movies in the 20s and 30s (Lang, Murnau…), but not that much after WW2, especially in the Hollywood scope. Berlin (again…) seems to be collecting a lot of startup spirit, so I wonder how this will change in the near future.
*: Either "just" Germany, or you'll have to cope with all the legal and linguistic horrors that expanding to Europe does entail.
German engineers are one of the world's best. But german computer scientists/software engineers are mostly just pathetic. I'm working in Germany and it's unbelievable what kind of people do get a CS master here.
The only successful german software corporations are SAP (which are outstanding) and a bunch of digital audio companies. The fun part is that they are so successful at digital audio because it's mainly an engineering discipline and the software is just the smaller part of the effort.
I suspect it's all about the education. Where engineering study is really hard the CS curriculum is pathetic. After the first semester where they sieve out the total idiots with massive math abuse there's not much more than writing java applications. (Believe it or not - some weeks ago I worked with a CS Master on a project and he didn't know what a singleton is. When he discovered the all-mighty singleton hammer suddenly everything looked like a nail ...)
And the copycats ... well besides the StudiVZ which is a facebook copy (and now loses hard to FB) no other copycat made any real profit. All the eBay copies died. The most popular digg/reddit copy has 2 comments on the front page. And well, that's all. I think Germans don't really get it that a valley startup is mostly burning money to get huge and to find out if the business model is viable. The Germans start then a copycat and expect to make money from an unproven business model.
A friend of mine works for the work department and processes business plans of people who want funding (there's a funding program for unemployed which pays ~1000eur/month for the first year to help them start a business). And he told me once that besides the occasional kebap-stand one of the most common applications are for funding a social network type company.
>> The only successful german software corporations are SAP
May I ask how you define "successful"? Successful compared to what/whom?
>> Where engineering study is really hard the CS curriculum is pathetic
Here again, on what facts do you base this statement? The fact that you met a guy who did not know about a given softare dev pattern does surely not mean that no German CS Master knows about it, right? Further is CS all about programming? I don't think so!
How long have you been around in Germany? Did you study there? If yes in which university? Where do you work? Have you come around enough to get to such conclusions?
In general, I think that your comment is much of the reality and shading quite a bad light on "all" Germans in IT. I think you should not generalize, just because you made a bad experience once.
just the 2cts from a German, working in IT, feeling offended by such generalizing comments ;-)
May I kindly ask why you put "German" in there? Do you actually think there are no US (or whatever nation you are from copycat) startups? Is there anything special about German copycat startups? Do you have evidence that in Germany there are more copycat startups than in other countries?
Probably a reference to the Samwer brothers. Yes, other countries clone US startups, but these guys are especially successful at it. So I would take it as a compliment. Pioneers are the ones with the arrows in their backs and all that.
Hard evidence? No. And I'm not even saying that Germany has that much more (or more per capita) than some other countries.
It's just an annoying trend that I've noticed (and I'm not the only one, cf. links at the end). Don't get me wrong, there are many interesting startups, especially the smaller ones. But for a time there was an alarming trend of just taking an US product, and creating a German version of it. And then not keeping up with the original.
Of course it's never easy to say where you'd draw the line between copycat and competitor. Xing and Linkedin might be the latter, but StudiVZ and facebook? Quite often there's not much valued added besides the translation (myvideo vs youtube), and once the original gets a German localization…
The problem for me is that I'd actually like some German equivalents of some US apps (e.g. netflix, okcupid, mint), but I'd prefer if their implementors would add some passion to it. If you don't restrict yourself to German-language internet, some things often look rather familiar. And, as I said above, quite often that means that there's no excited (and exciting) company behind it, and so nobody will introduce interesting features in the future – or at least keep up with the interesting features of the original.
Who's to blame (assuming this is no figment of my biased imagination)? Hard to say. Maybe because there's no breeding ground for new ideas comparable to SV or NYC here (although Berlin might be there or almost), maybe because local investors are more risk-averse and if you show them something American that already has lots of customers/members…
It seems like a reasonable thing for Google to do, while I agree that Groupon and friends are probably a bubble, I think Google could turn it into a feature that their advertisement customers want.
The bad thing (to me, at least) in all of this is that the basic concept is great - but it cannot sustain the silliness of what's going on with investment in this rather limited space.
