While it's easy to nod along to the thesis of the article, I don't know that I agree with the examples.
Is the suggestion is that European business has been hollowed out to being nothing except a sales channel for imports really true? As far as I can see, manufacturing has been steadily increasing in the EU for basically at least 30 years, with the exceptions of two one-off events (2008 financial crisis, Covid). Likewise for exports.
And when it comes to telcos, why in the world would we want them writing their own tech? Very few of them have sufficient scale to make building their own basic infrastructure sensible. All they could plausibly be writing is value added services that nobody actually wants, rather than being dumb pipes.
(I do think telcos shouldn't outsource their network operations as a whole. Outsourcing individual commodity functions like DNS seems kind of reasonable though.)
> [...] European business has been hollowed out [...] manufacturing has been steadily increasing in the EU
Note that EU-heavyweight Germany has an atypical-for-Europe emphasis on manufacturing. Perhaps making those two thoughts compatible.
Also, people speak of US total manufacturing output increasing, while at the same time US DoD speaks of five decades of US deindustrialization being severely damaging.
First, Unix and Erlang are not good examples here. They were more like tiny research projects that escaped the lab. No particular economies of scale needed. In comparison to that, te technical artifacts these companies were actually aiming to produce (e.g. networking equipment) had hundreds of times more people working on them.
Second, Ericsson is not a telco, they're a supplier. Exactly the kind of entity that can achieve economics of scale on building say a mobile gateway router or a billing system, by building one that can be used by a hundred telcos, not just one.
Vertical integration did make more sense for the AT&T of old. The market didn't yet exist, or wasn't standardized enough, for them to be able to depend on that.
Well telcos did led the pack worldwide regarding networking and mobile coms (GSM started as a French acronym), as said Unix, c and c++, many mobile concepts and services before Apple and Google replaced those.
Is the suggestion is that European business has been hollowed out to being nothing except a sales channel for imports really true? As far as I can see, manufacturing has been steadily increasing in the EU for basically at least 30 years, with the exceptions of two one-off events (2008 financial crisis, Covid). Likewise for exports.
And when it comes to telcos, why in the world would we want them writing their own tech? Very few of them have sufficient scale to make building their own basic infrastructure sensible. All they could plausibly be writing is value added services that nobody actually wants, rather than being dumb pipes.
(I do think telcos shouldn't outsource their network operations as a whole. Outsourcing individual commodity functions like DNS seems kind of reasonable though.)