In a week? Not even the US. Over a normal time frame? Two dudes from Stanford built Google.

Get over your America-centrism. The only reason the American Cloud hasn't been duplicated more extensively than it already has is that there's been no business reason to do so - it was cheaper to use what was there, much of which was in America, I'll grant you.

But give it a year.

America is yesterday.

No, Europe is behind. I know, I work there. Maybe not so much in talent, but in a way to leverage it.

As hard as getting a H1B is, as bad as the SW patents are, it's there that Google, FB, etc grew. And not "in the US" but in tiny patches on the West and East coast.

Don't underestimate the power of vision and drive combined (not forgetting very good sources of financing). Also, Europe (yes, I'm talking about Germany, but this concern others as well) suffers from chronic bureaucracy, while the Europeans are still thinking about something in the US it was already prototyped and generating a revenue. Ireland is the safest from this, but has other issues.

Europe is absolutely behind, yes. (I live there.) But not for lack of talent.

I'm a pretty flaming liberal and I stand behind unionization of traditional industries 100% - when you get to the point of large capital against a large population of workers, I believe Europe's model is not bad and far better than the travesty we witness in America, where the government is solidly on the side of capital. But most of Europe is absolutely horrible for small business that isn't working with a very, very stable business model.

In other words, if I'm opening a metalworking shop in Swabia, everybody knows what I'm doing, and it's going to be enough just to turn out solid work and treat people fairly. My market is predictable, and when I hire people, it's fair to expect me to have to jump through some hoops to let them go, because they have a right to expect some stability in this well-understood market.

But if I'm trying out a new idea - Germany ain't the place to try that unless I can essentially do it by myself or with a couple of friends. Their incremental, stable business attitudes are great for hardware, bad for software (although there are small software companies there that really kick ass, of course - in my experience, often tools used in industry that can work on the same industrial business model).

Fast iteration and early fail is not something Germans excel at - individual Germans, sure; German society, no no no. And that's true to a lesser extent throughout Europe. But it's been a key to success in Silicon Valley. How that gets implemented, I'm not sure.

But in terms of getting Europe off the American cloud - this isn't a problem. The concept of the cloud has been proven (except for privacy/security issues, obviously), and so it's far less likely that a given iteration in that space will fail. It's a good setup for European companies in that sense.

And again, I want to stress that the problem is not a lack of talent and that anybody that thinks that a lack of talent is the problem is deluded.

I think the real reason is language. Europe does not share one language. There is no European media, no European public, hence creating a brand and reaching a lot of people is infinitely more difficult than in the US.

French consumers will learn about a German startup only if it gets picked up by the english speaking media (which may take years).

I think European startups should look to Isreal for a clue. Israeli startups don't have a home market to speak of so they go straight for the US market.

Language is one reason, yeah; I'm not sure how strong a reason it is overall.

You know one very serious problem? Shipping. Amazon can sit in California and send something cheap anywhere in the United States, but if I'm sitting in Hungary and want to buy something in Germany, it might literally be cheaper for me to just drive there and back to get it, depending on the item. That really carves up the market into minuscule chunks.

Someday soon, somebody is going to start offering low-cost shipping throughout Europe and they're going to end up billionaires.

(Always assuming that this hasn't just killed the very viability of the Cloud concept.)

I never said a week. This will obviously take years. It's just starting - that's the point.

So what you're saying is that only the United States is capable of building cloud infrastructure, until people go to other places to build it there, from the United States. And your face is still straight. You exemplify the very attitude that's killing the United States.