I recently posted on this blog a summary of the Etats Généraux de l’Open Source (EGOS) that recently took place in Paris. One of the debates that I believe is an essential part of the process, is to understand why France is not producing more global software champions.
During Le Web conference last December, Informilo published this interesting infographics of “Successful European Venture backed Companies by Country” (you will find the original version here, leaf to pages 4-5 of the PDF publication). Informilo’s “success” criteria are pretty simple: they look at how big was the exit (IPO or M&A), or the potential exit for companies that are still private. Some of the EGOS attendees would probably argue that this is a very capitalistic way of measuring success, that the effect on software freedom, global warming or world hunger are more important – but let’s face it, software freedom is hard to measure, and unfortunately few software entrepreneurs have the power to solve global warming or world hunger unless they first make a ton of money (like Bill Gates).
Anyway, back to this map of success/wealth creation. It is fairly obvious that France is a distant third, far behind the UK and Germany, and not that far ahead of the Nordics or Benelux. Now, this map does not show only software vendors but also successful online companies and probably even a few offline ones. If somebody is interested in digging into the lists, feel free to post your findings as comments on this post.
Many attendees of EGOS debated that France is a fertile soil for open source projects, and that French engineers make great software developers. So why isn’t France producing more champions? Why isn’t there more “Software Ambition” in the French ecosystem? Why are French software entrepreneurs struggling to take their company to the next level? Or why aren’t they trying?
Yves