None of these companies except Nokia and Skype were even bought out by US companies. And those two are not exactly huge losses for Europe. The entire comment is BS.
The US doesn't have that much of a lead when it comes to hardware, especially chips, and is as dependent on Europe as Europe is dependent on the US in turn. Both are dependent on Taiwan anyways.
The US has a lead on software, mostly due to an inherent advantage of having a large domestic market with mostly the same rules everywhere, whereas the European market is as big in total, but unfortunately is divided into many smaller markets with fairly large differences and cannot be captured as quickly as the US market. This gives companies which scale nearly effortlessly from a tech perspective (modern software based startups) a huge advantage in terms of the available headroom for quick, initial growth. This advantage is largely irrelevant in industries where physical stuff must be produced and which are therefore hard to scale anyway, but it is almost a guarantee for a dominant role in the realm of SAAS.
So, no - there is no other world where Europe would have bought out US companies, at least not if we talk about Google, Salesforce, Oracle, etc., and if we talk about a similarly-structured US and EU.
The US doesn't have that much of a lead when it comes to hardware, especially chips, and is as dependent on Europe as Europe is dependent on the US in turn. Both are dependent on Taiwan anyways.
The US has a lead on software, mostly due to an inherent advantage of having a large domestic market with mostly the same rules everywhere, whereas the European market is as big in total, but unfortunately is divided into many smaller markets with fairly large differences and cannot be captured as quickly as the US market. This gives companies which scale nearly effortlessly from a tech perspective (modern software based startups) a huge advantage in terms of the available headroom for quick, initial growth. This advantage is largely irrelevant in industries where physical stuff must be produced and which are therefore hard to scale anyway, but it is almost a guarantee for a dominant role in the realm of SAAS.
So, no - there is no other world where Europe would have bought out US companies, at least not if we talk about Google, Salesforce, Oracle, etc., and if we talk about a similarly-structured US and EU.