The other night I was thinking about graphene. Not the OS, the material.
‘We considered patenting; we prepared a patent and it was nearly filed. Then I had an interaction with a big, multinational electronics company. I approached a guy at a conference and said, “We’ve got this patent coming up, would you be interested in sponsoring it over the years?” It’s quite expensive to keep a patent alive for 20 years. The guy told me, “We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it’s really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us.” That’s a direct quote.'
So, we absolutely can get stuff done, the Americans just keep buying us up (DeepMind) or stealing it or using initimidation (Graphene) or espionage (of Airbus for benefit of Boeing way back).
But you have to keep in mind that this is the same as not being able to get stuff done :) Economies don't exist in a vacuum.
If a US company can buy an EU company out,
* business conditions in the EU are not favorable enough for people to want to grow their business in the EU (they would rather sell to the US);
* there are no EU companies that are competitive enough to counteroffer (meaning the EU has not created an environment to grow competitive businesses).
"Getting stuff done" isn't determined in a vacuum, so unless the EU totally isolates its economy it has to deal with the fact that it needs to actually encourage innovation and business to be competitive and "get stuff done" on the world stage.
The US is isolating itself, that really only leaves China for Europe to worry about on these points.
China is absolutely capable of replacing the US as buyer of all the interesting companies, European nations can absolutely fail this if they forget that.
