By editorial@silicon.com, 6 November 2000 17:00
COMMENT 'de is for Deutschland' - a reference to the domain name extension for German websites - was designed to encourage the relatively reluctant Germans to get online fast. It looks like it is working. The UK may remain the largest internet economy in Europe, but not for long. By 2004, a Gartner Group survey predicts, Germany will be out in front and if you combine the activity of these two front running nations they will account for over 50 per cent of a $1.2tr industry. The signs of this shift are already there. From the likes of Stephan Shambach's Intershop, Thomas Egner's Openshop to the relative old-timer, SAP, German ebusinesses are global players. T-Online is the largest internet service provider on the continent, while its parent Deutsche Telekom and equipment maker, Siemens, represent the high-tech establishment staking a claim to the new business world. Another player worth watching is media conglomerate, Bertelsmann. For too long it lived in the shadow of its partner AOL. Since that deal went west when AOL made a play for Time Warner, Bertelsmann has been setting out its own path. Owner of bol.com - the only online bookseller to give Amazon a run for its money - the company last week made an honest man of Napster's Shawn Fanning. It was a major coup. And it came from a German company. Conventional wisdom has it that Germany is 12 to 18 months behind the UK in the new economy and a further three to four years behind the US. If this is true, it may be to the nation's advantage. The aura of boom/bust that has surrounded the UK in the last year has not been healthy and although insiders are more than confident that good dot-com ideas will out, the frenzied environment is an unnecessary distraction. Germany has the opportunity to take a more measured approach. Today sees the launch of another dot-de - silicon.de. Sister site to the one you are reading now, it is staffed by Germany's leading business and IT journalists and operates out of Munich, which has one of the largest concentrations of high-tech firms in the world. It is a German language site for a German speaking market. But given the European - to say nothing of the global - nature of today's ebusiness world, journalists on the ground in Munich will be able to enhance the view of the world for silicon.com users. And vice versa. You can find our sister site at http://www.silicon.de .
In order to post a comment you need to be registered and logged in.
Log in or create your silicon.com account below