Vittorio Colao offers blunt verdict on Europe’s tech lag

Vittorio Colao has delivered a stark assessment of the continent’s technological trajectory, observing that Europe effectively missed the major digital wave of the past twenty years. His comment reflects a persistent reality across European industry: while American and Asian tech conglomerates built the software platforms and hardware infrastructure that power the modern economy, Europe largely remained an end-user rather than a pioneer.

Missing a twenty-year digital cycle carries concrete costs for everyday citizens and local businesses. It leaves European consumers dependent on foreign hardware, cloud networks, and consumer software. Economically, it means the massive revenues, high-wage engineering roles, and market influence generated by tech giants accumulated elsewhere, leaving European companies to pay licensing fees to foreign platforms to conduct basic daily business.

Inside EU institutions, admitting to a missed twenty-year wave is both routine self-criticism and the justification for an endless stream of legislation. Lacking its own commercial tech titans, Brussels has positioned itself as the world’s chief digital referee. The institutional playbook has long relied on the idea that if you cannot build the dominant platforms, you can at least write the global rules on data privacy, competition, and artificial intelligence that govern them.

European policymakers are now focusing on 'strategic autonomy'—the EU term for cutting reliance on external suppliers—in hopes of securing a foothold in emerging fields like quantum computing and artificial intelligence. Whether regulatory clout can translate into tech innovation remains the central test for the decade ahead.