Comment by rehtona

The US and China both have the "unfair" advantage of a big homogenous market. I think that's the main reason you don't see a Microsoft, Google or Facebook in Europe. For example Spotify, headquartered in Stockholm, initially had a domestic market of 9 million people. Spotify is growing fast, but again, not enough engineers would move to Stockholm to sustain a Google. There's a language and culture barrier between EU countries that just don't exist in the US.