1) Our culture: Coming from an engineer culture, France has always been strong at building infrastructures, don’t we have one best automotive highway or high speed train networks even airlines. It’s a no surprise that’s we have a fair good broadband network. As a consumer, you pay only 30 euros for a 20mb connection plus free calls plus 60 TV channels. Everything perfect but only 53% households have access to it.
But this time it’s not about infrastructure but about services and content
Didier Lombard (France telecom CEO) said
Contents are the oxygen for our networks
That’s my point because our culture, we don’t give enough value to intangible assets. We have very few online champions, really to few to catch the growth which goes to the US (around 80% of online media spending in france)
2) Our lake of investments: if you take a look at the The Global Information Technology Report 2008 ranking just released by the World Economic Forum, you won’t see big evolutions in the past 3 years, France (2006: #22, 2007: #23, 2008: #21), UK (2006: #10, 2007: #9, 2008: #12), US (2006: #1, 2007: #7, 2008: #4), Germany(2006: #17, 2007: #16, 2008: #16), India (2006: #40, 2007: #44, 2008: #50), China (2006: #50, 2007: #59, 2008: #57).
Knowing that a networked economy is directly linked to innovation and competitiveness, we will have to invest heavily to catch up with the 10 or even just for not been catch up.
Regarding point 1) and our 2,000 billions euros debt, It will need political courage and vision to make the necessary investments.
3) Talents migration: Due to point 1&2 and/or to our tax system, we face a huge talents migration and where we are still questioning ourself about it , others developed countries are already working on it (see Bill gates congress intervention here). In the past 6 months, every entrepreneur, I have met was considering incorporate outside of france. Fortunately, we have local initiatives (see my post on digiport) but it won’t be sufficient.
Conclusion: This is in this context that was appointed Mr Besson as Digital Economy Secretary of State. He will present his catch up plan for the french digital economy in a couple of months after a series of meetings with french digital economy leaders.
It will have to be ambitious, heavily founded and engaging if he wants to have the market makers behind him.
I wish him good luck, If this time nothing happens, I will also move east.
[...] I’m appalled. HADOPI is just another proof that France is stucked in the past, incapable to see a change in a positive and so unable to take advantage of it (you can also read my post on the french digital revolution). [...]