My guess is that HN will worry more when that turns true.
This is what I understood from the German culture after living there the past 6 years.
Less appetite for risk, less imagination, lack of critical mass for innovation, less cultural diversity, smaller language sphere. Much harder to go without income because of prevalence of longer termination periods for contracts, compulsory health insurance etc.
I actually heard an American say at a conference here in Germany recently, "you all get free health care, so it should be easier for you to quit your jobs and start a startup".
That doesn't seem realistic. We have to pay for compulsory health insurance. Lots of people get public which means it comes out of your wages or benefits (at around 13%!), or they go private and pay a fixed fee. Not having health insurance is not an option.
I went without income or benefit for one month here and people flipped out. It was not something that they had seen before, and freaked out mostly about health insurance. Turns out I was covered under my wife, but if I was not married I would have been in some existential black hole according to the authorities.
German engineers are one of the world's best. But german computer scientists/software engineers are mostly just pathetic. I'm working in Germany and it's unbelievable what kind of people do get a CS master here.
The only successful german software corporations are SAP (which are outstanding) and a bunch of digital audio companies. The fun part is that they are so successful at digital audio because it's mainly an engineering discipline and the software is just the smaller part of the effort.
I suspect it's all about the education. Where engineering study is really hard the CS curriculum is pathetic. After the first semester where they sieve out the total idiots with massive math abuse there's not much more than writing java applications. (Believe it or not - some weeks ago I worked with a CS Master on a project and he didn't know what a singleton is. When he discovered the all-mighty singleton hammer suddenly everything looked like a nail ...)
And the copycats ... well besides the StudiVZ which is a facebook copy (and now loses hard to FB) no other copycat made any real profit. All the eBay copies died. The most popular digg/reddit copy has 2 comments on the front page. And well, that's all. I think Germans don't really get it that a valley startup is mostly burning money to get huge and to find out if the business model is viable. The Germans start then a copycat and expect to make money from an unproven business model.
A friend of mine works for the work department and processes business plans of people who want funding (there's a funding program for unemployed which pays ~1000eur/month for the first year to help them start a business). And he told me once that besides the occasional kebap-stand one of the most common applications are for funding a social network type company.
It's just an annoying trend that I've noticed (and I'm not the only one, cf. links at the end). Don't get me wrong, there are many interesting startups, especially the smaller ones. But for a time there was an alarming trend of just taking an US product, and creating a German version of it. And then not keeping up with the original.
Of course it's never easy to say where you'd draw the line between copycat and competitor. Xing and Linkedin might be the latter, but StudiVZ and facebook? Quite often there's not much valued added besides the translation (myvideo vs youtube), and once the original gets a German localization…
The problem for me is that I'd actually like some German equivalents of some US apps (e.g. netflix, okcupid, mint), but I'd prefer if their implementors would add some passion to it. If you don't restrict yourself to German-language internet, some things often look rather familiar. And, as I said above, quite often that means that there's no excited (and exciting) company behind it, and so nobody will introduce interesting features in the future – or at least keep up with the interesting features of the original.
Who's to blame (assuming this is no figment of my biased imagination)? Hard to say. Maybe because there's no breeding ground for new ideas comparable to SV or NYC here (although Berlin might be there or almost), maybe because local investors are more risk-averse and if you show them something American that already has lots of customers/members…
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,779869,0...
http://venturebeat.com/2008/10/22/the-german-start-up-scene-...
http://www.thewavingcat.com/2011/09/03/defending-the-german-...
http://siliconallee.com/startups/2011/08/09/editorial-founde...
http://venturebeat.com/2007/05/09/samwers-bankrolled-faceboo...
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/02/18/the-samwer-brothers-make...
You might see a temporary contraction in the industry, but the model's not going anywhere.
