CORDIS Archive : A Letter to the Editor

A Letter to the Editor

InfoWin is always keen to receive user views on the Bulletin and News-Clips, but so far we have had little feedback. But what we have had is good. We are pleased to reprint this letter from a self-described "somewhat perplexed American" working at Delft University of Technology.

In the last posting [News-Clips Issue 09 of 15 September - ed.], there was a lengthy piece on ACTS - "The EU Gets its ACT Together" - which was quite interesting, though perhaps a bit self-congratulatory.

As an American newly arrived to work in Europe, I find the blizzard of EU programmes and acronyms a bit overwhelming. The piece on ACTS seemed to exemplify this most concretely.

On the one hand I read of much co-operation and cross-fertilisation, resulting in many new developments and lots of potential applications. There are many pronouncements about the Information Society, and how fast and well European countries are moving to capitalise on and compete in it.

On the other hand, I sense that there is still a degree of resistance to many technological initiatives, that things may not be as smooth as publicly depicted, and that in some quarters (the European Commission, for example?) there is seen a continuing necessity for programmes on a trans-European basis to get things going. For example, in the same issue, there was a list of countries which had not yet liberalised their telecoms sector - "Race for Telecom Liberalisation" - a list which seemed to contain many important countries.

Finally, I get the impression that it is mostly US and Japanese developments that find commercial applications and world-wide success, while European technologies and firms do so only occasionally. It is hard to imagine a Microsoft or an Apple Computer company coming out of a European context, not to mention many of the much smaller (and not so small, e.g. Netscape!) firms.

And in the applications areas, such as in electronic data interchange, banking, and multimedia, it seems also difficult to see how European firms can take a commanding position, dominated as the scene is by big telecoms operators or national champions (e.g. Phillips, Thomson, Siemens, Olivetti).

So, my question is, how to make sense of the image of progress on the one hand, and that of hesitation and delay on the other.

Am I wrong about my impressions?
What is really going on here? And -
(perhaps most important to me as a researcher looking for documentation!) has anyone written about this in a way that doesn't bog down in uncritical acceptance of government or business public relations?

Any thoughts or suggestions you have on this would be gratefully received by this somewhat perplexed American.

Todd La Porte, Ass. Prof. Systems Engineering and Policy Analysis,
Delft Univ. of Technology, The Netherlands, 18 September 1996.

Edited by Paul Bacsich, Sheffield Hallam University, 01.11.1996