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paul sutton wrote: > what do you think to this, > > http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=news.show.article.page&obj_id=130341 > > He seems to think the internet was invented along side web pages, but > thats a side issue, no discredit to tim, (the guy from cern) I think there are institutional issues in the UK that explain things as well. The only British Internet success of any size I can name was founded by someone descended from a Marquis -- need one say more? The UK is expensive place to do business, a lot of IT businesses I worked for hosted stuff in the US because they could buy servers and bandwidth cheaper there. It is also a larger market with one language, one currency, and lots of rich people, so a good place to sell to. Bandwidth especially was an absolute killer, with BT keeping the price artificially high during the big boom years. Fine if you wanted your business hosted somewhere inside the M25. Similarly the reason Ireland had such a boom was helicopter money from Europe, we were subsiding Ireland even after they overtook us on most measures of financial success. As he points out, some Brits made money out of supporting American companies, or companies working in America. I'd suggest anyone wanting to do anything like that target the US market before ours, even if they do it from Devon. Once one is selling to the US, in US dollars, it probably doesn't make much sense to base the company here, when you can base it in one of the corporate friendly tax havens in the US (or the channel, or....). -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html