The talk I gave at the SDForum meet has now been slotted into the archive. It’s an hour long. I wouldn’t bother listening if I were you – I can give you the juicy bit in a nutshell.
I spoke about the old idea that Europe is approximately 18 months behind the US in terms of PC and Internet tech. My position was that this was true from about 1994-2001, but that this was a temporary blip, spurred mostly by the geographical and cultural advantage the US had in Internet adoption. Here’s the really fun graph:
I stole most of the stats for this graph from this paper. As you can see, between 1984 and 1994, PC ownership as %age of the population in the UK was higher than the US. The US sneaked ahead during a burst of computer ownership in the late nineties (I think perhaps spurred by faster Net adoption), but since then the distance between the two curves has narrowed. Or at least, I think it has – I had to a bit of extrapolation for some of the points on that last bit of the curve.
Here’s the other graph, which shows the narrowing of the “18 month” gap between the UK and US a bit more clearly.