WHY are European industrialists slower to make use of personal computer and Internet technologies than their counterparts in the US? I've been mulling over this question since I talked a couple of weeks ago to Andy Grove, the Intel chief executive. Grove was about to depart for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he planned to deliver a characteristically blunt speech.
He said he would warn the assembled political and industrial leaders of Europe that they were falling behind in the adoption of new technologies. He would urge this group to lead by example by making PC technologies such as email a fundamental part of the way they work. (Computimes, February 10th)
To me, Grove's speech was a salutary reminder of the cultural chasm between the West Coast of the US and western Europe. Imbued in the technology driven business culture of Silicon Valley, it is easy to forget that not every one shares the faith; not everyone believes that taking maximum advantage of information technology is critical to business success.
From this West Coast vantage point it is hard to imagine how any business or organisation could operate without email and a corporate intranet.
Hewlett Packard would function "poorly or not at all", if its email systems were removed, says Lew Platt, chairman and chief executive. "I can hardly remember life without email. It is woven into the fabric of how we operate."
At Intel, Microsoft, Cisco or Sun Micro systems, the story is the same. Corporate networks carrying email and Web pages are the life blood of these companies. Yet in Europe, Platt, Grove and others tell me, the chief executive who uses email is the exception rather than the rule. I also hear anecdotes of European managers who ask their secretaries to print out email messages and type out responses.
Used in this way, email is little more than a substitute for the fax machine, and an inconvenient one at that. It seems these managers are more determined to maintain their traditional work environments and practices than to take advantage of the opportunities created by new technologies.
I have come to the conclusion that this resistance to change has something to do with the pace of doing business in Europe - and for that matter the pace of life. Email vastly accelerates business communications. It enables electronic messages and documents to be sent almost instantly to anywhere in the world. It eliminates "telephone tag" and spans time zones. It cuts bureaucracy and leads to faster decision making, speedier deal making, and prompter customer services.
But email also places new demands on everyone to respond swiftly, to make quick decisions and to deal directly with co workers, customers and suppliers. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, for example, described at Davos how he starts his work day with screens full of email and frequently finishes responding to these messages late at night.
For Gates, his colleagues at Microsoft and their counterparts throughout Silicon Valley, this is a way of life. To others, I suspect, it is not an appealing prospect.