Steven Den Beste has a lengthy essay on how the cellular telephony industry developed in the United States and in Europe, why the European cellphone industry is now in serious trouble, and why they pretty much deserve it.

I confess to a deep feeling of satisfaction about this on a personal level, primarily because of all the horseshit I put up with from GSM fans over the years when they talked about how superior the European approach to this was.

I had heard that HDTV technology has followed pretty much the same trajectory, though with Japan taking the fall for its technocratic hubris, rather than Europe.