[jesstaa]

This is definitely it.

The best markets for selling software are the wealthy countries with their cultures. You need people in those countries that are part of those cultures to develop that software. So your employment market is limited by people within that culture that have that skill, which is why there is still a software development skills shortage.

For purely technical things like kernel, database, network or driver development the job market is much smaller but it's also much easier to move those jobs to lower income countries, which is very common.

But most software development jobs are at the application level where having a matching language and culture with your users is essential.

Something as trivial as a signup form that asks for firstname and lastname and then refers to the user by their firstname later in the application is something you wouldn't even need to spec out for an English speaking programmer. They would just implement it like that by default because that's the culture.

[chii]

But by this hypothesis, countries that have a different culture, but have similarly good programmers, would be able to produce a product suited to their own culture and thus out-compete the imported english version.

But this rarely happens, if at all. So there's something that's still amiss.

[Barrin92]

This does indeed happen and the biggest example is probably China. Wechat with its super-app concept has done something that didn't really have a Western analog. Didi replaced Uber in China, Alipay and TikTok and a lot of other apps constitute an entirely different, domestic ecosystem.

It's also starting to happen with banking / finance apps. Nubank is growing very fast in Latin America, Africa is starting to have a domestic ecommerce sector, and so on. The internet is new and many countries, particular developing ones that have a sufficiently distinct culture to not just adopt Anglophone products are only now starting to have the talent and infrastructure in place.

It's also happening in messaging. Telegram is overwhelmingly more popular in Europe/Russia than it is in the US. LINE is the most popular app in Japan and Thailand, Facebook Messenger and SMS still dominate in the US.

[st1ck]

China is not a free market, but your other examples are mostly on point. Except that Telegram (and Viber) are really popular only in a few countries. Most of Europe (and the world) uses WhatsApp.

[Frost1x]

And this seems to be fairly consistently true although there are other factors (e.g. does your culture attract talented people to technology or do they work elsewhere? Is there a consumer market for software in your country, etc.).

Other countries tend to use communication applications and platforms developed at or near their country (WhatsApp seems to be one of the bigger international exceptions from my experience).

There are a few exceptions to this where massive US companies have the scale to setup native teams in markets that understand culture well. Outside of that, it tends to fall apart. Some examples come to mind: Taobao, QQ, Baidu, Yahoo Japan, Weibo, VK, Aliexpress, Line, TikTok, etc.

(Note not all of these examples may be good because I'm not intimately familiar with all of them--since I too tend to use systems developed in my country).

Facebook, Google... they seem to span cultures probably due to providing services people fundamentally want to have across cultures. Large businesses typically have the capital to invest in addressing the cultural barriers and developing solutions.

Apple has a massive share world wide but when you look at Samsung in South Korea or Huawei in China, you'll see more adoption. Some of it may be nationalistic preference but I argue much of it is due to developing products/services that properly address demands in the market (which is tightly tied to culture).

[aikinai]

This is exactly how it works in Japan. The country lies in the sweet spot where software development will likely never be able to compete globally, but local talent is good enough and the cultural divide big enough that local players almost always dominate the global competitor (e.g. Yahoo vs Google).

[firethief]

It is much more lucrative to make the version for Americans. The other country ends up with whatever's cheapest to make, which is more likely to be a localization than a parallel effort (the better cultural fit for an independent product would not be worth the cost).

[PeterisP]

For niche markets this does happen, and for mass consumer markets the economy of scale comes into play, as the local market is so much smaller than the global market, or the English market, or even the local market of California (I mean, the state of California is economically larger than many countries, and doubly so for the premium market targeted at wealth individuals) that the local adjustments aren't sufficient to outcompete the much larger investment available due to a larger market. But for the larger markets this definitely does happen.

[petra]

Partly, this could be explained by culture: a democratic culture produced more innovation.

And the best US companies have developed an internal culture that might not be easy to develop.