| 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). |