[Hello71]

small, niche startups usually have poor uptime on their services. we commend them if they have a year up (hell, if they still exist after a year), but criticize Google for being down once every few years.

therefore, if you want to bring in the analogy of startups and Google, it should be even more impressive that small countries (viz. people in small countries, viz. Cuba) live longer than Google (viz. people in large countries, viz. United States).

[EpicEng]

No, because the specific topics at hand are not comparable (service uptime and, say, physicians per capita). The analogy was meant only to illustrate the fact that you cannot (should not) directly compare statistics from such different entities without attempting to control for the variables.