
Thoughts about the difference between European and American H/W and S/W design - lproven
https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/72876.html
======
esperent
This article has a huge cultural blind spot. What about Asia? Probably most of
the hardware in your phone was designed in Asia. Arm, originally from the UK,
is now Japanese owned. ATI is Canadian, which also doesn't get a mention.

When it comes to programming languages, C++ and C# were both created by Danes,
although they were working in the US at the time. Presumably because that's
where the money was. Does that mean the US gets to claim these languages?

Personally, I think it just invalidates the whole argument of what is American
and what is European. Creation of modern tech is a global effort. If you look
inside any modern laptop or smartphone you'll find that most it was
manufactured in Asia, and that the software and hardware design was split
between many different countries and continents, and that the actual people
doing the work are even more diverse.

~~~
lproven
Blogpost author/submitter here.

It's a fair point. It is not a blind spot -- I did think about it, but I don't
think I have ever owned an Asian-designed computer or used Asian-designed
software. Ditto African or Australian, FWIW.

I once owned a 2nd-hand Sony Ericsson P910, an early smartphone with the UIQ
GUI -- but this was a Symbian device with a Swedish-designed UI. I'm honestly
not sure how much input Sony had. And I have a Playstation 2. My tablet is
Chinese, by a Chinese company (Chuwi), but it runs an American OS: Android.
These are about as close as I can claim, sadly, so I am really not fit to
comment or judge.

Whereas most of the world's electronics are partly or totally manufactured in
Asia, it's mostly by or for American- or European-owned companies.

I am aware of many fascinating Japanese computers and similar devices, from
the FM Towns to the Pomera e-ink portable word-processors, to the MSX2 and
MSX2 Turbo-R computers, which interest me greatly and I'd like to have -- but
I don't.

The Julia programming language (AIUI, an Indian project) looks fascinating,
but I am a poor programmer and old enough to find learning new languages
extremely hard -- not something I would do as a leisure activity. So I have
never tried it myself.

There is no lack of creativity there, certainly. There is a huge amount. It is
just that little of it seems to directly influence the world market elsewhere.

Why that is the case is a fascinating question that I am ill-equipped to
address.

~~~
knolax
> Whereas most of the world's electronics are partly or totally manufactured
> in Asia, it's mostly by or for American- or European-owned companies.

Top Personal Computer Vendor in 2019 by Market Share is Lenovo[0]

Top Mobile Phone Vendors by Market Share in 2020 Q1 is Samsung, Followed by
Huawei [1]

Top Games Console vendor is Sony [2]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_computer_vendors)

[1] [https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-
share/vendor](https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/vendor)

[2]
[https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181129005477/en/Nin...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181129005477/en/Nintendo-
Number-Spot-Sony-2019-Game-Console)

~~~
bazooka_penguin
Playstation is pretty much American. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, its a
division under Sony Interactive Entertainment, a subsiadry under Sony Corp
America. Both the PS4/pro and PS5 were American designs led by Mark Cerny

~~~
knolax
Followed by Nintendo, running a Japanese OS on Japanese Hardware to play
Japanese developed games. Have you not noticed the popularity of the new
Animal Crossing during quarantine, or the outsized impact Nintendo has had on
Western pop culture?

~~~
monocasa
The switch hardware is pretty much a Nvidia Tegra X1 reference platform.

The last mainline console they designed was the SNES, albeit they've been
designing almost all of the mobile consoles.

~~~
esperent
Mobile consoles such as the DS, very close to being the best selling console
of all time? 154 million to the PS2's 155 million. The Gameboy is number 3 at
118 million.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
selling_game_co...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
selling_game_consoles)

~~~
monocasa
Sure, but the example give by the OP only listed a Switch game.

And the Switch represents them getting out of the hardware market entirely by
converging their mobile and home console lines and going with an Nvidia
designed machine for both.

Like, the Switch literally has the same RAM chips as the Tegra X1 dev boards.
That's normally something that you'd swap out just based on your purchasing
department's relationships with the chip vendors more than anything else and
you almost never see those carried over.

~~~
knolax
Did you know that Animal Crossing is a series of games that run on more
Nintendo consoles than just the Switch?

~~~
monocasa
> the new Animal Crossing during quarantine

Which, last time I checked is a switch exclusive game.

And my point anyways, is that Nintendo hardware isn't Japanese designed
anymore. Which is objectively true.

Their software is great though, and is Japanese designed. Their OS reminds me
a lot of Fuchsia, but actually completed and shipped.

~~~
knolax
Or maybe in 2020 the actual SoC is a piece of commodity hardware and claiming
that the SoC + support components is the totality of hardware design is how
you get constantly overheating iPhones that bend when you put them in your
back pocket.

[https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nintendo+Switch+Lite+Teardow...](https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nintendo+Switch+Lite+Teardown/126223)

I can't find any public information on what the Tegra X reference design is
without registering an account with Nvidia, but even if you're telling the
truth you conveniently ignore that said ram chips are made by Samsung.

~~~
monocasa
> Or maybe in 2020 the actual SoC is a piece of commodity hardware and
> claiming that the SoC + support components is the totality of hardware
> design is how you get constantly overheating iPhones that bend when you put
> them in your back pocket.

I mean, it's not a commodity. Another SoC means it's not a switch anymore as
the software is incredibly tied to the specifics of that SoC.

> I can't find any public information on what the Tegra X reference design is
> without registering an account with Nvidia, but even if you're telling the
> truth you conveniently ignore that said ram chips are made by Samsung.

Here you can see the Samsung K4F6E304HB-MGCH chips being referenced for the
Jetson Tegra X1 developer board.

([https://developer.download.nvidia.com/embedded/L4T/r24_Relea...](https://developer.download.nvidia.com/embedded/L4T/r24_Release_v2.3/Tegra_Linux_Driver_Package_Release_Notes_R24.2.3.pdf)

Also, Samsung isn't a Japanese company, so their chips being in there doesn't
make it any closer to Japanese hardware.

~~~
knolax
> I mean, it's not a commodity. Another SoC means it's not a switch anymore as
> the software is incredibly tied to the specifics of that SoC.

It seems that most of the actual OS layer of the switch is designed to be
hardware independent. I mean they managed to run Skyrim on ARM so it's not a
stretch to say it wouldn't take much effort to move to a different SoC. Maybe
using a different SoC would be difficult with Linux, but it doesn't seem the
case with the OS they're using.

> eSOL, a leading developer of real-time embedded software solutions, today
> announced that its µITRON 4.0-compliant real-time operating system (RTOS)
> and exFAT file system have been adopted in the Nintendo Switch™ game console
> developed by Nintendo Co., Ltd

[https://www.esol.com/news/news_57.html](https://www.esol.com/news/news_57.html)

> Supported CPUs are numerous. ARM, MIPS, x86, FR-V and many others including
> CPUs supported by open source RTOS eCos and RTEMS, both of which include the
> support for µITRON compatible APIs.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRON_project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRON_project)

> Also, Samsung isn't a Japanese company,

This thread started because of a statement on "Asian companies"

~~~
monocasa
> It seems that most of the actual OS layer of the switch is designed to be
> hardware independent. I mean they managed to run Skyrim on ARM so it's not a
> stretch to say it wouldn't take much effort to move to a different SoC.
> Maybe using a different SoC would be difficult with Linux, but it doesn't
> seem the case with the OS they're using.

There's no GPU shader compiler on the system, all of the games' shaders are
compiled for this exact GPU micro revision. There's a lot of other ways that
the games are tied specifically to this SoC. The closest you'd be able to get
would be running the games in an emulator.

> uITRON stuff

Their OS really isn't uITRON derived, but I can believe they took the exFAT
stack from there.

You can see the shape of the OS here, and it's pretty different from uITRON.
[https://switchbrew.org/wiki/SVC](https://switchbrew.org/wiki/SVC) There might
be a compat layer in the driver process for the exFAT driver though. They
threw in a FreeBSD kernel space compat layer for their IP stack process for
instance.

> This thread started because of a statement on "Asian companies"

That's cool and all. I was correcting your specific assertion that the switch
is Japanese hardware.

~~~
knolax
> There's no GPU shader compiler on the system, all of the games' shaders are
> compiled for this exact GPU micro revision. There's a lot of other ways that
> the games are tied specifically to this SoC.

You're missing the point. If they can port a third party x86 game using a
notoriously janky decades old game engine to ARM then they can easily move to
using a different SoC if need be.

> That's cool and all. I was correcting your specific assertion that the
> switch is Japanese hardware.

You were being pedantic about what is and isn't hardware engineering. You
can't just sell a bare PCB with a SoC on it.

------
theandrewbailey
This seems to be a list of things that Europe used to have. Here's some
counterpoints that you might be thinking of:

The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.

The best selling CPUs (ARM) are ultimately of British origin.

The Web was created by a Brit at CERN (Switzerland).

Raspberry Pis are quite popular, and British. (Also has an ARM CPU, and often
runs Linux, sometimes with a web server. Nifty!)

~~~
jjcon
> The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.

By a Finnish guy that moved to the US (and is a US citizen)

> The best selling CPUs (ARM) are ultimately of British origin.

The instruction set for the cpus originated in Britain (now japan), the cpu
design is almost all based in the US (Qualcomm, Broadcom, Apple).

> The Web was created by a Brit at CERN (Switzerland).

The web was started by a Brit yes, the internet started long before in the US.

> Raspberry Pis are quite popular, and British.

True

~~~
readmodifywrite
The CPU _implementation_ is done by Qualcomm, Apple, and the like. The CPU
_design_ is done by ARM, predominantly in the UK. The fact that Softbank
(Japan) owns ARM has no bearing on where and who is doing the actual technical
work.

~~~
jjcon
Not true - just look at the latest chip from Apple.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A13](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A13)

Yes it uses the arm instruction set, but it was completely designed by Apple.
This is identical to Intel using the same 64 bit instruction set as AMD... you
wouldn’t say AMD designs intels chips though.

~~~
kergonath
Apple is largely an exception in the crowd of ARM SoCs manufacturers, though.
A lot of companies just implements ARM cores, with their additional magic in
other bits of the SoCs. The fact that Apple does it does not mean that ARM
does not do any design.

------
zwieback
I grew up in Germany during the home computer boom in the 80s and there was a
definite anti-computer vibe at the time, my classmates thought I was
contributing to the destruction of the high culture that was so superior to
the US. Even though there were many cool platforms I think ultimately the pro-
tech and pro-business atmosphere in the US drove the smaller competitors in
Europe out of business.

Which isn't to say that European companies aren't strong in some areas. Here
at hp we love STM32 micros (French/Italian), German robotics and automation
equipment, optical equipment and of course ARM, which is a direct outgrowth of
the pioneering European micro culture.

~~~
pjc50
I'm surprised and disappointed that was the prevailing culture in Germany,
which is famous for its engineering culture; I guess that's limited to
mechanical engineering?

The British microcomputer boom had a huge boost from a classic "dirigiste"
state direction, involving the BBC producing a TV series to educate the public
and a matching computer to work along at home with. That led to Sophie Wilson
being hired straight out of Cambridge to produce it, and ultimately to ARM.

~~~
wink
100% - if you look at the landscape now, everything digital is still pretty
much new and not working ("Das Internet ist für uns Neuland" in 2013).

Broadband is worse than in other countries, government interaction is pretty
much non-digital and other things (there recently was a big thread about a
government game development grant that was so startup-adverse that the person
telling the story was lucky to not have been bankrupted) and it goes on and
on. Also remember all the pixelated houses in Google maps? I wanted to look
something up yesterday, image was made in 2008 and everything is pixelated.

Despite working in tech I don't see Germany in any sort of leading role in
anything digital or IT and this won't change.

------
Rochus
> Ada, the _fast_ type-safe compiled language (French)? Largely dead in the
> market.

Well, Ada was the language of choice of the US DoD from 1983 to about 1994.
And it's only dead if you ignore the millions of code lines (old and new)
produced in aerospace and defence.

> The Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon family, ... Largely dead.

Well, Pascal and it's decendants (Delphi, etc.) are still in wide use with
good tool support; obviously not in the author's field of sight here either.

> Nokia's elegant, long-life, feature-rich devices ...

Sunk by an American u-boat in the prime of its life.

Asians or Europeans are also behind many so-called American inventions.
Anyway, I don't understand what the author is trying to get at.

~~~
masswerk
> _Anyway, I don 't understand what the author is trying to get at._

It's about paradigms in technology deployment.

------
Spearchucker
When focus is quality, quality rises and costs fall. When focus is cost, costs
rise and quality falls. William Edwards Deming, an American, said that.

Whilst a lot of what Liam wrote rings very very true (I'm not Amercian either)
I think it's slightly more nuanced. Windows Phone is a great example.
Americans hate on Microsoft and so deprived themselves of the best mobile
phone OS of ever. Even today Windows Phone is more usable, faster, more secure
and better in almost every metric than Android. But Windows Phone is dead.
Same with the Compaq IPaq. It too was American and amazing.

I went through the whole tech cycle Liam did (started programming in '84), and
felt crushed every time another obviously superior product died. Apart from
the iPaq, some highlights in the mobile space alone are the Nokia 9000
Communicator, the Nokia E90, the Nokia N900, and the best device (my opinion)
I've ever experienced, the Nokia 1520.

Interesting that we as humans so often base our decisions on emotion rather
than logic. I now use an Android phone and no longer bother with mobile apps.
That sense of awe and wonder has been eviscerated, eaten up and spat back out.

Today's tech is throw-away. Watches, thermostats, tablets, light bulbs...
Delivered by Amazon this morning, in the trash this afternoon, making space
for yet another smart but shitty light bulb tomorrow.

I miss that child-like sense of excitement and wonder tech used to instill in
me...

~~~
CopOnTheRun
> Americans hate on Microsoft and so deprived themselves of the best mobile
> phone OS of ever.

I don't think that's a correct assessment for most Americans' opinions towards
Microsoft.¹ I also don't think that's the reason Windows Phone never took off.
When compared to iOS and Android, Windows Phone just didn't have the app
ecosystem to compel people to buy them.

1 [https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21144680/verge-tech-
survey...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21144680/verge-tech-
survey-2020-trust-privacy-security-facebook-amazon-google-apple)

~~~
Spearchucker
I believe the assessment to be true. Windows Phone was doing really well in
Europe. It was Americans who refused to write those WP apps that were so
desperately wanted.

~~~
pilsetnieks
Not even refused to write, refused to let them operate. Microsoft would have
made apps for the major online services themselves, if they were allowed to.
For example, they created a fairly decent Youtube app themselves but Google,
owner of both Youtube and Android, simply refused it access to Youtube.

------
mschuster91
> And I think a big reason is that Europe was poorer, so product development
> was all about efficiency, cost-reduction, high performance and sparing use
> of resources. The result was very fast, efficient products.

While Europe is poorer, the issue is not a focus on fast/efficient products...
rather that US companies have access to incredible amounts of "dumb money" via
pension funds that they can use to simply flatten (or buy up) any European
competition. Either via outright price dumping (Uber), via lobbying efforts
(Microsoft), by marketing (Apple) or by having access to _way_ more R&D
resources than European companies (Apple again).

------
elchin
A professor in my grad school told me once "In US if you try to create a
business and you fail, people will think you're entrepreneurial. In Europe
they'll think you're incompetent".

------
sriku
Ocaml - France? Erlang?

A heartbreaker for me is Mozart/Oz (Germany?) .. wish it was
developed/used/taught more .. "pickling" (in python) came from M/Oz.

------
nn3
His examples have so many mistakes, it's hard to take anything in this
seriously.

\- Ada (French). Ada is not french, it was developed for the US DOD. I also
wouldn't call it dead.

\- Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon: ... garbage collected ...: Neither Pascal nor
Modula-2 are garbage collected. Modula-2 and Oberon are probably dead, but
Pascal in its modern iterations is very alive and still widely used, apart
from having a significant legacy.

------
AnimalMuppet
> The Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon family, a fast garbage-collected compiled family

Pascal wasn't garbage-collected, was it? At least not in the original form.

------
mikorym
> Ada, the _fast_ type-safe compiled language (French)? Largely dead in the
> market.

Isn't this language used in the Eurofighter Typhoon?

~~~
sgerenser
I thought Ada was still fairly widely used in aviation software in general.
Perhaps not in new designs?

~~~
non-entity
From what I've seen in job descriptions for various defense related positions
Ada seems to be written in as a small "nice to have" and makes me imagine most
of it is maintenance or being replaced (probably by C++ too lol)

~~~
throwaway0a5e
Not much Ada was written in the first place. The reason you see it in job
requirements is because inertia and it's easier to slap those three letters in
there than it is to try to explain to someone that there is no reason to
require it on the job postings. Imagine if a bank listed Cobol on every single
tech related job posting, that's basically what defense contractors are doing.

------
GeorgeTirebiter
I do have anecdotal evidence for this (probably incendiary, but certainly not
intended that way) point of view: Europeans tend to love creating and
mastering complexity; Americans at their best despise complexity and produce
simple approaches that cover most of the use-cases. (Also, the author doesn't
mention the HP 200LX PDA - a full DOS box, CGA on which I have running a C
compiler, scheme48, RF design s/w and much more. Still works great.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX))

------
kanobo
Europe seems to me to have good intentioned laws and norms that stifle
computer related companies. 1) Very strong privacy laws and culture that make
it difficult for startups to thrive 2) Business and bankruptcy structures that
aren't as friendly to investors 3) More sensical valuing of companies and
higher risk-aversion

~~~
Uberphallus
This thing of running a company into debt while growing userbase until someone
figures out how to make money out of it is certainly not part of the culture.

That's what gave YouTube an edge over DailyMotion, they were pretty 50/50 in
popularity in Europe before Google stepped in to monetize the thing. I
certainly remember uploading videos to both platforms.

~~~
bsder
> That's what gave YouTube an edge over DailyMotion, they were pretty 50/50 in
> popularity in Europe before Google stepped in to monetize the thing.

YouTube was flaming out until the boardroom backscratch between Sequoia and
Google bailed them out.

YouTube was burning several million dollars a month on bandwidth and was
facing down billions in legal fees--both of which were rapidly increasing. It
was going to be bankrupt before the buyout. The buyout meant that Google could
subsidize YouTube for a very long time.

It's also not at all clear that we wouldn't be better off if YouTube had
actually gone bankrupt.

------
Causality1
I think the oversight in this article is the survivor bias regarding American
designs. There were plenty of those fast, efficient designs from American
developers but they too died in the avalanche of big-team giants.

~~~
magicalhippo
I also think it severely underestimates the advantage of having such a large
internal market.

Having access to a large internal market allows you to grow to a fairly large
size while still only serving that internal market. Then, when you want to
expand abroad, you're likely in a much better financial position to take on
the expenses of dealing with lots various local laws and regulations.

~~~
DoingIsLearning
> having such a large internal market.

... (I would add to your statement) with a large amount of median disposable
income. Adding to this, a large numbers of consumers who have access to
consumer credit and are far less reluctant to purchase on credit than other
nations.

A lot of countries have a large internal market but not all of them actually
have the purchase power or the inclination to spend on novel non-established
products as much as the US market.

~~~
TulliusCicero
> or the inclination to spend on novel non-established products as much as the
> US market.

Moving from the west coast to Germany was definitely a fair amount of culture
shock there. Americans love trying out shiny new things that are weird or
different, my experience has been that Germans are much more cool to that kind
of thing. They're simply less interested in novelty for novelty's sake.

------
dmm
> Use the most minimal, close-to-the-metal language that will work.

What? Javascript/Electron is super popular, way more popular than close-to-
the-metal languages for desktop applications.

~~~
FpUser
Not sure. I saw a lot of industrial applications and they're all native. No
Electron there.

------
catherd
There seem to be a lot of supporting arguments (look at all these dead
projects he deems to have been fast, elegant, and efficient, also, hey, my
current toys are not made for me to play with like I used to be able to, and
the battery life sucks). But what is the actual thesis?

It seems like he wants hacker toys and is unhappy that everything is built for
consumers now. I can't get anything deeper out of it.

The EU vs. US/Asia thing just seems like a weird proxy for saying real techies
don't like extruded technology product but it's what the market asked for and
now we have lots of it.

~~~
jiofih
What makes you think the products he mentions were “hacker toys”? They were
consumer products just the same.

~~~
catherd
Some of them were consumer products. But they lost out (probably) because they
were more like something a technical person would want and less like something
made for a consumer.

Would you frame the reasons they failed differently? If TikTok users and
gamers needed long battery life and elegant scripting tools we would have
them. But they don't.

~~~
pjc50
Psion in particular had a huge business following. Mind you, so did
Blackberry.

------
jhoechtl
There is much truth told but

> Nokia's elegant, long-life, feature-rich devices, the company who
> popularised first the cellphowe and then the smartphone? Now rebadges
> Chinese/American kit.

As someone who paod a lot for these early smartphones (N80, N800) they were
highly inconsistent. Maybe ahead of it's time but when the iPhone hit the
market Nokia quickly lost it's share for good reasons.

------
4cao
I think there is an interesting question here but I'm not sure I follow the
train of thought.

First of all, I doubt that whatever happened relatively recently with regard
to certain design choices in hardware and software is related in any way to
how different implementations of BASIC fared against one another in the 1980s.
Regardless of the conclusions, there are simply too few people involved in
making these choices now that also know what the situation was then.

As a matter of fact, one of the perpetual problems in the field seems to be
that so many already identified problems with certain design choices and
solutions to them are being forgotten, and have to be rediscovered again by
every new generation of programmers.

And I'm not sure how all this can be framed into the Europe vs America debate:
most of the big things happen in the US. Arguably, having a huge single market
and less regulatory overhead helps but it's also because this is where the
financing is. However, there are people from all around the world working on
these things, so to what extent the final outcome can be called "American" is
debatable. The founder of Commodore himself was a European Holocaust survivor.
And we really have to be careful lavishing praise on "elegant" and "efficient"
European products lest we forget about whom to hold responsible for
monstrosities like Systemd. Could it be just that we tend to remember the most
succesful products from the past, and those originating outside the US had to
meet a higher bar to become so?

Perhaps there is an argument to be made that at some point while stuff in
Europe was still being "built to last," American businesses have already been
discovering the allure of planned obsolescence. This would pertain to the
hardware side of course. As far as the software is concerned, I think
everybody just got lazy the moment they could get away with it due to the
rapid advancement in hardware performance. So from the era where you could
have Jet Set Willy or Dynamite Dan (platform games with dozens of levels) fit
in 48 kB, we've now "developed" ourselves into a corner where even winver.exe
(a program whose sole purpose is to display the Windows version and an "OK"
button) takes more than this (56 kB on my system).

While I concur this outcome is not desirable, I can't really agree it happened
because of "moving close to the metal." On the contrary, I think this was only
possible because of moving away from it, one layer of abstraction away at a
time. To paraphrase the quote attributed to Churchill, BASICs of the future
will no longer call themselves BASICs but I think if a BASIC was being
invented today, it would look like another JS and it would be part of the
problem, not the solution.

~~~
lproven
(Blogpost author/submitter here.)

It's a fair cop. It was only a blog post, dashed off on the basis of a FB
comment that grew overlong. :-)

I do not have a coherent thesis that I was expounding; it was merely a passing
thought.

I find it interesting, though, how the computer market has developed in my
lifetime -- I first touched a computer keyboard in about 1981 and owned my own
a year later.

In the early 1980s there were dozens of different manufacturers of almost-
totally different and incompatible systems, and it was quite normal for the
larger developed countries to have one or more indigenous computer makers,
often with their own architectures. Most used one of a small number of CPUs,
yes, and those CPUs were mostly American, yes, but I knew of English, Welsh,
French, Spanish, German, Norwegian, and Swedish makes of computer, to pick the
first few to come to mind. I'm sure there were many more.

Now I live in the former Communist Bloc, I've also learned of hordes of
Sinclair clones and other copies of Western home computers that thrived over
here, often after they were dead and gone from their homelands. I covet a
Didaktik Kompakt. :-)

By the 1990s things were starting to consolidate but there was still a lot of
variety, and major innovations came from other countries -- as other
commenters note, from Denmark, from a Brit at CERN, from a Swedish-speaking
Finn, etc. As I said in the piece, I used a Finnish cellphone with a British
OS, and so on.

But when the world market consolidated down to a handful of companies and
technologies, the winners were pretty much all American. The European software
luminaries relocated their and often became American.

And yes, I think the overall design ethos has changed as a result, and I find
that interesting. I have rarely seen it discussed. I often see people
bemoaning modern bloatware, but I rarely see analysis of why and how it
happened. This was my 2¢ worth on the subject.

------
oaiey
Also not to forget: American business culture is focused on achieving your
yearly bonus, means achieving your goals, means delivering the product you
promised.

Many European places are focused on quality and feature richness. That
produces delays and budget overruns.

As a consequence, American products are often first to market, get the
attention and the money. And often, they just buy the competition who has not
made it (European or not).

(and this is not only true for companies but also for managers within the same
multi-national company).

~~~
lewis1028282
I’ve never seen such an incorrect statement in my life — have you ever been to
Europe?

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Aeolun
You mean products in Europe are not focused on quality and just garbage both
in sales and time to market?

(I don’t necessarily think that)

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Scarblac
"Products in Europe" is ridiculously broad.

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oaiey
I agree to that. It is too broad what I stated.

