
Ask HN: How did the USA become the Technology Capital of the world? - subhrm
I have read that in the sixties and seventies Europe and Japan were also as technologically advanced as the USA.<p>But what has happened in the latter decades, that has now made the USA the technology capital of the world.<p>Now all major Software and technology firms (barring a few) are based in the USA. E.g. Apple, Google, FB, Microsoft, etc..<p>PS : This is an open ended question and I am looking forward to many interesting answers.
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johntdaly
If you remove Facebook from that list you will find the US is leading in
cloud, OS and hardware providers. If you look closer things get more
complicated. Samsung and Foxconn? Arm? If you look at the history thing get
more complicated too. Oracle swallowed Sun and got its hands on OpenOffice
(originally a German, commercial product) and MySQL (originally a Swedish
product). Those American companies are a lot more international then you
think. Also, if you look at Spotify, Elasticsearch and so on you will find a
lot of European companies. If you look at Linux and Python you will find a lot
European programmers. If you look at Ruby you will find a lot of Japanese
programmers. Here in Europe (Germany in my case) software looks more local
too. We use DATEV and SAP, European products that are huge here.

The US has a foot hold in a couple of markets and that is right because there
is such a thing as a natural monopoly or duopoly. We can’t deal with an
infinite amount operating systems and hardware platforms so now we have
Windows and Unix (the Macintosh’s utility for a lot of us programmers is that
it is a Unix).

What you should consider is ANDROID. The hardware it mainly runs on is ARM
(British), the Linux Kernel was produced by a Finish guy and by a lot of
international people, including Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians, Europeans,
Japanese and so on. If you look at the Google IO you should notice Sundar
Pichai is an Indian (well, naturalized American) and he isn’t the only one at
Google. To just hijack all the work done by people who aren’t American and
rubber stamping something as American because the company behind it was
incorporated there does a big disservice to the complexity of modern
technology.

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Jaruzel
I think maybe, you should look at this Wikipedia article, as a quick bit of
Googling easily debunks your initial supposition:

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

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Boothroid
In my experience there are many aspects of the US that seem surprisingly
backward as regards technology, and in which other countries seem far ahead:

-I see endless threads complaining about broadband speeds and monopolistic behaviour of cable companies in the US

-Public transport is poorly developed in comparison to Europe, with very little high speed rail for example

-Mobile phone coverage poor outside populated areas

-American cars still seem to be built to inferior standards of quality compared to European/Japanese manufacturers, and the overall stock of cars is generally woefully inefficient in comparison to elsewhere

-The latest medical technology is out of the reach of many due to exorbitant cost

-Crumbling transport infrastructure

Don't get me wrong, I love the US, but the perception that it's some kind of
technological utopia is not based in reality.

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GrumpyNl
What have lead you to the conclusion that the USA is the technology capital of
the world?

