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Ask HN: How did the USA become the Technology Capital of the world?

by subhrm on 7/21/17, 8:32 AM with 4 comments

I have read that in the sixties and seventies Europe and Japan were also as technologically advanced as the USA.

But what has happened in the latter decades, that has now made the USA the technology capital of the world.

Now all major Software and technology firms (barring a few) are based in the USA. E.g. Apple, Google, FB, Microsoft, etc..

PS : This is an open ended question and I am looking forward to many interesting answers.

  • by johntdaly on 7/21/17, 9:23 AM

    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.

  • by Jaruzel on 7/21/17, 8:56 AM

    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...

  • by Boothroid on 7/21/17, 12:39 PM

    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.

  • by GrumpyNl on 7/21/17, 9:00 AM

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