Comments by "Martinit0" (@Martinit0) on "Why is Japan So Weak in Software?" video.

  1. Europe has tons of mid-size and smaller software companies - most cash-flow positive and privately owned - that serve some niche (or local) market. Most have no ambition to become a Google since they are already cash flowing for their owners. SAP being the one outlier that is public and became quite large. But there are dozens of smaller ERP software houses some of which only serve one particular industry. Also there are tons of open source devs/projects run or started by Europeans, Linux being the most prominent one. OpenOffice evolved from StarOffice which was a private German software company that tried to compete with MS Office (I know the founder, he now runs a small software firm (profitable) as he doesn't want the stress of running a big show any more). KDE was started and still has many German devs too. Let's also not forget the the WWW was invented and first implemented at CERN in Europe by an Englishman (Tim Barners Lee). Americans then commercialized it with Mosaic and Netscape.
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  2.  @tezcanaslan2877  That's interesting. I once worked for a European hardware manufacturer and we used to have a Japanese distributor who sold our equipment. They used to do very detailed Japanese versions of our data sheets (but of course they would confirm everything with us making sure no false data or claims were included). In fact if I wanted to know more about competitor devices best way was to go to their JP distributor website and look at their data sheets there. It was all laid out in great detail, just needed a bit of google translate.
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  3. I know an innovative Finnish software company, named M-Files Oy based in Tampere. They moved their HQ to USA not long ago - probably because access to VC money and developers is better there. In fact, they recently announced another funding round led by a US VC. But Finnish people still run most of the show.
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