The US software market is the largest single market for software, single from the perspective of billing, culture, language, regulation and distribution. For a

The US software market is the largest single market for software, single from the perspective of billing, culture, language, regulation and distribution. For a product with very low marginal costs, the bigger the market the better, because you scale up more easily. Software has lower marginal costs than any other product category. It is basically impossible to launch a startup with such a big market anywhere else, except maybe china (and in china you do see that they didn't buy into US software but instead have their own big software players). A similar story exists around licensing creative works. In the EU you must negotiate licenses for every country separately, in the US you negotiate just once for all 50 states. If I had to guess, I'd say the scale of the US software and creative works market is the dominant reason for the observation you made, and patents simply didn't play much of a factor, either to help or to harm.