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It is very interesting to see the waxing and waning of technical skills and regions over long timescales. Both the Germans and the Japanese are renowned for mec

It is very interesting to see the waxing and waning of technical skills and regions over long timescales. Both the Germans and the Japanese are renowned for mechanical ingeniousness, probably because mechanical knowledge was increasing rapidly at the time they began to industrialize. Now that mechanical systems are being replaced by mechatronic systems and software, these regions are experiencing relative decline. I have always thought the US as the center of the global software industry was a bit incongruous given that this industry took root when the US was itself experiencing relative decline, but it's probably due to the invention of that other IC technology here, integrated circuits, more than anything else. For the same reason aerospace is still concentrated in the US. It really shows how the first mover advantage in R&D can confer advantages that last for over a century.

arethuza 8y ago
Aren't Germany and Japan still by far the largest exporters of machine tools - i.e. the machines that make our machines?
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Depends what kind of machine tools you're buying and whether you're counting units or dollars and whether you're including tooling in there. Like every other industry the cheap stuff at the bottom of the market moves way more units than the fancy stuff at the top (and as usual, a certain country in the far east makes most of the cheapest stuff). Yeah, central Europe and Japan/Korea are big players but pretty much every "industrialized" nation has a noteworthy share of the industry.
flexie 8y ago
The US is the leader of software 1) because software really got started in English. Since then it has been taught, documented, written about in books, blogs and tutorials in English, spoken about in English. Yes, there are translations, and in major languages they sometimes appear fast, but there is 100 times more in English, and you just don't get around becoming a great software developer without English. 2) because the largest software companies in essence make text based products. It's all about text on screens, text processing, text outputting and inputting. Re 1: A 13 year old Spanish, French, German or Japanese kid is facing a double hurdle when trying to learn programming. Would Bill Gates or Zuckerberg have mastered programming already as kids if to do so they first would have had to learn Italian or Polish? Other countries that either have English as a first language (UK, Australia) or as a strong second language (Netherlands, Scandinavia) do far better than countries where English is a mediocre second language. Re 2: Let's pretend that these countries that are not strong in English still somehow managed to produce vast numbers of great developers at a relatively early age, so that they have a large enough pool of potential founders of great companies. Could they then market their products at the local home market as virtually all the now great software companies did? Like Amazon selling books in Bellevue, Washington, Microsoft selling to hobbyists on the West Coast, Facebook to students at Harvard, Google at Stanford? For text based products (text on screens) that would realistically require they launch in the local language, just like their American counterparts did. Would an 18 year old Italian student have reached beyond Italy, had he launched his new social network at Bocconi? Or Twitter if it launched in Tel Aviv in Hebrew the first year or two? How far would Amazon have gotten, if it had started with the first 10,000 items in the store described in Russian? Microsoft DOS with Korean-inspired commands? How would a Serbian-first Google have fared in 1997-2000? Could it have beaten AltaVista?
- jackcosgrove 8y ago
  That's a great point. My only question is, would software still be written mostly in English if Fairchild Semiconductor had been located in Stuttgart? It may be so, given that English had become the lingua franca of what was after WWII called the first world for political rather than technological reasons.

arethuza 8y ago

Aren't Germany and Japan still by far the largest exporters of machine tools - i.e. the machines that make our machines?

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Depends what kind of machine tools you're buying and whether you're counting units or dollars and whether you're including tooling in there. Like every other industry the cheap stuff at the bottom of the market moves way more units than the fancy stuff at the top (and as usual, a certain country in the far east makes most of the cheapest stuff). Yeah, central Europe and Japan/Korea are big players but pretty much every "industrialized" nation has a noteworthy share of the industry.

flexie 8y ago

The US is the leader of software 1) because software really got started in English. Since then it has been taught, documented, written about in books, blogs and tutorials in English, spoken about in English. Yes, there are translations, and in major languages they sometimes appear fast, but there is 100 times more in English, and you just don't get around becoming a great software developer without English. 2) because the largest software companies in essence make text based products. It's all about text on screens, text processing, text outputting and inputting. Re 1: A 13 year old Spanish, French, German or Japanese kid is facing a double hurdle when trying to learn programming. Would Bill Gates or Zuckerberg have mastered programming already as kids if to do so they first would have had to learn Italian or Polish? Other countries that either have English as a first language (UK, Australia) or as a strong second language (Netherlands, Scandinavia) do far better than countries where English is a mediocre second language. Re 2: Let's pretend that these countries that are not strong in English still somehow managed to produce vast numbers of great developers at a relatively early age, so that they have a large enough pool of potential founders of great companies. Could they then market their products at the local home market as virtually all the now great software companies did? Like Amazon selling books in Bellevue, Washington, Microsoft selling to hobbyists on the West Coast, Facebook to students at Harvard, Google at Stanford? For text based products (text on screens) that would realistically require they launch in the local language, just like their American counterparts did. Would an 18 year old Italian student have reached beyond Italy, had he launched his new social network at Bocconi? Or Twitter if it launched in Tel Aviv in Hebrew the first year or two? How far would Amazon have gotten, if it had started with the first 10,000 items in the store described in Russian? Microsoft DOS with Korean-inspired commands? How would a Serbian-first Google have fared in 1997-2000? Could it have beaten AltaVista?

jackcosgrove 8y ago
That's a great point. My only question is, would software still be written mostly in English if Fairchild Semiconductor had been located in Stuttgart? It may be so, given that English had become the lingua franca of what was after WWII called the first world for political rather than technological reasons.