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 an

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?