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It's a fair point. It is not a blind spot -- I did think about it, but I don't think I have ever owned an Asian-designed computer or used Asian-designed software. Ditto African or Australian, FWIW.

I once owned a 2nd-hand Sony Ericsson P910, an early smartphone with the UIQ GUI -- but this was a Symbian device with a Swedish-designed UI. I'm honestly not sure how much input Sony had. And I have a Playstation 2. My tablet is Chinese, by a Chinese company (Chuwi), but it runs an American OS: Android. These are about as close as I can claim, sadly, so I am really not fit to comment or judge.

Whereas most of the world's electronics are partly or totally manufactured in Asia, it's mostly by or for American- or European-owned companies.

I am aware of many fascinating Japanese computers and similar devices, from the FM Towns to the Pomera e-ink portable word-processors, to the MSX2 and MSX2 Turbo-R computers, which interest me greatly and I'd like to have -- but I don't.

The Julia programming language (AIUI, an Indian project) looks fascinating, but I am a poor programmer and old enough to find learning new languages extremely hard -- not something I would do as a leisure activity. So I have never tried it myself.

There is no lack of creativity there, certainly. There is a huge amount. It is just that little of it seems to directly influence the world market elsewhere.

Why that is the case is a fascinating question that I am ill-equipped to address.

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> Whereas most of the world's electronics are partly or totally manufactured in Asia, it's mostly by or for American- or European-owned companies.

Do you have a source for this claim? I suspect it's incorrect, especially once you stop focusing quite so strongly on CPUs and programming languages and start considering everything that goes into a computer or mobile device such as RAM and networking, not to mention displays, which are just as important as the CPU.

> It is just that little of it seems to directly influence the world market elsewhere.

In the country where you live, maybe. Aren't the Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean, and so on, markets part of the world market?

Maybe I have a different perspective on things since I live in Vietnam. But your article comes across as kind of myopic to me.

By all means please do educate me on what I am not seeing.

I once saw a British OS, Symbian, used around the world. I saw a Finnish company's phones used around the world. A little British computer maker designed what's still the most popular CPU architecture, ARM, but the company is long dead.

I understand many of the world's hard disks come from Thailand and Malaysia -- but from factories owned and run by Western Digital, Seagate, etc.

Yes, every country is part of the world market, but the salient point is who manages to break out of their own national market.

I am trying to think of Asian companies who make and sell computers or computer-related tech internationally. Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi... But they run American OSes and use American designs.

Sony and Nintendo don't, but then they don't make CPUs or GPUs, do they? Sony's PCs run Windows, like the Japanese laptop vendors' do. When Sony made PDAs, they ran PalmOS; when Sanyo did, they ran Windows CE.

American dominance was not so universal just 25y ago. Can we identify what happened?

Is this all "worse is better"?

> I understand many of the world's hard disks come from Thailand and Malaysia -- but from factories owned and run by Western Digital, Seagate, etc.

And the largest manufacturer of screens, ram, and SSDs is Samsung. When it comes to smartphones, again, Samsung is top, then Huawei, and Apple is third. Laptops? It's Lenovo, a Hong Kong company. HP is second. Game consoles? Sony and Nintendo are top there, MS is third.

(Edit: and CPUs, top is Arm, Japanese.)

Saying these companies don't impact the world market is just plain wrong.

I think his point is that they're all clones, or running American OS, or selling excellent quality commodities (in the sense that as a designer or engineer I don't care much about the part past its specs)

Lenovo -> IBM

Samsung + Huawei -> Google

SSD, screens, ram -> commodity

You might balk at SSDs being mere commodities (or screens for that matter). Surely Samsung SSDs and screens are better! Sure, and as a designer I might care. But I probably wouldn't, past the promised MTBF, viewing angle and contrast ratio.

Put the SSD+display+CPU together and you get, for better or worse[1] , a largely American computing device. You don't get a BBC micro or an Acorn. Or a Setun.

Nintendo is the only one who obviously stands out as different, making a unique computing device (albeit with an American CPU). Although even the N64 was largely an American design (SGI)

[1] I think worse, in the sense that everything is a Unix monoculture.

If all those things are just commodities, then surely the OS, CPU, and really every single low level aspect of a computer could be considered a commodity as well? Nobody's buying a PS4 because it runs a FreeBSD derived OS, nor are people buying the Nintendo Switch because of it's ARM architecture or that it has a Tegra X1 from Nvidia inside.

Components like the CPU and OS might be designed in America, but it's the higher level software development and hardware design that takes these largely off the shelf parts and assembles them into an actual product, and in the case of Nintendo that happens in Kyoto, not Silicon Valley. Is that really any different from say, assembling a piece of furniture out of materials and components sourced from around the world? Without the product design and assembly all you'll have is a collection of wood and nails lying about.

Same with the N64 - it might have been an SGI designed system at it's core, but through the guidance of Nintendo which developed the higher level industrial design of the console, the controller, the concept of using carts over discs, some of the more lower level OS functions, and of course the user facing software like Mario 64, etc. All the things that actually make the N64 the N64. SGI didn't decide to make a games console all on their own.

> You might balk at SSDs being mere commodities

Why would I balk at that? SSDs, screens, RAM, CPUs, GPUs, laptops, phones, and are all commodities. I don't care about any of them past their specs and build quality.

> Samsung + Huawei -> Google

Oh come on. That's some serious reaching to prove your point right there.

Really? I own a Huawei and AFAICT, the OS / services (eg the kernel, android, Google play services) are basically the same as what would run on eg a Google pixel.

>> > Samsung + Huawei -> Google

> Oh come on. That's some serious reaching to prove your point right there.

On the software front it's right on the mark though. Those devices wouldn't be much without Google. I know that Samsung in particular has had some other platforms (Bada? Tizen?) to try to break that dependency, but correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think it's been successful. AFAIK Google also has some kind of hardware requirements posed on the OEMs, so they influence hardware design this way.

Not in the slightest. Samsung tried to launch products that were rejected by Google via OEM licensing. Their commercial offerings are subject to external rules.

Every company's products are subject to external rules. All these huge companies constantly fight in court over trademarks, intellectual property, and so on. The products were not "rejected by Google", they were rejected by a court somewhere. And Google are at the receiving end of many such cases themselves, in many jurisdictions:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Oracle_America

He interestingly lists of DOS clones made in the UK by a US based company as an achievement in his blog post, but anything derivative from Asia or made by a multinational in Asia is not notable enough.

Certainly right now someone would be a fool to overlook Asian hardware companies, including examples you mentioned.

But a bunch of this is more recent than the time period the article is discussing, as the comment you're replying to made some mention of.

Symbian was a terrible OS that was impossible to program for and needed to die. iOS rightly changed the entire paradigm, and they didn’t have the vision to catch up.

> Whereas most of the world's electronics are partly or totally manufactured in Asia, it's mostly by or for American- or European-owned companies.

Top Personal Computer Vendor in 2019 by Market Share is Lenovo[0]

Top Mobile Phone Vendors by Market Share in 2020 Q1 is Samsung, Followed by Huawei [1]

Top Games Console vendor is Sony [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...

[1] https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/vendor

[2] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181129005477/en/Nin...

Playstation is pretty much American. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, its a division under Sony Interactive Entertainment, a subsiadry under Sony Corp America. Both the PS4/pro and PS5 were American designs led by Mark Cerny

The PS1, PS2, and PS3 were insanely successful consoles that were completely designed in Japan as far as I understand, so it’s still 3/5 for the Japanese teams.

Followed by Nintendo, running a Japanese OS on Japanese Hardware to play Japanese developed games. Have you not noticed the popularity of the new Animal Crossing during quarantine, or the outsized impact Nintendo has had on Western pop culture?

The switch hardware is pretty much a Nvidia Tegra X1 reference platform.

The last mainline console they designed was the SNES, albeit they've been designing almost all of the mobile consoles.

Mobile consoles such as the DS, very close to being the best selling console of all time? 154 million to the PS2's 155 million. The Gameboy is number 3 at 118 million.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_co...

Sure, but the example give by the OP only listed a Switch game.

And the Switch represents them getting out of the hardware market entirely by converging their mobile and home console lines and going with an Nvidia designed machine for both.

Like, the Switch literally has the same RAM chips as the Tegra X1 dev boards. That's normally something that you'd swap out just based on your purchasing department's relationships with the chip vendors more than anything else and you almost never see those carried over.

Did you know that Animal Crossing is a series of games that run on more Nintendo consoles than just the Switch?

Lenovo barely existed until they bought IBM's PC division. The brand is (was?) entirely American.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/lenovo/locations/

7 research centers in China, one in the US, one in Japan. That's from their US facing site too.

Just a couple more random examples of international sources of influential technology: the Ruby language comes from Japan, and has had a pretty wide influence. Lua is from Brazil.

As is Elixir (Brazil).

Note that for non-Pixel Android phones, the Android that it is running is only part of the picture, and is permeated with non-Google code. The hardware driver code (BSP, or Board Support Package) is an external part; custom frameworks or libraries to support product specific features such as special camera configurations or AI accelerators; custom apps such as photo apps, dialers, gallery, etc; themes such as Oxygen OS or One UI; cloud services that connect to custom apps. Your Chinese tablet might be from a smaller company which does not provide many of the above, but leading Android phone companies have large SW teams which develop these SW for their products.

> The Julia programming language (AIUI, an Indian project)

Nope, Julia is MIT.

Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral Shah were all at MIT, under the patronage of Alan Edelman.

You don't need to apologize. Not every blog post needs to include every culture on earth in equal representation.

Not in general, no. However, a post claiming that the US monopolizes all of worldwide software and hardware is incomplete if it ignores the output of an entire continent. Especially when that continent is the main manufacturer of tech products.