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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"?

2 comments

> 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

Some products don't reach the stage of a public lawsuit, i.e. their fate is determined during private negotiations.

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.