Let's be real though. This is a result of Russia being completely isolated from most major internet services due to the overwhelming amount of malicious traffic originating from there, not any inherent superiority of Russian tech companies.
Not really, although I'd imagine some companies in defense space or those operating with consumer data might take stringent measures.
Russian annual Internet ad spending is just north of $2 billion (136 bln rubles, src https://www.vedomosti.ru/technology/articles/2017/03/21/6820..., US digital ad spending, for context, is $77.4 billion) and requires a business and banking entity setup to accept payments from other businesses. They recently started requiring anyone with a business entity to also host their data in Russia, and booted LinkedIn out for not renting data center space locally.
Credit cards payments are not widespread, so accepting consumer payments involves going through local transmitters (Qiwi, WebMoney, Yandex.Money) whose total volume is also low. English is not widely spoken, and at the language level Russian is unsuitable for drop-in translations due to flexions and conjugations being expressed by suffixes and occasional stem changes.
So overall it's a small ad market with complex payment setup requiring a significant investment just to get started. Most Western companies have Russia "on the list" when they talk about international growth, but it's an afterthought.
Can you please clarify something for me: Are you saying people in Russia can't use Facebook or Google because those companies block them ?
Now that LinkedIn is banned in RF (is it still?) there's a chance for moikrug or other local startups to come up.
In Moscow I have seen and met (including Yandex) dozens of startup guys copycatting successful US ones. I was always curious why they were more successful than the Berlin ones or other west and east European ones. My conclusion has been the cyrillic alphabet. Of course a country of ~150millions with CIS expansions.
I would assume China, Korea, Japan, and some south Asian countries with a different alphabet and a large population offer the same opportunity to to startups.
Curious case is India - and I don't remember they having winner tech giants except outsourcing ones.
Yandex - founded in 2000. Google - founded in 1998.
Predates for sure.
I'm originally from a very small, insignificant country that also uses Cyrillic but people adapted to the early days of the internet just fine.
English was relatively widely taught and at least understood on some very basic level, and people adapted the Latin alphabet to type out words, there's even a "phonetic" standard for using the Latin alphabet to write Cyrillic.
Most of my friends from that era never even used the (poorly) localized early Windows/DOS, it was all the US version of everything.
So Facebook for example is still the thing, and very well localized, although there are (for whatever ungodly reason) "local" versions of sites like YouTube (although YouTube is also super popular).