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Comment by swebs | Hacker News Reader

>it's because Europe is a continent of 20+ different large languages and cultures. In Sweden everybody speaks Swedish and nobody uses cash. In Germany, nobody speaks Swedish and everyone uses cash.

How much does that matter though? You could just release your app/site/whatever in English and instantly have access to the US market.

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The same things that make it hard to make one app for all of the EU also make it hard to make an app for the USA from outside the USA.

Even if you hire a UK or Éire citizen for their English skills, you have all the cultural reasons that means Tesco isn’t a supermarket brand in the USA and Walmart isn’t a supermarket brand in the UK even though both are English speaking nations. The language issues are also substantial, even though the cultural output of Hollywood has made it easier for many EU citizens to learn English than each other’s languages.

Walmart owns ASDA, or at least they did until recently.

Yes, but irrelevant. The details of the Walmart brand are essentially unknown in the UK, and the very fact that Walmart are now trying to sell ASDA for almost the same nominal amount they bought it for 20 years ago demonstrates the exact difficulty I was referring to.

Because when I want to talk to someone for support, especially when it's a small business that might be slower to addressing my support concerns because of a lack of resources, I want to speak to a native English speaker I can understand with an 800 number.

US companies get that baked in. Everyone else has to grow to become that.

It does, the citizens of different countries don't care or know each other, anyone hardly knows how EU works or what people even do in Brussels. You have news stations that are literally for 300mil people. Same with every startup and product.

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