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Comment by courgette | Hacker News Reader

France had more than ok software company.

Bull for instance. Ubisoft and a bazillion other video game company. Alcatel / Lucent / Thales for industrial stuff.

For the deepness of my ass I would say failure was tree fold :

- France like a good old top down approach. That … mostly don’t work for software.

- France decided to listen to our American friends and sell the familly heirloom to the market. ( I’m bitter on this one )

- France like to do it the “right” way, and that is, of course, the French way. That lead us to build our own internet in the 80’s ( see : minitel ) ( see : point 1 )

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By that definition, Japan has its own software companies too. They are also big in the gaming world. I didn't check the numbers, but I'd bet it's bigger than France.

The US has won the Software (ie: not the games, but the core Software market) because it had pocket deep VCs that understood tech. Everything else is secondary. This is of course, my opinion.

Yes, even in games this is the case. Market leadership in gaming followed market investment. Japan had a large manufacturing presence in games from early on which propelled the corresponding software industry. And the US was pioneering in funding pure software businesses - gaming became part of Silicon Valley's VC pool in the 80's. In other countries, they faced difficulty raising the capital needed to grow as productions got bigger in the 1990's, and mostly got absorbed by US investment, either through acquisition or talent poaching. Ubi was a rare exception to this trend.

I'm pretty sure a story similar to this was playing out throughout the software world.

I think you are correct :)

I work in startup on both side, it’s … different

Yes. Also France made a real big effort to protect its agriculture, wine and luxury industry.

LVHM grew and flourished, but there was no love for the software industry. I kinda think there was no alternative scenario where it would have worked out, culturally most people really don't give a damn.

Also having a smaller internal market makes it harder to bootstrap new ideas to a decent size before getting it out. Even now successful startups might target France and Spain, but going beyond seems to be a very hard sell while the EU is supposed to make it easier in theory.

I’ve seen the market thing play out first hand : my former company was dominant in France ( in a tiny niche market )

But that was bringing just enough to get by. Then we expanded to Italy and Germany with great effort. Each country was a whole new market with different regulations, customer expectations and so on.

We ended up spreading ourself very thin.

In insight, we also made mistakes, but that was not helping that each next 500 deployment was a large, hard to quantify effort.

This is an aside, but you can explain the phrase "For the deepness of my ass"? Never heard that one before!

It’s me freestyling English :)

Just to say that I probably wrong / not very informed.

> - France like to do it the “right” way, and that is, of course, the French way.

Having a national identity seems to be a double-edged sword. Brazil's soccer team, for example, is expected to win the Brazil way, dance, samba, which even for professionals may be a subconscious distraction from seeing a particular game situation clearly.

All this talk about why the U.S. is better at producing software could someday turn into the same burden.

France also has CATIA from Dassault Systems.

Nitpicking but Lucent was an American company. A Bell Labs spin-off according to the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent.

It merged with Alcatel (French indeed) but that was in 2006. Well after the rise of Silicon Valley, right around the time of the Web 2.0 pivot.

Very valid nickpick. Thanks, I had no idea.

> - France decided to listen to our American friends and sell the familly heirloom to the market. ( I’m bitter on this one )

Can you please expand upon this, and especially what "the familly heirloom" references?

France holds their own in software IMHO: Dassault Systèmes CATIA is still a behemoth, for example.

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