Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

> Zoho started allowing African companies to pay for its software in local currencies. This decision has been a major reason for Zoho’s success in Africa as it allowed customers and potential clients to avoid regulatory hurdles around dollar spending

> Zoho has also been aggressive with its pricing in Africa. Zoho One, a bundle of more than 45 products

This is a major reason why Western products aren't landing as well abroad anymore.

This isn't the 1990s-early 2000s where your only options for software and hardware were Western (in reality only American and maybe a couple niche European vendors).

American companies need to actually localize and build the "cultural competency" muscle, which I feel a lot of Western companies lost by being overly dependent on China as a singular market.

This isn't 1989 anymore - Levi's jeans and Coca Cola don't cut it. Just about every major country is capitalist now.

American brands, technology, and R&D still have a lot of staying power and brand cachet (there's a reason Asian tourists love taking a selfie while touching John Harvard's foot), but there needs to be recognition that the delta between the US and other countries in R&D has drastically shrunk now that countries all over the world are much richer and have adopted American style innovation systems.

Localization and greater openness to foreign innovation will help boost our own products, economy, and soft power.

If we become too insular, then we doom our larger economy to the same mistakes France, Germany, UK, and Japan made.

Sticking to principles like Data Security, Privacy, and concierge Customer Support are legitimate differentiators that can by justified by customers to pay a premium.

View on HN

I am not so sure how much of your post really applies to this scenario.

Zoho has been around practically for as long as Salesforce has and they have always been the scrappy bootstrapped company that in my opinion focused on the small to medium sized business. MSFT is at such a large size that tailoring the selling experience to a smaller market does not move the needle enough to make a difference for the business. With ~200x the revenue of Zoho, it just might not make sense to focus on these smaller markets and being aggressive on pricing.

American companies do not need to localize or build cultural competency when it does not move the needle for them and I don't think we lost that by being dependent on China. I am not even certain how China comes into play on that front beyond outsourcing of manufacturing and cheap imports. Even for booming new economies like Nigeria, the overall benefit for larger companies is so small that its most likely not worth the effort for them to go down that path.

Zoho would have been American if Sridhar's visa process wasn't messed up. He used to live in Pleasanton like the rest of the Zoho founders, but they were looking at a multiyear GC backlog, so Sridhar decided to return to India.

I'd argue it's one of several pieces that show an issue of insular pigheadedness American institutions have.

This was fine when the rest of the world was much poorer than the US, but that delta has shrunk massively.

> American companies do not need to localize or build cultural competency when it does not move the needle for them

I agree to a certain extent, but there have been plenty of major fumbles in markets with large TAMs (Uber in ASEAN, Ford in India) that if there was a bit more localized market research done, they would have done decently well.

Korean, Chinese, Indian, etc companies are increasingly becoming competitive, and American companies cannot rest on their laurels.

The thing is that with India - for example - it is a relatively cheap market and those can afford expensive stuff, but western stuff anyway.

Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.

> those can afford expensive stuff, but western stuff anyway

Western, sure. American, not really.

There's a reason American brands like Harley-Davidson and Ford quit India, but Western (NATO+) brands like Toyota and Hyundai thrive in India, and Indian conglomerates like Tata acquired prestige western brands like Jaguar Land Rover.

Same thing with China and the acquisition of MG, Volvo, Lotus, etc.

> Also regarding visa - well there are more indians in the visa queue than probably multiple countries combined. If they make it as fast as other countries - indians will just move in millions and millions simply due to sheer amount of people they have.

True, but there needs to be a middle path between being selective but also attracting the cream of the crop. Take a look at the placement statistics of IIT graduates nowadays (2017 onwards) - barely 5-10% choose to immigrate abroad now, ad it's a similar trend in mid-tier Indian programs as well.

America's innovation ecosystem only worked because we were able to attract the best and the brightest from Russia, India, China, etc. Without that level of openness, we fall to the same pit of stagnation that Mainland Europe, the UK, and Japan fell into.

------

Both these points are examples of the insular mindset that is going to doom the US. There is this assumption that we have always been the best and always will be the best.

It was immigrants or the children of immigrants like Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, von Neumann, etc that ushered the Atomic and Information Age, and it was immigrants like Hinton, le Cunn, Bengio, etc that ushered in the current ML revolution.

Already, a lot of my Chinese and Indian friends who did their PhDs in EE or CS at programs like Stanford or MIT have started returning to China and India because they find the visa process demeaning and very backlogged.

> Western, sure. American, not really.

The thing is that I am not sure what american - that is not software services and some PC hardware - is even sold outside of USA. Coca Cola and McDonalds? But aside that I haven't see much american stuff even in Europe. It is usually german home appliances, local food, nestle (swiss) etc.

> True, but there needs to be a middle path between being selective but also attracting the cream of the crop. Take a look at the placement statistics of IIT graduates nowadays (2017 onwards) - barely 5-10% choose to immigrate abroad now, ad it's a similar trend in mid-tier Indian programs as well.

The problem is that even 5% is a lot. Like Indian's population is probably 2-3 times bigger than the whole europe. My own country has less than 9m people and my friend got his USA passport after 5 years only...

> America's innovation ecosystem only worked because we were able to attract the best and the brightest from Russia, India, China, etc. Without that level of openness, we fall to the same pit of stagnation that Mainland Europe, the UK, and Japan fell into.

One of the reason for western stagnation is just the amount of regulations. That's why heavily regulated industries are usually quite successful in Europe (like pharmaceutical companies), but garage startups? Not really. Sweden is basically the only exception. And UK (every 10 years lol).

> Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, von Neumann

People like this are exceptions really. Though there are always trends over the years when some countries produce more talents than the other. It is like there is a beacon shining at one point and a lot of talents are born close to each other.

> It was immigrants or the children of immigrants like Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Fermi, von Neumann, etc that ushered the Atomic and Information Age, and it was immigrants like Hinton, le Cunn, Bengio, etc that ushered in the current ML revolution.

You’re not wrong, but America won’t accept it. The middle class has been gutted, and everyone is scrambling over the ruins of it to try to land in the upper class instead of the lower.

People perceive those immigrants as “taking a spot” in the upper class, as if there were a deity determining how many rich people we can have at some inflexible level.

I think people pervasively underestimate the value of education, in literal dollar terms. The US spends a crazy amount just getting someone through high school, much less college and a PhD. I would be pretty okay with a visa process for anyone that has a PhD from a reputable institution (where reputable only means “not a degree farm”).

Having someone with a PhD immigrate here is like their government donating a half million dollars to the US in the form of paying for the immigrants education instead of us. Their home country bears the costs, we reap the benefits. I don’t even really care if they speak English; they’ll learn, or use a translate app, or marry someone that can translate or whatever. They got a PhD, I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

The only real risk is crashing wages, but in a globalized labor market I don’t know if immigration is even relevant. Even if wages did crash, that might be a good thing if the crash wasn’t permanent. Cheap research sounds like the kind of thing that might drive us into new technologies.

This is already happening in Canada and it is destroying many governmental services like healthcare, education, and of course housing. There definitely need to be reasonable caps in place otherwise services cannot scale up quickly enough to accommodate. I'm sure USA is like Canada in this respect; many services are already woefully underfunded or backlogged without even increasing immigration rates.

I'm also surprised someone who is more well-off would want to leave their country to come to North America. I would think their money would go much further in their own country. But maybe there is more to it than I realize.

> I'm also surprised someone who is more well-off would want to leave their country to come to North America. I would think their money would go much further in their own country. But maybe there is more to it than I realize.

It really depends on how well off you are and the reasons for that. Let's take my home country as an example.

We have IT people earning like 3-5x times more than the regular people (like you get salary 2000$ while the rent will be 200$ at worst, with average salary being below 500$. New apartments cost 100k in the capital but outside the capital even 40k is considered an expensive apartment). And we have police and military earning similar (and more money. Not to mention corruption). Both IT and police can afford buying expensive goods and stuff, can afford apartments, good food and so on.

Both can live like kings, but at the same time people are limited to what they can get and find in their country. It is like to be a king of the village - you are the king, sure, but in the city you have more opportunities, more advancements, more access to resources.

When I was leaving the country we did not even have Spotify, for example. And I was earning like 5x times of the average. But there was no point in that. And that's just a software service - there are issues with medication, education etc. So even if you earn more, it might not be worth it.

However in case of IT, it is not a problem for me to get a relatively decent salary in a foreign country while as a military person or a police officer it will become close to impossible to reach the same level without a lot of things attached to that. So for people like this, being a king of a village is worth more than being an average in some foreign country. But, each and every time, they are trying to send their children to a foreign country to live or to study.

And that's without people who have no opportunities or cannot learn foreign language and thus cannot leave.

In India you have extremely rich and extremely poor, coming from various developed and underdeveloped countries and all know English most of the time and often has IT education - with their much bigger population just sheer amount of people leaving will be a lot. A lot.

Thanks for that perspective. I wish there was more of a focus on people trying to improve their own countries versus running to another country, but I can understand why people would choose that option.

The problem I've been seeing in Canada is that we have A TON of new people coming from India. Aside from all our services being unable to handle things. The other problem is that people from these cultures tend to stick together, rather than assimilate. When the rates of immigration are kept lower and the people being brought in are more diverse, the problem isn't really present. But when about 90-95% of new people are coming from one country, the problem really surfaces.

People will say they are trying to get away from the bad practices in their country and that they want to improve, however in practice it doesn't seem 100% true. Many continue to operate the same way as where they came from. Especially since they can stay within their Indian communities and rarely need to interact with the existing population. Canada has now began shifting towards a more low trust society. Even things like food banks aren't save from many new immigrants as they are viewing them as places for them to keep more of their salary rather than as places for people really struggling.

And I think this is part of the reason many people start to become against immigration. When they see their own countries culture/norms/values start to get degraded. Many people even start to feel real hatred and racist feelings towards groups because of it.

To me, leaving a country for betterment makes sense in a way. But leaving to another country to copy your own countries practices just seems odd to me.

> Thanks for that perspective. I wish there was more of a focus on people trying to improve their own countries versus running to another country, but I can understand why people would choose that option.

Most of the time the improvements are coming from the top. So what usually happens - and we observe it over the course of history - countries reach peak, then decline and decline until they collapse or fall, and then again rise by using some external means (finding cheap resources etc). Every time you need the government that actually does things (forces/gives morale boost to the people) - or a revolution. Any other time it will be endless bureaucracy in democratic societies (nothing is getting done or takes too much time) or nepotism and corruption (with authoritarian flavor) in less democratic societies.

> People will say they are trying to get away from the bad practices in their country and that they want to improve, however in practice it doesn't seem 100% true

It is not true for sure. Especially with many people coming at once or forming their own small communities. When you are alone - you are forced to adapt. But when you are not alone you can keep your own culture and traditions without changes, while having benefits of a developed society.

I see it all the time - if you are used to throw away trash outside of trash box in your home country, then by coming here you will continue doing that sooner or later with more people from your countries coming here. Same with public transportation - in my country in order to travel from one region to another region, we used to have a train once per day. Per day. Here you get trains once every 10-15 minutes. So even if the public transportation will decline (fall apart, more delays and cancellations) I will feel ok (and a lot of people will feel ok) because I am used to such conditions and with bigger populations coming from the same culture and gaining rights to vote and so on - nobody will care about such things because we are just used to have it worse.

Or another example - in my country we are used to have fully crowded buses, coming every 30 minutes. Here if they cancelled a couple of buses and it would start arriving crowded, I would feel "at home" and it would not be a shock me and I would less likely to care about that because I simply used to it in my home country. It would be a minor issue for me. And you can imagine that with more people coming with the same mentality, it will just degrade the quality of living.

That's why adaptation and supporting the habits, rules and laws of your new country is important - because you came here due to them. You wanted to live in that "clean and nice country". Don't bring your bad habits with you.

This is really is opening too many arguments.

Sure American institutions have insular pigheadedness. Indian/Vietnamese/Chinese/Korean institutions are filled with corruptions and nepotism.

We don’t know for sure Zoho would have been an American company, I would almost argue that their success is because they are in India and can most likely build their product at drastically lower costs than in the US. This is probably one of the reasons they can target SMB, including emerging markets in local currencies.

No doubt localization would have helped but it’s again one of those things where there are too many angles to really accept what is the correct or incorrect path. Uber, perhaps it was that insular pigheadedness you like to mention or perhaps they were really dedicated on having a single app, with a familiar process globally. Grab is indeed hyper local but also drastically different depending on the region your in and is a much different experience than what Uber provides.

I could not speak on the Ford in India but on the flip side Tata could never make it in more developed markets probably with the lack of safety.

Many people thought Alicloud would eat AWS/Azure/GCP's lunch in the developing world, since they expanded really fast and priced aggressively. But there's a limit to what even extremely price-conscious customers will accept, and their service quality and support was just not up to scratch.

Chinese manufacturers are steadily creeping upmarket though: Haier, BYD, Xiaomi, DJI, Anker etc are all producing increasingly solid hardware with software that's distinctly not great, but tolerable (and certainly good enough to compete with Japan/Korea, who don't exactly shine on this front either).

> But there's a limit to what even extremely price-conscious customers will accept, and their service quality and support was just not up to scratch

I totally agree! I've worked on Chinese CSPs and they are annoying. IMO they could have been much better, but they are extremely insular and fall into the same trap of lack of localization that I mentioned in my comment.

Those companies you listed, especially DJI and Anker, are the exception rather than the rule. In my experience living there for 6 years, Chinese companies at all levels tend to cut corners too easily and focus on short-term profits. Very few are capable or willing to put in what it takes to establish a brand that can compete with Western brands. DJI was helped by being in a relatively new market without long-establish brands, Anker to a similar extent (and also produces less expensive products). It's much easier to buy a foreign brand (like Geely with Volvo) than to try to establish your own brand internationally. Even huge companies like BYD, Huawai, and Xiomi (smaller but very popular in China) have not made headway except in less developed countries.

> American companies need to actually localize and build the "cultural competency"

Not gonna happen.

It's much easier to manage a company that has all-American culture, and American market is the biggest anyway, so it makes sense to focus on it as the priority #1 because that's how you achieve fastest growth.

When a local company starts growing too much and threatens your business, you just buy it and allow it to run as a subsidiary. All the money, none of the effort.

> Not gonna happen

Depending on the market and industry, it's already started. Take a look at Google and Meta's ad buy in India, Brazil, and Indonesia for example.

> When a local company starts growing too much and threatens your business, you just buy it and allow it to run as a subsidiary. All the money, none of the effort

Some do attempt this (eg. Walmart's acquisition of Flipkart) but it doesn't always succeed.

For example, Zoho was an acquisition target of Google and Yahoo back in the day.

And most countries have regulators that try to bar this kind of a move for competitive reasons.

For example, it was Chinese regulators that crashed Intel's attempt at acquiring Tower, and Broadcom's attempt at acquiring Qualcomm, and there's the whole sordid saga around Carl Ghosn's tenure at Nissan.

I'm completely OK with American brands making Americans their primary target again.

By becoming completely insular, you lose the ability to innovate, as you cater to a subset of consumers and as such aren't being pushed to test the limits of the existing status quo.

For example, look at what happened to Sony - they were a darling of the Consumer Technology space and the Apple of the 1990s-early 2000s, but because they concentrating on the Japanese market at the expense of the global market, they fell drastically behind in innovation.

A similar story happened with Nokia, RIM, GM, etc as well.

Competition from players like BYD, DJI, and Huawei has helped incentivize innovation in the Li-on Battery space (eg. Panasonic, Tesla), the low budget drone space (eg. Andruil, Skydio), and 5-6G sector (eg. Cradlepoint, Qualcomm)

An insular America is an uncompetitive America. An uncompetitive America is a weaker America. A weaker America opens political vacuums from the Red Sea to Central Africa to Myanmar.

I think the key word there was 'primary'. I think it's okay to have a main audience in mind that isn't the entire world.

Primary implies the lack of localization, and localization is a critical piece of innovation, as it forces you to consider additional user experience enhancements.

From a typography standpoint, think about how you would represent Hudum versus Latin fonts on a mobile app or PWA now that Mongolia is deprecating Cyrillic script.

On the Cloud side, a lot of major K8s orchestration and edge computing innovations were sparked by Chinese telcos and tech vendors trying to work around GFW related latency issues.

> Primary implies the lack of localization

No, it doesn't.

It absolutely does as a PM or EM.

If my feature's primary market is the US, I'm not going to prioritize Japanese localization or GDPR compliance. Those two epics will remain in the backlog until a sufficiently large enough opportunity arises to justify a pivot to meet those feature requests.

I am not going to justify limited engineering resources to localization if the localization isn't aimed at my primary market.

This is why GOOG or MSFT haven't prioritized building billing infrastructure for Naira, but something a company like Zoho absolutely can.

My hunch is Zoho is using Razorpay (YC W15) for payments, and Razorpay has been pivoting to support the Africa and ASEAN markets (like most Indian companies have been for decades).

> On the Cloud side, a lot of major K8s orchestration and edge computing innovations were sparked by Chinese telcos and tech vendors trying to work around GFW related latency issues.

Is there publicly available information on this?

Did you read the article? The whole point is that African companies are replacing GOOG and MSFT with Zoho because Zoho is more responsive to their needs.

Increasingly, American companies cannot expect to succeed internationally on the strength of brand alone, if they are not willing to customize their product and service offerings to meet local requirements.

>A weaker America opens political vacuums from the Red Sea to Central Africa to Myanmar.

I'm 100% OK with this. If we need to become weaker in order to shrink the size of our military, then we should do exactly that.

The resulting global conflicts will be painful for everyone, including the US itself.

Deterrence is better than response. See Yemen

Would you trade geopolitical places with China?

This is why China is investing so heavily in EVs and green energy. They don’t want to have to go to war over oil in the future, and they would rather be immune to oil price fluctuations. Same with imported coal and natural gas. It is just as much about national security as it is about environment.

The USA could do the same, but it produces a lot of oil and gas so there is more resistance against it. But they make those a part of the world market, so whenever Russia or the Middle East go nuts, the price of oil rises and affects consumers at home as well as allies, and we feel compelled to be implied militarily.

That is a less than smart attitude on it. I don't think you have really thought that through.

56% of Apple's revenue is from outside the US. 38% of Boeing's revenue is from outside the US. 58% of Caterpillar's revenue is from outside the US. (Those are the first three companies I checked.)

If American companies took the attitude "America #1, we don't need foreign customers," I don't think you would like the impact the resulting revenue loss would have on the American economy.

100% agree, than you.

May I ask, where do you find those numbers? Did you actually go to their earnings reports one by one, or is there an easier way?

But overall total trade deficit is still lopsided correct?

I'm all for increasing exports. What markets are untapped where something could be made in US and exported.

Apple doesn’t make much hardware in the USA anymore, so you have to count the software and hardware IP from the actually hardware/finished product, so accounting what percent of value for an iPhone is generated in China/other countries vs the USA. For Boeing it’s slightly easier, but they also have an international supply chain.

> on the American economy

looks upward for the trickling down implied here

Add up the employees those companies employ in America and multiply that by their respective proportion of foreign revenue. That's the trickle-down.

Americans are out of money and wall street needs to keep the ponzi of infinite growth going.

This is loser talk.

If you want to grow, you target customers, not Americans or American customers.

Is it some sort of MATA (with T standing for "Target")?

US is tiny. Sure, economy is currently a multiplier, but less than 5% of world population lives in US.

If you are a bit smart and grok those numbers, you will leave such... non-smart opinions behind, or competition will steam roll you.

Or don't, rest of the world deserves some good economical growth too, much more than spoiled west TBH.

The problem is that with giant trade deficits since the the Reagan Era, either Americans scale down their consumption habits by a lot, or America needs to export more.

America can't rely on the global appetite for the US dollar and US Treasury Bonds forever to keep consuming what other countries consume.

The Petro Dollar is not going anywhere anytime soon, but it definitely has a future expiration date. The global demand for the dollar and US bonds won't disappear tomorrow, but it will cool down somewhere in the future, and thus America can't let go of international markets, unless it wants to downsize a lot.

And the problem with Downsizing is that due to the absurd levels of wealth concentration, the middle-class and the poor are really poorly equipped for such a thing.

We are not on the 50's and 60's anymore when the US share of the global GDP was almost half of it, if we measure it using PPP, it is only about 15%, less than China. America can't just rest on its laurels, it needs to be globally competitive.

Hello alephnerd, Loved reading your insights. I am one of the editors of this story, and I was surprised when the reporters told me that most other tools (Google and Microsoft) did not allow African entrepreneurs to pay in local currencies. That does seem like something that can be easily fixed, if there's will. Here's hoping that all global companies make the playing field even for all global entrepreneurs.

My hunch is Zoho is using Razorpay (YC W15) internally for payments.

A company like GOOG can't justify using a product like Razorpay that is directly competing with internal platforms.

> That does seem like something that can be easily fixed

It's a very hard problem due to KYC, AML, and a multitude of other compliance and legal headaches. That's why Stripe and Razorpay can justify multi-billion dollar valuations.

> A company like GOOG can't justify using a product like Razorpay that is directly competing with internal platforms.

This does seem silly, though, even though it's probably already obvious to say. If they want to build something, and why not, build an integrating service over the top of that one and the internal ones, and figure out how to select the one to use based on the currency/location/etc.

No company ever pays a competitor.

It's partially for financial reasons (why should I pay you to undermine my lead) as well as competitive (the competitor can extrapolate our own internal trends, and then potentially use it against us in competitive deals).

This is why Walmart is famous for forcing every single one of it's vendors not use Amazon services in a Walmart related SKU (eg. If I'm selling a SaaS to Walmart, I either need to migrate the Walmart portion to GCP or Azure, or not get the Walmart contract).

>No company ever pays a competitor.

Didn't Apple use a bunch of Samsung components in the iPhone for years?

It was because they had no choice.

Samsung holds the patent and all the IP for OLED displays.

The moment a Samsung competitor is large enough, they move to them. For example, switching from Samsung foundaries to TSMC by 2018.

Apple also buys Google Cloud products for iCloud even though there are alternatives that don't have rival mobile platforms.

If Google used market research from Cloud customer usage patterns to bolster its Android products, then I would expect various regulatory agencies to start knocking on our door with (more) antitrust action and calling for a breakup of the company.

Similarly, I'd be surprised if Samsung uses its foundry customer data for market research for its smartphone segment.

> Apple also buys Google Cloud products for iCloud even though there are alternatives that don't have rival mobile platforms.

GCP is separate from Google. While they're both Alphabet subsidiaries, the pot of money used by GCP is separate from the pot of money used by the Pixel team (within Google).

Kurien doesn't report to Pichai and vice versa.

> then I would expect various regulatory agencies to start knocking on our door with (more) antitrust action and calling for a breakup of the company

This falls under "competitive intelligence" which ISN'T treated as corporate espionage legally, because you are extrapolating data from sources.

As I've mentioned on here before, Competitive Intel is SOP for all companies, and every largeish (post-Series D) company has a CompIntel department under their PM or PMM org.

> GCP is separate from Google. While they're both Alphabet subsidiaries, the pot of money used by GCP is separate from the pot of money used by the Pixel team (within Google).

> Kurien doesn't report to Pichai and vice versa.

This is patently false. Thomas Kurian reports directly to Sundar Pichai, who is both the CEO of Google as well as Alphabet.

While Kurian likes to refer to himself as the CEO of Google Cloud, that's as much a vanity title as Susan Wojcicki's former title of "CEO of YouTube" -- neither has been an independent company during their tenure, under the Alphabet umbrella or otherwise. (YouTube was once an independent company... pre-acquisition almost 20 years ago.) All Google Cloud employees are Google employees, just as all YouTube employees are Google employees.

> This falls under "competitive intelligence" which ISN'T treated as corporate espionage legally, because you are extrapolating data from sources.

I never said it was corporate espionage. However, it is potentially anti-competitive behavior to use data (market research, whatever you want to call it) from one product to boost another. (Context matters.)

Are you familiar with the EU's Digital Markets Act, which recently went into effect? Google is designated as one of the "gatekeepers" by the European Commission, and the act itself reads:

> The gatekeeper shall not use, in competition with business users, any data that is not publicly available that is generated or provided by those business users in the context of their use of the relevant core platform services or of the services provided together with, or in support of, the relevant core platform services, including data generated or provided by the customers of those business users.

While GCP and other cloud platforms have not yet been explicitly designated as core platform services by the European Commission, it's only a matter of time before that happens.

It happens.

Larger corps with lot of departments, sometimes the left and doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

And sometimes suppliers get bought by the competitor and there is no fast easy substitute.

And sometimes your own products suck.

How hard could it be for a company as large as Google to hire a few dozen lawyers and accountants in every country they're able to do business in?

Not very hard but they should prefer big fat clients over tiny ones. Google products are at the top of my list of things to avoid. I don't have time for their endless work for free assignments. I'll reluctantly use their services if they are just to good but I keep in mind I'm not client material.

I hear of zoho for the first time, it apparently has 100m users. I hear they have actual support. There are employees on this page answering questions, or should I say busting myths? I haven't seen any of their products and it already sounds superior.

> Sticking to principles like Data Security, Privacy,

Isn't that something Europe has but the US chose not to (at least regarding computer/ad/tech industry) ?

European regulators talk big, but European companies (German+French) have really horrid internal security practices.

I don't want to name names as it can affect me professionally, but I would never trust a European (German+French) digital platform developed by one of their traditional conglomerates - even a stereotypically non-technical American F500 like Home Depot has way better technical and security practices than some of the European (German+French) conglomerates I've dealt with.

These are organizations where managing ACLs are a brand new practice.

If we're sharing anecadata, I've interacted professionally with organisations of all sizes and types (from startups to big banks to public sector) from all around the world, and I strongly disagree.

Legacy companies exist everywhere. Big banks with weird "security" practices exist everywhere. There's nothing special about French or German companies' digital security. If anything, they're often better than American ones because there's regulations forcing them to deal with some things like securing private data, meanwhile companies like Equifax can leak everything about everyone and not care in the slightest.

I wasn't talking about European financial companies - they're actually pretty decent at security because European financial regulators actually have teeth, and the internal platforms for a Deustche Bank or BNP Paribas are fairly forward facing (or at least as forward facing as very large and old conglomerates can be).

The companies I'd be worried about are outside the financial sector. I know it's all anecdotal so we're just randos on the internet yelling at each other, but actual enforcement of European data and security regulations (outside of the financial sector) are minimal, and more critically, very basic platform security practices haven't percolated.

That said, I can safely say that Equifax has completely revamped their infra to prevent a leak like the one they previously faced. They had a complete rearchitecture and heads rolled.

And I'm not talking about financial sector exclusively either. All sorts of companies, even centuries old ones, are taking security seriously and even if there often is lots of legacy stuff, there's no material differences with Indonesian or American or Brazilian companies

Not only currency, but Albo outdated payment methods like credit card or PayPal only? What?? Srsly?

What about other robust methods like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik

The price of being first - you are much slower to make any new changes.

I'm Polish, our internet infrastructure is miles better than German. Paying via phone is norm. Were I cross the German border, I'd think it's a museum.

But we didn't do anything particularly right. We just could implement our infrastructure on the newest ideas, while for Germany they're stuck with what they had as pioneers.

> If we become too insular, then we doom our larger economy to the same mistakes France, Germany, UK, and Japan made.

What are those? (Besides Japan’s which you’ve answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40143090)

Actually Germany's and Japan car industry are more innovative than American one's (and much more sucessfull on the international level)

The exact same mistakes as Japan - deciding to concentrate on their large local market which is protected via tariffs, but then completely outsourcing IP in non-target markets via JVs (eg. Renault's JVs in India, Volkswagen's JVs in China, Dassault and Thales JVs in India, Airbus JVs in China), but also failing to attract enough talent from abroad to innovate in these countries.

The Eurozone crisis also completely destroyed Western Europe's competitiveness (like the Asian Financial Crisis and Black Thursday did for Japan).

American companies make JVs abroad as well, but will also help transfer promising employees to the US, give them a competitive salary, and sponsor their visa process.

If you're smart enough to become a MechE for Dassault in India, you're also smart enough to become a MechE for Ford R&D in the US or India. Going from earning €25k in India to €45-50k in France or Germany isn't worth it, compared to moving to America and earning €90-110k.

Germany's automotive industry is a great example of this. In the 1990s-2000s, they began a MASSIVE expansion into China. Chinese consumers ditched their bicycles and motorbikes for the VW Jetta. But while VW continued to concentrate on ICE vehicles, Chinese challenger brands in the 2000s began researching EV technology as they were already the goto suppliers for batteries. Fast forward to today, and now German companies are dependent on Chinese EV R&D in order to build European EV platforms.

This is not exactly the fault of VW/Renault etc. China has quite explicitly encouraged technology transfer as an important strategic imperative for their local firms, so if these companies wanted to play in the (obviously growing) Chinese market, technology transfer was the price to be paid.

(Another example of this is the high-speed trains in China - the first generation was built by JVs with Siemens/Hitachi/etc with an explicit policy of technology transfer, but the newest trains in China are now local, built on top of the technology that has been acquired.)

And they're doing the same in India.

There's a reason I mentioned Renault and Dassault - to show that it's not just a China thing.

Every country pushes for JVs, but it's up to the individual companies themselves to defend their IP, or at least integrate the host country's talent base with the home country's innovation system so that it's mutually beneficial (eg. What Japanese companies did in Korea in the 1970s-80s).

American companies do that (eg. L1/2 transfers and O-1 visas) but European and Japanese companies don't as often.

US companies haven't had any more success in protecting their IP in China and avoiding "tech transfer" than European companies; it's endemic to operating in China ("somehow" your tech leaks from your JV to your Chinese competitors, who in some cases may even be owned by the same group of people through a web of shell companies). (The solar panel industry is a good example of this.)

What mistake did Japan make btw?

Not concentrating on localization and expanding their TAM.

Japanese firms had much less money to play around with after the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s, and localization costs a LOT of money.

Japan is already a large (125M+ pop, $4T GDP) market with an insular population that only really speaks Japanese.

This meant Japanese companies line Sony, Toshiba, etc can survive by just selling to Japanese customers without having to worry about spending money on innovating or building competitive products, as non-Japanese companies didn't care as much about Japanese localization and Japanese consumers couldn't really afford dollar denominated products on a Japanese salary.

Within 15 years, Japan got overshadowed by Korea, which to Japanese before rhe 2010s was what Americans think of Mexico. Korea has a much smaller population and historically had a much poorer population than Japan (they only caught up in median household incomes recently-ish - last 5 years), and as such Korean companies were more international facing and open to adopting best practices from abroad and competing in the developing world (it was Korean companies like Samsung that paved the path for Apple to begin manufacturing in China, India, and Vietnam)

Companies like Sony, Toyota, and Kirin got overshadowed by Samsung (Korea), Hyundai (Korea), and Lotte (Korea), and Korean conglomerates like Lotte began buying up Japanese prestige brands, and even Japanese-Koreans became like Mayoshi Son major titans of industry

> localization costs a LOT of money.

Not necessarily, on the tech side, but localized support can get pretty hairy.

Also, it depends on what your product is. Many different nations have many different laws, and localization is more than just changing the words in your screens.

Frankly it is simply the US dollar being overvalued. It is making US exports way too expensive for most of the world. Google can't really compete and make any money.

That is definitely a factor. ZIRP from 2008-2015 and 2020-2022 will do some damage to exports.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com