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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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