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Comment by Prickle | Hacker News Reader

They don't have international competition.

The Korean government explicitly chooses companies for these things. And those companies, Chaebols like Samsung, choose the laws.

If these Korean apps were so good, you would expect them to penetrate foreign markets. But they don't.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/06/dumb-telecom-industry-ba...

Just like how British car companies collapsed when foreign competition entered the market on equal footing, these companies will disintegrate if forced to compete.

https://www.latimes.com/world/la-xpm-2010-dec-01-la-fg-south...

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>If these Korean apps were so good, you would expect them to penetrate foreign markets. But they don't.

Dumb reasoning. Their apps are targeted at Korean life on purpose. Their app being good or bad is irrelevant.

The reason American apps penetrate the world usually is because America is a superpower that has almost colonised the web.

> The reason American apps penetrate the world usually is because America is a superpower that has almost colonised the web.

I live in the USA and EU, and the reason that I prefer a Samsung display in almost all cases is because it is the best product. Korea has not colonized us, but the product is often superior, so that is why I buy it.

Why is it that Korean software cannot do the same? I find it very interesting, and I mean to ask this in a very neutral/curious way.

Yes. Samsung created the best product for all eyes.

That's not the same for most internet apps.

They can do the same, they don't want to nor need to.

>I live in the USA and EU, and the reason that I prefer a Samsung display in almost all cases is because it is the best product.

No way, LG displays are better.

(In case it's not obvious, there's a joke here.)

Now that you bring it up, I can't recall ever (knowingly) using a piece of Korean software that wasn't a game or baked into a phone's firmware. Does seem kind of odd considering how much Korean hardware there is in my life.

naver mail is good. kakao talk too

TVs for most of their existence were simple devices, with mostly a few different consumer relevant parameters, which were mostly objective.

Apps on the other hand strongly reflect the philosophy of usage, control, privacy etc, and the design aesthetic of their creators. Different countries/cultures have radically different philosophies, and old countries have aesthetics that go back thousands of years. Using apps from the creators of a different culture almost certainly causes significant friction with your own culture's philosophy and aesthetics.

To give a related example. I don't know Korea, but many in the English speaking world are marginally know of Japanese TV shows - you know with the crazy antics. Imagine that you were forced to consume only that form of TV, and how jarring that would be compared to your own philosophical and aesthetic inclinations. The same with Apps.

Nothing prevented Switzerland from colonizing the web first. If Europe was a VC friendly environment it would be ahead in everything.

This doesn't really fit with the way the US government ensured dominance of its tech sector globally in the 80s, 90s, and even early 2000s. It was not a fair competition by any stretch of the imagination and involved a lot of strong-arming by the US government abusing its leverage.

Maybe somebody else should have invented the transistor, integrated circuit, and internet first. They didn't.

As if those were sufficient or necessary. Even a passing familiarity with the history of computing would show that these had little effect. A deep understanding would reveal what actually did.

Right. Instead the US colonised the internet. What's your point?

*created

The internet wasn't some terra nullius that America took over.

You can create something and have it be colonised too.

If you created it, then you're not colonizing it in any meaningful sense of the word (you are using the word to invoke implications of historical atrocities, etc.)

You can't create all of it, that's the point. But you can create it, and colonise everything else that others create.

>(you are using the word to invoke implications of historical atrocities, etc.)

No, I'm using it to invoke it's actual definition and the meaning it holds. Not everyone is an American political weirdo.

> The reason American apps penetrate the world usually is because America is a superpower that has almost colonised the web.

Love how the word "colonise" is thrown out without any thought.

Please tell us one example where America enacted a hostile takeover of a Korean site, and extracted its resources solely for the benefit of American interests.

I thought about it, then I used it. It pretty much stands (not literally of course).

>Please tell us one example where America enacted a hostile takeover of a Korean site

I don't think you understand what the word colonise means nor what my comment means...

Agreed, I was wrong.

LINE did.

Line failed in the Korean market, and only penetrated Japan if I remember correctly.

And it is also partially owned by Softbank.

SoftBank took a stake in Line way after Line became established

I did not know that.

Would that indiciate that Korean software companies are only able to penetrate one economy at a time?

That would be a very weird, but interesting thing to investigate.

Not sure what you are getting at, but Line is deeply penetrated into South East Asia as well

Taiwan too.

Last I checked, 90% of Line users were in Japan, and Facebook messenger was most popular in SEA.

So I am simply surprised. My knowledge must be incredibly out of date.

LINE is very popular in Thailand for unclear reasons, I've heard the theory that their cute sticker packs set them apart in the early days. In the rest of SEA Whatsapp is the most popular.

Each of language groups across the globe has its own dominant and different messaging apps. US has Messenger, Korea has KakaoTalk, Japan took LINE, China built WeChat, Russia picked Telegram, and so on. The Meta Facebook/Messenger/Instagram triad isn't the global default of social apps the way it might look to people from US.

And I don't think it takes conspiracy theories to explain it, maybe users don't like platforms that isn't dominated by similar users of their primary language, or maybe there are something else that prevent app experiences optimized for two distinct cultures at the same time.

> Russia picked Telegram

With some amusing exceptions: doctors are exclusively on WhatsApp; older (60+) people are often only on WhatsApp (and pre-Microsoft Skype before that).

This isn't really true. WhatsApp was used pre-acquisition and continues to be dominant throughout LATAM, Africa, and Europe in addition to US/NA. Only in the APJC region and Russia do we see significant divergence in messaging apps.

Having traveled extensively in these places, I always theorized it was due to UX behavior aligning well with the local languages. While the countries WhatsApp dominates speak different languages, they all use the Latin alphabet. In Russia and APJC there are many non-Latin alphabets used and those languages may also use different directions for writing/reading than Romance and Germanic languages.

One advantage of Telegram over WhatsApp is that you don't have to display your phone number to your contacts and random people in group chats and blogs.

India loves what’s app. I’d like to know what the distribution of Latin vs other characters used as I’ve seen plenty on Indian languages romanized.

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