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People are afraid of changes or just don't get it. I'm from micro mid/east country in Europe and i can tell you that most people here think that computers are used only as support for other businesses. When you tell them that web/internet/... is also great business you'll get blank looks all over the place. Btw they're all using google/fb/... but only as consumers. Hmmm, thank god on that :-)

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...my experience (originally from Germany, in the US since 2005) as well. It's a question of mentality. While in the US a vast number of people want to create their own business or already did when they are quite young, running a business or starting one is a herculian task in Germany. And you get punished when you fail. And you get taxed to death when you don't. Running a company can easily become a social stigma too. Even if starting your company happens to be easier now then it was 10 years ago, still the majority of people are rather focused on finding a secure position in a larger company with lots of benefits then "creating" something "new". Numerous reasons I guess for why that came to be (I don't think it was like that in the 50s/60s) - maybe as society ages there is less of a "drive" for radical innovation and a risk-averse mentality becomes mainstream. Either way, before I came to the US I had heard about "the difference in mentality" but I could not believe how "different" it really was and how much of an impact that meant on a daily basis: the biggest eye-opener was the completely different attitude towards things that needed to be changed and people just "did it".

Please note that Silicon Valley is not normal for the USA. Boston, for example, has a disturbingly "German-sounding" attitude towards computing, "Oh, yes, we have tech companies here, but the Real Deal of Boston is the universities and biomedical firms."

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