Why would we think that every country blocking out foreign companies would result in better software being written for consumers in that country?
I think some tiny amount of protectionism can be necessary to get a domestic industry started, when it is important for reasons beyond giving access to the best products like national security. Especially in edge cases like competing with foreign companies with the backing of their state government or an international market that has degenerated to a monopoly. But ultimately free trade makes better products and international consumers richer and is the desired end goal, not every nation rewriting the same tech stack and providing local flavors of software solving similar problems.
> not every nation rewriting the same tech stack and providing local flavors of software solving similar problems.
Why not? Isn't Diversity good? Wouldn't it be nice to have multiple colors, implementations of things rather than the monopolistic (and probably American) beige?
Diversity comes from (fair) competition. Why would I not make American monopoly beige if it works for America locally? But if the foreign company is already that color I have to differentiate somehow. I have to compete on whatever I know about the domestic market, and force the foreign companies to learn and adapt to reach parity with me.
That whole process works in reverse too, where I have to reach parity with the large multinational company on all the features the domestic audience cares about. That last step is usually the first one to be missed when a government hands a monopoly on a tech vertical to a local company with protectionist policies. (And often they don’t just do it to insulate them from foreign competition, they will end up insulating them from domestic too as an artifact of the way these relationships reinforce themselves)
So, the state should intervene to help level the playing field to reach fair competition. In practice though it rarely stops there and instead works to insulate the domestic company from any competition. Which results in inferior products.
It is not diversity to have many people reinventing and maintaining essentially the same wheel. Exceptionally, this is necessary for national security purposes, but in the common case this is actually a poor deal for local consumers who prop up a worse product.
This is rich, coming from someone in a country where everyone still uses SMS to chat with their friends and family. Other countries already have far superior messaging apps than whatever America has produced, but Americans refuse to give up their SMS just like they refuse to give up their guns.
I’m not sure what this is supposed to prove? There are lots of different messaging apps with very high market share in the US versus a WhatsApp monoculture. A lot of people using SMS are actually using iMessage, and historically one of the reasons it’s won is because US telecoms went to unlimited SMS messaging when competing with each other, whereas foreign monopoly telecoms charged prices per SMS making messaging apps on data more competitive.
iMessage is a better experience and also degrades gracefully to sms for people who aren’t on the platform, unlike almost all other messaging apps where I have to make sure they have the app installed.
Facebook messenger has like 50% market penetration with its own suite of features. Snapchat is next and offers a very different user experience.
Apps without compelling reasons to exist like Google allo lose.
> Why would we think that every country blocking out foreign companies would result in better software being written for consumers in that country?
Why do you think foreign companies are automatically better? Is American software written by non-Americans automatically best? I find this to be incredibly arrogant.
I think some tiny amount of protectionism can be necessary to get a domestic industry started, when it is important for reasons beyond giving access to the best products like national security. Especially in edge cases like competing with foreign companies with the backing of their state government or an international market that has degenerated to a monopoly. But ultimately free trade makes better products and international consumers richer and is the desired end goal, not every nation rewriting the same tech stack and providing local flavors of software solving similar problems.