This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind?
I visited Russia a few years ago. Commercially, they have all the same technology we have (for me, in the UK). Like us, they outsource most of their manufacturing to China, but internally they produce software equivalent to (or to be honest greater than) what we produce. The difference seems to be that a lot of Russian software, websites and apps are more local, which gives the illusion that it's not as good. Google is multinational, whereas the equivalence Yandex sticks to Russian and Slavic language countries. I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite.
Whatever software you can think of originating from the US, UK, or wherever, Russia has an equivalent. The major difference isn't the technical ability, but the commercial and cultural reach of that technology. Most of the world is happy to use Facebook, except Russia (and some others) who uses VK. We don't use VK, because it's Russian and we already use Facebook. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber (all artificially high value commercial products) have Russian equivalents. Sometimes they are even combined into one (Yandex has an Uber-like service within it). And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that. We all designate that to China, who sells it to all of us equally.
Whenever we hear about cyberwarfare, cybercrime and exploits, we usually pin it on Russian/Chinese speaking hackers. Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing, and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, produces many of the better programmers (something you can see in open source communities). From discussions with Russians, the level of maths, science and computing education is higher at a younger age than it was for me in the UK. Quite a lot of what would be A-level (18) Maths in my country was taught at Russian secondary school level (16).
In warfare, Russia has made fools of themselves in Ukraine, but on the other hand war is (sadly) the greatest contributor to military evolution. We see that with the introduction and evolution of drone warfare. Our UK Challenger tanks have been disabled and destroyed by far lower cost drones. All the technology associated with that (comms, jamming, avoiding jamming, self-targeting) is being rapidly developed by both Ukraine and Russia on the battlefield right now.
Where exactly would a decade back put them, technologically speaking?
> This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind?
Every country had it's own facebook. The difference was not features but scale.
Russia scales to million of users. Facebook/Google etc. scale to billions of users.
Everybody use Office, Chrome, commercial CADs, etc. Russia has no alternatives in most of these categories, and where it has alternatives - it's usually global (i.e. mostly made by programmers paid by western corporations) open source project they fork and add a russian skin over it.
> And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that.
USA and EU design the top-end chips and make crucial parts of the machines that produce chips (see ASML).
Russia was left behind in 90s and tries to catch up using some open-source alternatives around RISC-V. But they have no capability of designing nor producing chips anywhere near modern desktop CPUs.
Russian Lancet drones use smuggled Nvidia AI chips for example. We do not use smuggled Russian chips :)
I have no love (or even reason) to support modern Russia, but this is just wrong.
Russia has multiple home-grown office suites. Besides MS Office, the market leader still is full of bugs that harken back decades.
They also have multiple commercial CAD programs (KOMPAS, T-FLEX) that scale up to everything including airliners.
As for those 'western' top programmers, especially good ones, you'd be surprised how many of them are from post-USSR countries, including Russia (and Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan etc.).
As for chips they are behind (for reasons beyond the scope of my post), but the post mainly extended to software, in which, many of the supposed crown jewels of the West (aka US) have been replicated quite successfully in other parts of the world including Russia.
> I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite.
Why were you surprised by this? Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it is quite expected that systems of total control will be actively implemented there. And what is better for total control than digitalized things?
> Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing,
I've talked to many Russians and this is complete bs. The quality of education is quite low, but due to the competition created by remote work, programmers were easily paid 5x times more than people with comparable qualifications in other fields. So a lot of youth with a good work ethic put a lot of efforts into self-education in this fields even if they have no access to any systemic education in computing at all.
In other words, in Russia, as in other Eastern European countries, you either do programming, or you are screwed. And the advantage of mathematics is that you don't need a teacher for it (for school level), everything is in the book, one thing after another. All you need is work ethic and motivation.
>Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it is quite expected that systems of total control will be actively implemented there. And what is better for total control than digitalized things?
Ah yes, the reason the US is years behind most other country's payments systems is because they have too much freedom.
I visited Russia a few years ago. Commercially, they have all the same technology we have (for me, in the UK). Like us, they outsource most of their manufacturing to China, but internally they produce software equivalent to (or to be honest greater than) what we produce. The difference seems to be that a lot of Russian software, websites and apps are more local, which gives the illusion that it's not as good. Google is multinational, whereas the equivalence Yandex sticks to Russian and Slavic language countries. I was actually quite surprised to see in some areas they are ahead in digitising things (government services, payments). I expected the opposite.
Whatever software you can think of originating from the US, UK, or wherever, Russia has an equivalent. The major difference isn't the technical ability, but the commercial and cultural reach of that technology. Most of the world is happy to use Facebook, except Russia (and some others) who uses VK. We don't use VK, because it's Russian and we already use Facebook. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber (all artificially high value commercial products) have Russian equivalents. Sometimes they are even combined into one (Yandex has an Uber-like service within it). And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that. We all designate that to China, who sells it to all of us equally.
Whenever we hear about cyberwarfare, cybercrime and exploits, we usually pin it on Russian/Chinese speaking hackers. Russia seems to have better primary, secondary and tertiary education in computing, and, like the rest of Eastern Europe, produces many of the better programmers (something you can see in open source communities). From discussions with Russians, the level of maths, science and computing education is higher at a younger age than it was for me in the UK. Quite a lot of what would be A-level (18) Maths in my country was taught at Russian secondary school level (16).
In warfare, Russia has made fools of themselves in Ukraine, but on the other hand war is (sadly) the greatest contributor to military evolution. We see that with the introduction and evolution of drone warfare. Our UK Challenger tanks have been disabled and destroyed by far lower cost drones. All the technology associated with that (comms, jamming, avoiding jamming, self-targeting) is being rapidly developed by both Ukraine and Russia on the battlefield right now.
Where exactly would a decade back put them, technologically speaking?