History GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff / Technology

* And then we have the Chinese company [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsion Transsion]], whose marques like [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tecno_Mobile Tecno]] are unheard of and practically not sold in China, yet stably get a pluraity market-share in Subsaharan Africa for more than a decade, and quickly rose to the third share in India. When the founder left early major Chinese manufacturer Bird in 2006, there wasn't much market space left for him, so he specialized his new company in emerging markets. The company is known to customize their product based on the needs of the market. In Africa, they famously spent tons of money to make phone cameras work on African skin (many early smartphones were not capable of identifying their skin from the surroundings, and would otherwise underexpose the faces), as well as allowing at most 4 SIM cards (they channel-switch to minimize the fees) and putting in huge batteries to compensate for unreliable electric networks. In South Asia, they adjust the touchscreens' capacitance sensor to take into account of many people in that region tend to have greasy hands owing to having meals with hands (and thus too insulating in most cases to register finger taps).

* Internet cafes are still popular among Asian gamers and nerds, due to the fact the internet speeds are tremendously quicker and ''[[CrackIsCheaper more affordable]]'' than most home internet (inverse of what's in the West), to the point it makes a bare-bones, lower-spec computers run fast in comparison. Living space is also famously expensive in some parts of the world, which can make home desktop PC ownership impractical. [[PromotedFanboy It's also one of the particular reasons many top-levelled e-Sports gamers and teams are from Asia.]] It also doubles as a cheap accommodation for the working homeless population who are unable to afford rent.

* Despite being vastly superior to its predecessor, digital cassettes never really took off... except, for some reason, in the Netherlands (possibly because one of the main developers of the Digital Compact Cassette format was the Dutch company Philips...although since Philips was also one of the main developers of the Compact Disc format that killed cassettes everywhere else, that may not be enough of an explanation).

* Internet cafes are still popular among Asian gamers and nerds, due to the fact the internet speeds are tremendously quicker and ''[[CrackIsCheaper more affordable]]'' than most home internet (inverse of what's in the West), to the point it makes a bare-bones, lower-spec computers run fast in comparison. Living space is also famously expensive in some parts of the world, which can make home desktop PC ownership impractical. [[PromotedFanboy It's also one of the particular reasons many top-levelled e-Sports gamers and teams are from Asia.]]

* [=BlackBerry=] smartphones were moderately successful in its home country of Canada, as well as in the US, largely due to its rather advanced encryption capabilities at the time. In the late 00s/early 10s, however, [=BlackBerry=] phones were so ridiculously popular in Indonesia that they essentially became a status symbol; anybody who's an anybody (students, taxi drivers, street vendors, [=CEOs=], doctors, civil servants, celebrities, housemaids, [[TheLastOfTheseIsNotLikeTheOthers petty thieves...]]) owned a [=BlackBerry=] phone.

* The Commodore Platform/{{Amiga}} series sold much better overseas than in the U.S., mainly due to its lower price tag in comparison to Macs and DOS/Windows [=PCs=] at the time. The UsefulNotes/Commodore64 also had a longer market lifespan in Europe than in the U.S. for the same reason.

* The UsefulNotes/AmstradCPC was more successful in France than in its native UK. The majority of all French computer game developers in the 1980s made the Amstrad CPC the primary or secondary platform (usually behind the UsefulNotes/AtariST) for most of their output; while many British game companies also supported the CPC, they ranked it distinctly behind the UsefulNotes/{{Commodore 64}} and the UsefulNotes/ZXSpectrum among 8-bit platforms, and their CPC releases were all too often poorly colored conversions of Speccy games. This is also the reason why [[NoExportForYou some of the best titles for that computer are only available in France.]] (The other big foreign market for the Amstrad CPC was in Spain, where it easily outsold the Commodore 64.)
* Speaking of which, the ZX Spectrum was a success in the UK as a budget home computer but never really broke into the business sector, being something of a PoorMansSubstitute for higher-spec competitors like the UsefulNotes/BBCMicro. But in Russia and Eastern Europe it (or at least its various clones) enjoyed a virtual monopoly; its off-the-shelf components and broad manufacturing tolerances[[note]]legend has it that Sinclair sometimes used capacitors that had failed their manufacturer's quality-control process and were going to landfill![[/note]] made it easy to produce even for the decidedly unimpressive Soviet semiconductor industry, and the simple design could be repaired by anyone who could work a soldering iron. They stayed in regular use until a good ten years after British techies had moved on to IBM [=PCs=] and their various clones, and the embedded variant developed for controlling industrial machinery is still in limited production to this day.

* Like the Amiga, the UsefulNotes/AtariST was also much more successful in Europe than the U.S.

* While the UsefulNotes/{{Commodore 64}} was big in its native U.S., it was massive in Europe, selling in huge numbers when Americans moved onto cheap UsefulNotes/IBMPersonalComputer clones or the NES.

* UsefulNotes/Atari8BitComputers, years after they had begun to fade from popularity in the US, caught on in Poland, of all countries.

* The once almighty [=WordPerfect=] word processor, no longer widely used anywhere else, is still widely used amongst lawyers in English-speaking countries. This is caused by a combination of the original vendor listening to lawyers, thus having functions they needed and/or other word processors didn't have, and conservatism, which makes lawyers not change. [[http://www.microcounsel.com/nextgen.htm Read more here.]] It must be notes that this has been dwindling in the last few years, as Microsoft Word is now the standard, it includes all the functions lawyers need and Microsoft sells it competitively, in bundles with other software.

* Similar to the [[Platform/{{Amiga}} Commodore Amiga]], desktop Linux is popular outside of the U.S., to the point that municipal governments deploy it to thousands of nontechnical users. Linux itself is an example, with the kernel developed by a native of Finland, Linus Torvalds (who eventually became a naturalized U.S. citizen) and thousands of developers recruited from all over the world collaborating over the internet as one of the crown jewels of the open source movement. Stateside, desktop Linux is largely relegated to developers and computer enthusiasts who dislike Microsoft and Apple. Outside of the U.S., it's more common for computer manufacturers to offer Linux pre-installed on consumer machines, while what few stateside computers available with Linux preinstalled are workstation-class machines targeted toward developers.

* The Commodore UsefulNotes/{{Amiga}} series sold much better overseas than in the U.S., mainly due to its lower price tag in comparison to Macs and DOS/Windows [=PCs=] at the time. The UsefulNotes/Commodore64 also had a longer market lifespan in Europe than in the U.S. for the same reason.

* Similar to the UsefulNotes/CommodoreAmiga, desktop Linux is popular outside of the U.S., to the point that municipal governments deploy it to thousands of nontechnical users. Linux itself is an example, with the kernel developed by a native of Finland, Linus Torvalds (who eventually became a naturalized U.S. citizen) and thousands of developers recruited from all over the world collaborating over the internet as one of the crown jewels of the open source movement. Stateside, desktop Linux is largely relegated to developers and computer enthusiasts who dislike Microsoft and Apple. Outside of the U.S., it's more common for computer manufacturers to offer Linux pre-installed on consumer machines, while what few stateside computers available with Linux preinstalled are workstation-class machines targeted toward developers.

* Similar to the UsefulNotes/CommodoreAmiga, desktop Linux is popular outside of the U.S., to the point that municipal governments deploy it to thousands of nontechnical users. Linux itself is an example, with the kernel developed by a native of Finland, Linus Torvalds (who eventually became a naturalized U.S. citizen) and thousands of developers recruited from all over the world collaborating over the internet as one of the crown jewels of the open source movement. Stateside, desktop Linux is largely relegated to developers and computer enthusiasts who dislike Microsoft and Apple. Outside of the U.S., it's more common for computer manufacturers to offer Linux pre-installed on consumer machines, while what few stateside computers available with Linux preinstalled are targeted toward developers.

* Traditional flip phones are now obsolete in ''everywhere else'' (unless you're elderly, poor, paranoid or any combination of the three) but are still popular in Japan. This is largely due to the fact that Japanese flip phones were traditionally much more feature-rich than their overseas counterparts, having many bells-and-whistles the rest of the world wouldn't see until the advent of smartphones. This was possible due to Japan's mobile networks being more advanced than other countries'. When the rest of the world finally caught up with smartphones, many Japanese thought "What's the big deal?"

* The Boeing 747 is more popular with Asian and European airlines than with U.S. carriers. (The last active US airline to fly them, Delta Airlines, retired its aging Boeing 747-400s in 2017). [[NeverAcceptedInHisHometown No American passenger airlines have ordered the latest incarnation]], the 747-8 (which combines the iconic hump design of the 747 with the technologies of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner), and the largest fleet of passenger 747-8s is, ironically, that of Germany's flag carrier Lufthansa. This is because in modern terms the 747, with its four engines, is far less fuel efficient compared to smaller planes such as the Boeing 777 or Airbus A320. As a result it is only really practical for cargo, or when transporting ''large'' numbers of passengers became an absolute necessity--for example, the trans-Pacific routes in Asia which has always been the bread and butter of Asian airlines. Similarly, Ryanair - either Europe's largest or its second largest airline, depending on how and what you count - has an all Boeing fleet, despite being an Irish / English airline.

* [=VoIP=] apps are popular on smartphones in Europe for much the same reason as [=WhatsApp=] is: to avoid long distance charges when calling people in different countries.

* Cellphones with Internet access and cameras were ubiquitous in Japan a full decade before they became common in the West. Smartphones are still the most common way to access the Internet, due to Japan's famously cramped living spaces leaving little room for [=PCs=].
* Despite [[AmericansHateTingle Japan's historical aversion]] to Macs, the [=iPhone=] and [=iPad=] are the most popular smartphones and tablets, respectively. [=iPhones=] are favoured by majority of Japanese users over the likes of Samsung and even domestic brands such as Sharp and Sony. In the case of Samsung, it is mostly due to historical tensions between Japan and Korea, not helping matters was an incident where emojis on Samsung Galaxies were stripped of those symbolising Japan and its culture which unsurprisingly led to a boycott. Samsung saved face and sold their Galaxy devices without the Samsung branding, but this did little to appease the Japanese. Another reason was that of Steve Jobs being a Japanophile, which aided with better understanding the Japanese market. Local brands tried to capitalise on the [=iPhone=]'s success by releasing Android smartphones, but they were too late to catch up.
** Thanks to the [=iPhone=] and [=iPad=], other Apple products such as Apple Watch, Apple TV, etc. has also seen tremendous success. The tide would eventually be turned on the Macs and they, too, would become one of Japan's most popular platforms, allowing them to compete fiercely with the Windows operating system.
* Taiwanese people love Samsung phones, though they're hardly unpopular elsewhere, they [[https://scdn.androidcommunity.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Antutu-2016-Top-10-Popular-1H-Taiwan.jpg consistently dominate sales in Taiwan, ahead of domestic brands]]. In a curious contrast to Japan (which often sets the cultural and consumer trends for the region), the iPhone consistently struggles to even make the top ten, much less the high slots, and Apple's other premiere products that have done so well in Japan have largely flopped in the Taiwan, despite more than a decade of effort from Apple to turn it around. There's a certain shade if irony added in the fact that Taiwan is home of the almost all of the primary component manufacturers for all of Apple's most successful products (iPhone included), including [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn Hon Hai Precision]], better known in the west as ''Foxconn'', making the development and release schedule of Apple products very important to Taiwanese--so long as we're not talking about consumers, who won't be buying them, making the iPhone's reputation in Taiwan comparable to the Xbox video game console's reputation in Japan: an unpopular novelty. Though they've fallen far short of Samsung, Apple has made a great deal of effort to try and change the small market ([[https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/07/apple-taipei-101-opens-in-taiwan/ and finally had a popular launch of its first store in the entire country]]), and it remains to be seen if they can succeed. Apple computers, unsurprisingly, are almost unheard of, and Samsung's laptops, not well known in the west, are far more popular than the Macbook line of products.

* Similar to the UsefulNotes/CommodoreAmiga, desktop Linux is popular outside of the U.S., to the point that municipal governments deploy it to thousands of nontechnical users. Linux itself is an example, with the kernel developed by a native of Finland, Linus Torvalds (who eventually became a naturalized U.S. citizen) and thousands of developers recruited from all over the world collaborating over the internet as one of the crown jewels of the open source movement. Stateside, desktop Linux is largely relegated to developers and computer enthusiasts who dislike Microsoft and Apple. Outside of the U.S., it's more common for computer manufacturers to offer Linux pre-installed on consumer machines, while stateside computers with Linux preinstalled are targeted toward developers.

* {{Video Phone}}s, prior to TurnOfTheMillennium and TheNewTens, never did take off in the west like the western science fiction of the sixties believe it would, especially after the 90s when people started wanting more privacy (although most people are not aware that the video phone technology was first developed by [[StupidJetpackHitler the Nazis]], and thus, the Nazi stigma wasn't strong on this one). However, video phones are incredibly huge in Japan and South Korea. This is due to the fact that these cultures considers it polite that one to maintain eye contact while having a conversation[[note]]Each country having one of the best telecommunication infrastructures in the world may have helped, too[[/note]]. Outside of these two countries, one would only find video phones at meeting rooms in huge corporations, in the form of video teleconferencing. Videoconferencing would only gain more acceptance in the West with the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic making it possible for people to keep in touch with work colleagues, friends, and loved ones while maintaining physical distancing.

* {{Video Phone}}s, prior to TurnOfTheMillennium and TheNewTens, never did take off in the west like the western science fiction of the sixties believe it would, especially after the 90s when people started wanting more privacy (although most people are not aware that the video phone technology was first developed by [[StupidJetpackHitler the Nazis]], and thus, the Nazi stigma wasn't strong on this one). However, video phones are incredibly huge in Japan and South Korea. This is due to the fact that these cultures considers it polite that one to maintain eye contact while having a conversation[[note]]Each country having one of the best telecommunication infrastructures in the world may have helped, too[[/note]]. Outside of these two countries, one would only find video phones at meeting rooms in huge corporations, in the form of video teleconferencing.

* Internet cafes are still popular among Asian gamers and nerds, due to the fact the internet speeds are tremendously quicker and ''[[CrackIsCheaper more affordable]]'' than most home internet (inverse of what's in the West), to the point it makes a bare-bones, lower-spec computers run fast in comparison. Living space is also famously expensive in some parts of the world, which can make home desktop PC ownership impractical. It's also one of the particular reasons many top-levelled e-Sports gamers and teams are from Asia.

* While Bulletin Board Systems ([=BBSes=]) fell out of use in the West with the rise of the Internet in the '90s, they're still very popular in Taiwan, according to Wiki/TheOtherWiki. The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTT_Bulletin_Board_System PTT Bulletin Board System]] has over 1.5 million registered users discussing any manner of topics. It has its own slang and memes, similar to Website/FourChan.

* According to Wiki/ThatOtherWiki, Mozilla Firefox, which is developed by the United States-based Mozilla Corporation (itself a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, based in the same country) is the second most popular Web browser in Germany, Poland, and Indonesia. It's popular more broadly in Europe where users value privacy and are wary of big profit-driven [[UsefulNotes/MisplacedNationalism (American)]] tech companies like Website/{{Facebook}} and Website/{{Google}} overly influencing the design of the internet to their benefit in contrast to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation developing Firefox. Linux and other open source software is more popular there for the same reasons.

* Nextel phones had a similar status in Mexico, where the loud four beeps of an incoming call and the triple beep of the push-to-talk button used to be seen as synonymous with being a very important person who spent a lot of time discussing business over the phone -- so much, that when ringtone stores for conventional cell phones were still a thing, one of the best sellers was always the Nextel tone. In some cities such as Irapuato, the Nextel network was just so amazingly popular that at some points only foreigners would use non-Nextel phones, and even the highly ubiquitous Telcel network had poor coverage due to low demand. Their aspirational status eventually led it to be associated instead with tacky nouveau riches who just gratuitously adopted rich people mannerisms without having the educational background, but it still remained a symbol of wealth pretty much until the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S ended up pushing the Nextel network aside.
* Mexicans nowadays love Xiaomi. The combination of rising purchasing power, the decreasing cost of mobile phones, and the general Mexican preference for bang-for-the-buck over lavish luxury, have led many Mexicans around 2018 and 2019 to prefer Xiaomi's design philosophy of "as good as an iPhone/Samsung Galaxy S and won't drain your wallet".

* Internet cafes are still popular among Asian gamers and nerds, due to the fact the internet speeds are tremendously quicker and ''[[CrackIsCheaper more affordable]]'' than most home internet (inverse of what's in the West), to the point it makes a bare-bones, lower-spec computers run fast in comparison. Living space is also famously expensive in some parts of the world, which can make home desktop PC ownership impractical.

* {{Video Phone}}s, prior to TurnOfTheMillennium and TheNewTens, never did take off in the west like the western science fiction of the sixties believe it would, especially after the 90s when people started wanting more privacy (although most people are not aware that the video phone technology was first developed by [[StupidJetpackHitler the Nazis]]). However, video phones are incredibly huge in Japan and South Korea. This is due to the fact that these cultures considers it polite that one to maintain eye contact while having a conversation[[note]]Each country having one of the best telecommunication infrastructures in the world may have helped, too[[/note]]. Outside of these two countries, one would only find video phones at meeting rooms in huge corporations, in the form of video teleconferencing.

* {{Video Phone}}s, prior to TurnOfTheMillennium and TheNewTens, never did take off in the west like the western science fiction of the sixties believe it would, especially after the 90s when people started wanting more privacy. However, video phones are incredibly huge in Japan and South Korea. This is due to the fact that these cultures considers it polite that one to maintain eye contact while having a conversation[[note]]Each country having one of the best telecommunication infrastructures in the world may have helped, too[[/note]]. Outside of these two countries, one would only find video phones at meeting rooms in huge corporations, in the form of video teleconferencing.