Are all the software products created in just five Countries?

It seems that software products are only created in very few countries around the world : United States, Israel , United Kingdom , Canada and Texas :).

There are 196 countries in the world, but most seem to have better things to do than to write software.

This is a critical piece of information because “Software is Eating the World.”

India has  plenty of IT projects outsourcing companies , Japan has 200 video games companies while China has many hardware companies.

However, there seem to be very few software products companies In non English speaking countries (I count both  Canada and Israel as English speaking countries for in this blog context).

Germany has SAP and Software AG. France used to have Business Objects, but now it belongs to SAP so it is left with Dassau. Japan has Trend Micro, but that’s about it. China is not in a much much better situation with total of 29 companies listed in Wikipedia.

Try to think about a famous Spanish Software Company ( Hint : Anti virus that looks like a bear).

I’m not sure why this is the case , but can suggest a few ideas:

• There are a lots of software companies in other countries, but they are local to their markets an don’t bother to become international and big
• Since programming languages are in English, there is a huge advantage to English speaking countries
• Software development started form universities and the leading Computer Science universities are in the same countries
• Software development product companies have consolidated to a very few big companies and most are American
• Software products require a unique combination of strong engineering and “immature” first versions

Does anyone else have any explanation or counter data?

Any maybe it is less important these days. Our industry is moving into Software as a Service model in many use cases.

Tags: Software