How come the vast majority of popular software programs/websites come from the USA?

[Cortez]

This is an honest question. Why are Europeans and Asians so worthless when it comes to advancing computer technology? They are rich regions so why don't they contribute the same as America does? Despite their larger population they do not innovate that much. Yet the smaller USA innovates a lot. Why?

Almost all of the globally popular websites (Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Amazon, Groupon, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit, Craigslist, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc) come from America

Almost all of the globally popular operating systems (Mac, Microsoft, Unix, Oracle, Android, iOS, etc) come from America

Almost all of the globally popular web browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc) come from America.

Almost all of the popular software applications (BitTorrent, Wordpress, Adobe Flash Player, Photoshop, Norton Anti-Virus, etc) come from America
@ Scary. That doesn't make any sense. All of this software was developed by Americans or people who have lived in America since they were kids (i.e. like Sergey Brin of Google). They didn't build their programs in America because of the pay. They built their programs in America because that's where they live. Why don't Europeans and Asians build as many software programs as Americans?

[scary]

Because the pay is better here.

[2CuteFaYou]

Why you on here if you got nothing but bad things to say about america? An American guy made the internet. How you like dem apples?

[mr. c]

don't know what sort of a region you come from but it doesn't seem to include much... history?
culture?

in your listing you forgot one key company: IBM
until about 40 years ago IT = IBM
other companies (like HP, DEC, Bull and a few more) were doing (mostly) computer hardware as well, but the actual giant in the IT world was Big Blue.
in 1981 IBM introduced the Personal Computer (aka PC) and asked a cranny garage developer / business owner to make an OS for it; the guy was Bill Gates and he bought Quick & Dirty OS from Seattle Computer Products; added a couple features to it and... the rest is history.
(yes, i know, the personal computer was actually created by Steve Jobs in 1977 but only when IBM picked it up did it become what it became)
(funny thing is that IBM actually got ride of their "personal computer" division and left that market nearly 10 years ago when they sold it to Lenove, a chinese company)

and it went this way all the time; PC was born, DOS was born; Peter Norton, the founder of Symantec decided to create Norton Commander and Norton Utilities, other companies did the same and so on and so forth

quite a few companies in Europe or Japan started taking interest in IT as well and offering hardware or software for it.

where did they go?
well, even though the US may seem small compared to Europe, Japan and a few more when you add them together, beck then the US were the biggest market.
IT companies in other countries had a (usually much) smaller home market and had to export much more which back then meant mostly more taxes on their products, thus their products were usually more expensive then comparable american products
thus little by little they either had to close shop or were bought up & integrated by american companies.
one example of a European company that made it: SAP
in 2010 it even acquired one of the american jewels of database software, Sybase

to generalize this;
about 15 years ago when the European Union started getting serious about "integration" Europe started to become a big market. and in fact even the EU isn't a good example because all the EU did was creating a big "home market" for all the companies in the EU
bigger then the US market, indeed
but still not the biggest - the chinese market is currently developing into this position and many companies have decided to build factories there so they could be "local" in China as well
the US were thus until +/- 15 years ago the biggest market and that's why most large companies simply developed there
and about a 100 years ago? well, the US have always been at "the frontier", struggling to conquer "the far-west" and creating new tools and means to do exactly that.
and even though the whole of the US was "discovered & civilized" in the late 18th century (1790s) the US kept this "discoverer & creator of new solution"
for example space exploration or computer technology
even so, nowadays more and more non-american companies become "the biggest"; see Toyota for the cars, Airbus is seriously attacking Boeing's dominance, Samsung in the mobile market aso. asf.

on the other hand, many things are often discovered elsewhere in the world (cars & rockets in Germany for example), planes in France, trains in England (to name but a few) but the Americans were quick to pick it up (or take it over as war trophy) and improve it
and because they had a bigger market, they needed more of it and thus the companies quickly grew bigger then their non-american counterparts.

[Chacha]

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