> Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows.
Because if you're making something in the US, you have immediate access to a market of 330m[1] people, and they all speak a single language, follow roughly similar laws and regulations, and have relatively similar needs (e.g. software made for schools in Arizona is pretty likely to work well for schools in Kansas, because things like the A-F grade system stay the same).
This rich market gives you plenty of opportunities to grow quickly. Once you grow large enough, you have pretty easy access to other large and rich markets that also speak English, and then you can get into the hard stuff like internationalization.
If you start out as an EU company, you only have access to the population of your own country, and you're not large enough to handle internationalization or the 30 slightly different systems of laws, regulations, agreements with retailers and different store chains etc. It's a lot harder for you to grow at first, because the potential pool of customers able to use your product is much smaller.
You have markets like China and India, which are technically better, but at least historically, they used to be poor enough that the US was a much better option in practice.
I don't think this is the only reason for US domination, but it's definitely one of the reasons.
[edit] [1[] the population was different back then, but the difference in scale was similar
Because if you're making something in the US, you have immediate access to a market of 330m[1] people, and they all speak a single language, follow roughly similar laws and regulations, and have relatively similar needs (e.g. software made for schools in Arizona is pretty likely to work well for schools in Kansas, because things like the A-F grade system stay the same).
This rich market gives you plenty of opportunities to grow quickly. Once you grow large enough, you have pretty easy access to other large and rich markets that also speak English, and then you can get into the hard stuff like internationalization.
If you start out as an EU company, you only have access to the population of your own country, and you're not large enough to handle internationalization or the 30 slightly different systems of laws, regulations, agreements with retailers and different store chains etc. It's a lot harder for you to grow at first, because the potential pool of customers able to use your product is much smaller.
You have markets like China and India, which are technically better, but at least historically, they used to be poor enough that the US was a much better option in practice.
I don't think this is the only reason for US domination, but it's definitely one of the reasons.
[edit] [1[] the population was different back then, but the difference in scale was similar