Australia has much more than just Atlassian. Canva is the 9th most valuable private company according to crunchbase [1].
But you need to look deeper than just "who has the biggest most successful companies. Note, the comment says "countries that understand software".
From what I've seen, and one of the reasons I moved here, Australia values quality production. They understand where software drives business and invest in that.
I'm former NICTA/CSIRO, and those organizations used to be drivers of technology and research.
Canada is a major technology hub. Microsoft and Facebook both have major development centres in Canada. Of course, being so close to the US, most of the brain drain goes directly out of the country, but that is part of the country and the people understanding the value of software. The education is good, and so people go to where the dollars are.
Canada and Australia are not going to be able to compete with the US from a dollar perspective. So many of the best Canadians, Australians, Chinese and Indian are going to end up in the US.
[1]https://www.crunchbase.com/lists/crunchbase-private-unicorn-...
It's not the SV of the north yet -- local VCs are still a joke (expect one to two orders of magnitude worse terms) but it's getting better. The angel scene has actually been pretty incredible over the past few years.
This is how Microsoft drove their phone business off the cliff: they built a product that their customers (corporate IT) loved but the users detested. When the iphone showed up Microsoft famously knew it was dumb because it addressed nothing that their customers cared about. But the workforce demanded change.
Come now, it’s more of an iron ore or coal state than an oil one. Beef is more of their exports.
> The top exports of Australia are Iron Ore ($79.6B), Coal Briquettes ($36.4B), Petroleum Gas ($26.8B), Gold ($17.7B), and Frozen Bovine Meat ($4B)
Japan considers programming a blue collar task so pays accordingly (though there are exceptions, like Sony Computer Entertainment). But culturally the companies tend to understand the role of software better and have for a while. Remember how great the Keitei were in the late 90s/early 2000s compared to anywhere else in the world?
There are a lot of interesting lessons in video games though; it’s the only kind of software people love using enough to write emulators for, and game developers seem to exist in a lot more countries than other software businesses do.
Finally, they made very crappy Android phone and local industry shrunk. So Japanese consumers now love iPhone because Android phone is a trauma for some of them.
There are plenty of wellknown tech/software companies originating in Australia. Xero, Freelancer, Canva, REA Group, MYOB, Airtasker, BigCommerce, Afterpay...
Many foreign software companies have development teams in Aus as well. Google, Zendesk, Square, Squarespace spring to mind.
https://www.smartcompany.com.au/technology/the-top-50-tech-c...
But when looking at living there, the wages/housing prices seemed like a poor trade off even compared to California. Although of course it’s a great place to live in many other ways.
I’ve heard of some of those but haven’t looked up their pay bands, not sure Afterpay has a moat though…
> Google Maps first started as a C++ program designed by two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen, and Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, at the Sydney-based company Where 2 Technologies. It was first designed to be separately downloaded by users, but the company later pitched the idea for a purely Web-based product to Google management, changing the method of distribution.[9] In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google Inc.[10] where it transformed into the web application Google Maps.
What are Australia and Canada doing in there? Australia has… Atlassian? Besides that, I’ve only heard of developers in Aus/Canada/Japan being well paid if they work for US companies like Google or are parked there because of US visa issues.
Australians are well paid in general though, even if they don’t value software like FAANG does, because Australia is a petrostate pretending to be a service economy. Japan values software but doesn't pay anyone well because of the system where you earn salaryman virtue by suffering for the first 30 years of your career. (Hot takes.)