Europeans are mostly comfortable giving money to American companies, and there is not as much of a culture difference as with Asia, so there is no need for separate offerings specially for Europe. All big tech companies have several subsidiaries that seem to be doing quite well. It’s true that there are not as many European startups than American ones, but the market is there.

Is “Asia” a well-defined market? Honestly curious.

No, you're right

Which creates some juicy margin niches for smart developers to make a killing as independent contractors.

even if it has struggled it still is a lot of purchasing power

and cloud is an essential service for many companies

and how things played out in recent years has created increasing insensitive to not use Amazone/Google/MS Cloud

but it's marked which isn't really that visible on HN and similar US focused sites

>European market has always seemed like a tertiary market compared to the US and Asia

Well, this isn't even remotely accurate on the numbers. For virtually every big tech company the US is about half of the market, Europe about 30%, then ~15% Asian Pacific, and give or take a bit in the rest of the world.

Given that most large tech companies are locked out of China or quickly leaving the only large country with comparable purchasing power to Europe in Asia is Japan.

It's about revenue growth opportunities, not current market share. Europe in general is largely stagnant, and seems likely to trend down due to the demographic time bomb.

In Asia, South Korea is already comparable to Japan as a technology market (but also stagnating). The big Asia-Pacific growth opportunities are going to be in India, Malaysia, and Philippines.

Africa will soon emerge as an important market as well, particularly Nigeria. Japan and Korea are, as you said, not only stagnating but deflating (in the case of Japan). I believe GDP actually declined in Europe recently so I think Europe will shrink as a market in the coming decades unless they can fix demographic pressures and improve entrepreneurship. The US faces similar demographic problems but we have unique solutions to those problems that means that GDP growth is stronger in the US than virtually anywhere else in the world. India is a more mature "growing economy", and at this point I think the whole world is aware of the opportunities there. As you pointed out, Malaysia and the Philippines are growing, and so are other SE asian countries like Viet Nam and Thailand (though Thailand has struggled to grow since the pandemic, it's shown good growth since 2000).

Africa is the untapped market right now; Nigeria is expected to exceed 400mil (if not 500-700mil) people by 2050. I don't know as much about their economy, so I'm not sure if this growth has translated into the kind of infrastructure which would create more demand for computing services (i.e: I don't know what smartphone or 5G penetration is like there), but I would bet that if it's not ripe yet, it will be soon

Europe needs to solve its demographic pressures by either accepting more non-EU immigrants or doing something to encourage women to have more children, which would require solving for the opportunity cost (i.e: career stagnating or ending) that women bear 90+% of the time they have children, as well as the FOMO issues (which I don't think government can solve)

It's always humorous to see HN users praising the lifestyle of dense, walkable European cities. They don't realize how miserable it is to raise multiple children in the typical 2 bedroom / 1 bath flat that most locals can afford. It's not surprising that many couples have only one child.

Historically, homes in the US were very small, far smaller than what you see today. Americans have a huge misconception about this, because the historic homes they see today are the ones that survived, and the ones that rich people lived in 100+ years ago. The homes that regular people lived in have all been torn down, because they were small and unremarkable. But you can see some of this if you visit neighborhoods built in the 1950s: the houses there are much smaller than newer nearby homes.

However, despite a trend towards much larger homes in the US over the last 50+ years, Americans (at least the ones who can afford nicer homes) have been having far fewer children. So apparently Americans preferred having lots of kids back when they lived in homes with less than ~900 square feet.

As for Europe, Europeans have been living in dense, walkable areas with small homes for millennia, and didn't have any trouble raising lots of kids in that environment all that time.

Yes, people's expectations around living space and privacy have inflated. What's your point? It's not as if Americans or Europeans are suddenly going to go back to tolerating having a bunch of kids in a cramped urban flat. And it was never "preferred". They mostly only ever did that in the first place due to religion and lack of birth control.

My point is that small living spaces aren't the reason Europeans aren't having kids. Middle-class Americans aren't having kids either, even though they live in suburbs with oversized houses that they're spending all their income on.

"All their income" is very funny to hear when a small house in Prague costs 2 million dollars - now check what's the average income there.

The number of children per family is absolutely higher in suburbs than in dense cities. So your point is at least partly wrong, although there are likely other causative factors as well.

Europeans didn't raise lots of kids in areas of dense small homes, that was happening outside the cities.

They certainly did have kids in cities: you think people living in European cities in the 1700s or 1800s somehow all managed to stay childfree? They didn't have birth control back then, nor did they have transportation allowing them to commute.

They had much less children than the people outside cities, and the absolute majority of people was not living in cities then. Many of those working in cities had their families outside the city.

I believe this impression is mainly because people think of France and Germany as separate countries, not as a combined EU market.

Imagine if you'd compare only California against all of China, it would look like the US was in seriously bad shape.