Germans Love David Hasselhoff/Real Life/Technology

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Examples of Germans Love David Hasselhoff in Technology include:

  • Despite being vastly superior to its predecessor, digital cassettes never really took off... except, for some reason, in the Netherlands.
  • The Commodore Amiga series sold much better overseas than in the U.S., mainly due to its lower price tag in comparison to Macs and DOS/Windows PCs at the time.
  • The Laserdisc optical disc format was developed by Dutch corporation Phillips, and produced by Phillips and American corporation MCA. It never caught on in the US or Europe due to the cost and read-only nature; but became the dominant video format in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the more affluent regions of Southeast Asia. Production of laserdiscs continued until the end of 2001, in Japan; and production of players continued to the beginning of 2009, also in Japan. They are still popular with collectors, due to the number films and other media on laserdisc which have never been released on DVD, and the increasing scarcity of playable VHS releases.
    • Similarly, the VideoCD (not to be confused with the incompatible CD-Video format). It was extremely popular in exactly one continent: Asia. Due to its low price and region-free nature, it was widely used in Asia and even today, videos are often released in VideoCD, DVD and Blu-Ray formats. In the US and Europe, it failed to catch on, as it was released roughly three years before DVDs entered the market, and featured almost no copy-protection (if the disc does have copy-protection, it's trivially easy to bypass) and is completely region-free, making the format extremely undesirable to film studios. Feature wise, the requirement of switching discs midway through a film, the inability to store closed captioning and inability to store a second audio track without sacrificing quality (you could only either have two mono audio tracks or a stereo one) put off many consumers elsewhere, though VideoCD's tolerance of high humidity (a problem with VCRs whose media suffers from mold build-up) and low cost more than made up for its shortcomings.
      • It was then replaced with pirated DVDs. And with the rise of internet streaming services in developing countries as well as illicit movie downloads on torrent sites, optical media has sadly gone by the way of the dodo.
  • AM stereo was more popular in Canada (thanks to regulations that forbade all-hit formats on FM) and Japan than in the US.
  • The Opera web browser became extremely popular in Russia and other ex-USSR countries in the late 90s due to speed and reliability on crappy dial-up lines. It still keeps a 30-50% share - compared to 2% worldwide.
  • Linux was first developed in the early 1990s, much like Windows and Mac OS. The Finnish-developed operating system is free-and-open source that doesn't require as much space as both Windows and Mac does, which made it an attractive option for breathing new life to otherwise obsolete vintage computers. On the other hand, such like Opera, Linux is relatively popular in Russia mostly due to the mention above with OpenSUSE, Gentoo, and Mandriva being the most popular.
    • OpenSUSE is also popular in Czech Republic.
    • Ubuntu is popular in Italy and Cuba.
    • Linux is also popular in India.
  • According to That Other Wiki, Mozilla Firefox, which is developed by the United States-based Mozilla Corporation (itself a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, based in the same country) is the most popular Web browser in Germany and Poland.
  • Despite the increased use of computers, typewriters, which early versions were developed in Italy dating back to 1517, are still popular in many parts of Latin America and South East Asia. India still has many using mechanical typewriters because they're cheaper than a laptop and are useful in areas without electricity.
    • Mechanical typewriters are also popular in parts of Africa and Latin America thanks to similar reasons. Brazil still has factories making typewriters.
  • While popular in its native Europe especially during their heyday, Nokia mobile phones are extremely popular in Asia to the point that Nokia has released bespoke models for the Asia-Pacific region such as the Nokia 3108/6108, the Benq-derived 6708 PDA and the 6208 classic. Not to mention that Nokia has avoided the use of the number four in their product names as a sign of deference to their East Asian customers (although they somehow came up with the Series 40 platform as well as the Nokia 3410 and the Nokia 6234; the latter two weren't officially released in Asia though). Stateside however, Nokia fared worse as despite efforts through Product Placement in various media such as films, music videos and video games, they failed to gain a foothold due in part to telcos in the US having a bigger stranglehold towards phone manufacturers and the use of different operating frequencies among other things.
  • The iPhone and iPad are the most popular smartphones and tablets in Japan, respectively. iPhones are favoured by majority of Japanese users over the likes of Samsung and even domestic brands such as Sharp and Sony. In the case of Samsung, it is mostly due to historical tensions between Japan and Korea, not helping matters was an incident where emojis on Samsung Galaxies were stripped of those symbolising Japan and its culture which unsurprisingly led to a boycott. Samsung saved face and sold their Galaxy devices without the Samsung branding, but this did little to appease the Japanese. Another reason was that of Steve Jobs being a Japanophile, which aided with better understanding the Japanese market. Local brands who traditionally offered those so-called "garakei" feature phones (named after the Galapagos islands whose unique species mirrored that of Japanese feature phones' advanced feature set compared to western cellphones) tried to capitalise on the iPhone's success by releasing Android smartphones offering similar functionality to their Apple counterparts, but they were too late to catch up.
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