American companies in Europe: A bad example

June 4th, 2008 by Lars Ottesen Henriksen

One of the things that is annoying about following tech news is that most of the new technologies presented to the market mostly happens in the U.S. or Asia. No iPhone (not that I want one), no TiVo, no movie rentals on iTunes (well… See hack in this post), no NetFlix, nothing..!

Now I don’t know the reason why… I guess it may be a lot of different legislations in each country that makes it harder to introduce such products. Another problem may also be that U.S. companies (as an example) maybe don’t want to be selling their product in Europe – at least they don’t try to understand the cultures in each of the countries, which is an essential part of doing business here. The culture varies a great deal from country to country. And when you, companies, talk like the U.S. is the center of the world… We really don’t like that.

Here’s the example that made me write this post. The example comes from an e-mail from Plaxo, who was acquired by Comcast and as a nice gesture (?), they decided to tell their users.

...Comcast, THE NATIONS leading company...

Now, let me reiterate the part following the text in bold again (which is even available online in this blog post):

“…Comcast, the nation’s leading provider of entertainment,…”

The nation… Now as far as I know, not many Danish people use Plaxo yet (I personally prefer LinkedIn in stead), but sending an e-mail to users in the whole world and referring to “the nation” is more arrogant than you accuse the french of being…

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About Lars Ottesen Henriksen

Lars Ottesen Henriksen is a Civil Engineer in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Southern Denmark. He currently works in Copenhagen, but still lives in Odense which means he spends 4 hours on the train each day. Sometimes this time is used for writing, which is what you see above. > More

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