NEVER in my 30+ years as a user of computer networks or communication programs I have seen the "better software" win. It has always been the most marketing, the most shady ethics, or anything else that lead to the strongest network effect.
And a far more controversial question: would it be allowed? Or would a successful European world-dominating quasi-monopoly on the FAANG scale get banned from the US market? We've seen twitches in that direction (remember the "Tiktok will be forced to sell to Oracle" nonsense?). Or in the aerospace market, things like https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/26/bombardier-... or https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32542140 ; Boeing vs Airbus shenanigans go back a long way.
I found out the other day that one of the UK's longstanding tech companies collapsed after accidentally buying a CIA front organization for illegal arms sales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti#Collapse
Or ARM: are they an "EU" tech success any more? As their ownership is passed from Japanese Softbank to US NVIDIA.
Even if they stay where they are they're not in the EU any longer anyway!
Europe is at a permanent disadvantage with language. You either target your local market in your local language, or you do English first. If you do English first, your market isn't even in your home country. Even culturally England and the USA (and AUS/NZ) are a bit different to France, Germany, Sweden and so on.
Only one "European" success I can think of whilst typing this: Spotify (anglo-swedish).
America on the other hand has access to a literally flood of venture capital money.
And really, i18n is a minor issue.
Where i18n becomes nasty is when you have to find, evaluate and constantly coordinate with n external translation agencies. Working from Germany on an international product, this is a nightmare. From a technical standpoint we can release features within a minute thanks to our CI/CD setup, but as soon as some user-facing text is affected we have to hold changed back until all translations were collected.
There's other things like GDPR, local taxation, many cross border laws, and by culture I mean a variety of things: you'll see university graduates flogging themselves to death in Silicon Valley, but a start up in London will be slightly more relaxed by comparison. In the US, "free VC money" means there's an incentive to get to market asap, monetize, and move on. That doesn't really exist in Europe.
Siemens SiMatic - again, I won't say anything about the quality of their software, but they seem to be successful.
After it was basically the winner it brought in marketing, shady ethics and everything else to keep growing.
on edit: I mean there seems to be a large number of people of the opinion, and I concur, that Google now is not as good as the Google of a decade ago. This is part of the reason why I think that many products we think of as bad might actually have been very good at the time that they gained their initial success.
The definition of "better software" is vague. Does it mean technically better? Better product? Easier to use? Ethical? Probably have to ask GP for clarifcation on that.
Google was significantly better than anything else at the time, and in spite of the problems with Google, its search result are still quite a bit better than most others I've tried.
GitHub was a huge improvement over anything that came before it, and after a review of alternatives some months ago it still clearly is the best product IMO.
Internet Explorer was a lot better than Netscape. Yes, it was a mess, but Netscape was an even bigger mess.
There are probably other examples.