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Comment by valenterry | Hacker News Reader

Does it? I wouldn't know of any popular software that originated in and by South Koreans. Can you give examples?

I can recommend reading about Chaebol in this context. [1]

Basically conglomerates grew so big through foreign investments that they control large parts of the legislative and executive body. The families regularly get threatened by some aspiring/greedy politicians, then they threaten to fire a lot of people, and then they get spoken free.

I'd argue that this was the inspiration for the Mr.Robot series (apart from enron group), as it's portraying a similar disfunct democracy that's effectively owned by oligarchs or is effectively an oligopol.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

I agree with you. Samsung is probably their only global software exporter. Their other top companies are exclusively local: Naver, Kakao, Daum. Pretty much no one outside of SK (or Japan) knows of them.

I will say they come out with some dank video games like Lineage, Guild Wars, MapleStory, Black Desert Online, PUBG

Line is the biggest messaging (and taxi, and many other things) app in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand.

The software Samsung puts on their phones may just be a layer on top of Android but is still very influential by being run on billions of end-user devices.

The country's definitely low on internationally impactful SaaS, though they do exist e.g. Sendbird and Moloco.

Line was previously owned by Naver, but is now Japanese-owned. I believe it was actually developed in Japan - it happened as a reaction to communication problems during the 2011 earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster. It's an absolutely excellent app, no ads or anything, only pure communication with everything you would want for that purpose.

LY Corp is owned 50/50 by Naver and Softbank. It started as a reskin of Naver Talk, and the product development has effectively been done in Korea throughout the years. They've intentionally marketed it as being a Japanese app/company to assauge the Japanese government, as unlike in the West, East-Asian governments understand that an app that the entire nation has come to rely is a critical piece of infra that needs to be in national hands. But this has not reflected the reality.

This strategy of pretending to be a Japanese app has worked for a decade but now seems to be coming to an end, with the JP government looking to force Softbank to somehow broker a deal with Naver to reduce their share to less than 50%.

The EU should do similar with Whatsapp.

This is completely false. Line has been developed almost entirely in japan after the first couple years. The japanese team at this point is a couple orders of magnitude larger than the korean one, and most of the development is decided in japan.

I would know, I literally worked there.

These people aren't being hired to pick their nose [1]. Nor is it like the US where they only place such adverts to justify H1Bs.

There has been an entire scandal about Line's data having been hosted in Korea all this time for more than a decade, after which the servers finally got moved to Japan. You're hardly going to place all physical servers in country A and then do all backend and infra development in country B.

[1] https://careers.linecorp.com/ko/jobs?ca=Engineering&ci=Bunda...

Yes, there is a korean team. The Japanese team is, no exaggeration, 10x larger.

And if you think that’s preposterous you don’t know the least of it. For example, the designers in the company decided to boycott meetings.

Everything that's shipped with Samsung phones, LG TVs, etc

Sure, most of it is Android, but even, like, using the darn thing needs more software proficiency than average

Though Nintendo and Sony kinda do a good job (a lot of development is done outside Japan though - same for Samsung)

Naver

I actually used that when I was in Seoul (because I had to). Never had the need (or saw the need) to user it afterwards. Am I missing out?

Or do you just mean it came from Korea? I guess I should have been more clear that I was talking about software that is known internationally.

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