I think the oversight in this article is the survivor bias regarding American designs. There were plenty of those fast, efficient designs from American developers but they too died in the avalanche of big-team giants.
I also think it severely underestimates the advantage of having such a large internal market.
Having access to a large internal market allows you to grow to a fairly large size while still only serving that internal market. Then, when you want to expand abroad, you're likely in a much better financial position to take on the expenses of dealing with lots various local laws and regulations.
... (I would add to your statement) with a large amount of median disposable income. Adding to this, a large numbers of consumers who have access to consumer credit and are far less reluctant to purchase on credit than other nations.
A lot of countries have a large internal market but not all of them actually have the purchase power or the inclination to spend on novel non-established products as much as the US market.
> or the inclination to spend on novel non-established products as much as the US market.
Moving from the west coast to Germany was definitely a fair amount of culture shock there. Americans love trying out shiny new things that are weird or different, my experience has been that Germans are much more cool to that kind of thing. They're simply less interested in novelty for novelty's sake.
"the inclination to spend on novel non-established products" is the key competitive advantage of the american market. Everything else are just compounding factors.
Well, one that springs to mind for me is Palm. Their devices punched well above their weight when it came to performance vs their Windows Mobile PDA competitors with better battery life but couldn't stand up to the corporate demand for buying things with the Microsoft sticker on them. Their later smartphone products were in the same position when Apple debuted the iPhone and was able to bring boatloads of cash from their ipod successes to bear on pushing both Palm and Windows Mobile out of the smartphone market entirely.
