Comment by sbinnee
9 days ago
What a sad news as a Korean to see a post about Korea at the top of HN during one of the largest Korean holiday.
I can share an anecdote how slow tech adoption is in Korea. It is not exactly about tech in public section but in private companies. I assume public section has slower adoption rate than private ones in general.
Just about a year ago I had a couple of projects with insurance companies. I won't name them but they are the largest ones whose headquarters you can find in the very center of Seoul. They often called me in because I was setting up on-premise servers for the projects. Not to mention that it was hard to understand their choices of database architecture to plug it into the server I was setting up, their data team seemed just incompetent, not knowing what they were doing.
The wildest thing I found was that most office workers seemed to be using windows 2000 to run their proprietary software. To be fair, I like software UIs with a lot of buttons and windows from that era. But alas, I didn't want to imagine myself connecting that legacy software to my then project service. It didn't go that far in the end.
Back when I worked for Mozilla, I had the chance to go to Seoul to meet with various companies and some governmental ministries. This was when Korean banks and ecommerce sites required Internet Explorer and Active-X controls for secure transactions. This meant that MacOS users or Linux users couldnt do secure transactions in Korea without emulating Win/IE.
What was the outcome of these meetings? Have they switched to Firefox?
They never did afaict. Eventually smartphones became ubiquitous and I think most S. Koreans bank on their phones using apps. As for those who bank on computer, I dont know what happened when Active-X was deprecated. It was a poor decision by the S. Korean govt. to hang their hat on that technology.
They settled down with chromium based browsers. Microsoft was pushing Edge and Naver, the largest Korean search engine company, also developed Whale browser based on chromium.
> I can share an anecdote how slow tech adoption is in Korea. It is not exactly about tech in public section but in private companies. I assume public section has slower adoption rate than private ones in general.
I guess it's not all tech, but at least in telecoms I thought they were very quick to adopt new tech? 2nd in the world to commercially deploy 3G W-CDMA, world first LTE-Advanced [1], "first fairly substantial deployments" of 5G [2]. 90% of broadband via fibre (used to be #1 amongst OECD countries for some time, now it's only just #2).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK_Telecom#History
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Deployment
[3] https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/sub-issues/broadband-statisti... -> Percentage of fibre connections in total broadband (June 2024) spreadsheet link
Things South Korea is good at producing: Cars, ships, steel, semiconductors, electronics, medicines, tanks, aircraft parts, nuclear reactors...
Things South Korea is bad at producing: Software.
Not too bad overall.
> Things South Korea is good at producing: Cars, ships, steel, semiconductors, electronics, medicines, tanks, aircraft parts, nuclear reactors...
Also: music and TV shows.
> Things South Korea is bad at producing: Software.
Also: babies.
Interesting interpretation of 'good' in regards to cars.
My parents have been driving the same Hyundai for about 20 years. Never heard them complain about a problem.
Seems everyone ouside of US is bad at producing software.
Yes, and US bad at everything else.
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Do South Korean companies prefer hosting data on their own servers instead of using Public cloud providers like Azure, AWS, GCP?
Yes and no. They used to prefer everything on premise. Many try to move towards cloud especially newer companies. Major cloud providers you mentioned are not the usual choices though (maybe aws is the most common). They do have data centers in Seoul and try to expand their markets for South Korea. But government offers generous incentives for using domestic cloud providers like NHN which was mentioned in the article or Naver cloud. Why does this work? Because Korean services rarely target global markets mainly due to language barrier. Domestic cloud usage is sufficient enough.
I think it's very interesting that Korea is probably the country with the fastest cultural adoption of new tech, e.g. #1 for ChatGPT, but on the other hand I can see as a web developer that new web tech is often adopteded at a very slow rate.
We excel at things that look good on paper.