Germany's been an outlier for many IT things. IIRC the Psion PDAs and the ARM (that is, the original computer, running RiscOS, not its CPU) were vastly more popular in Germany than in the other big countries.<p>Maybe you could say, as a rule of thumb, that if engineers tend to like a particular IT product, then that product will be more popular in Germany than in the other big countries.
> Are people in Germany more critical of Google? I somehow don’t believe that…<p>For historical reasons (NS, Stasi) Germans value their privacy very high. Google is collecting a lot of data and therefore they are critical. 10 years ago, before Chrome vs. Firefox it was IE vs. Opera. This is also the reason why still a lot of Germans avoid using credit cards.
Because they value security and privacy. They just prefer to work with Microsoft Office rather than have 50 different web apps that drain all their data for no reason.