>“We’re waiting for Engineering in Germany to get back to us.” is a common refrain.

From my experience in Germany as a consumer, customer support for all types of businesses from ISP, online shops, gyms, property management, in general, is a joke, so that stereotype tracks. You need to contact them via a letter from a lawyer or consumer protection agencies to get them to move their ass when you have an issue, otherwise they ignore you till that scary legal letter comes, at which point they go like "oh yeah, we were just about to get back to your customer right now, no need to take us to court over it". It's why in German companies the best paid positions are not engineers but accountants and lawyers.

In US (and UK as well) the customer is always right, in Germany (and France) the customer support is always right and the customer should be sorry for daring to bother the customer support with their problem.

That's why they have no international tech companies, because their mentality can't survive in the "customer is always right" cutthroat environment. So it's not really boggling to see how SUSE failed to get traction despite being technically superior from my PoV.

German companies thrive when the product they're selling involves a lot of made up red tape and bureaucracy (cough, AUTOSAR, cough) and customers are willing to wait months for a reply because they have nowhere else to go. The moment they DO have somewhere else to go, they take their money elsewhere, which is why German industry is in its multi year recession.