> "May I ask what you mean when you say "until the market develops"?"

Without speaking for OP, naturally:

One of the biggest issues with web businesses is public acceptance of the new business model: think Netflix, Spotify, or even AirBnb, all are dramatically different ways of doing things that require a non-trivial amount of social change to gain traction. Changing society and the way people perceive/do things is really hard.

Doubly so if there are licensing issues in the way - a la Spotify or Netflix.

In other words, if you're going to have to go all-in and expend an enormous effort for adoption, you don't want to do it in Canada. It's easier for these services to proliferate first in other countries before importing it to Canada where consumers are already chomping at the bit.

See: Pandora, Spotify, Netflix, all of which built up enormous pent-up demand before they even showed up at Canada's doorstep.

> "I'd hope that any company not offering their services to Canadians would have a pretty good explanation as to why they aren't taking advantage of that market."

There's one very good, almost universal reason: Canadians don't spend as much. In fact, per capita, they can spend half of what the average American consumer spends.

The reasons are numerous and not at all negative - lack of access to stupid credit, general cultural aversion to debt-building, lower credit card usage amongst the entire population, high taxation resulting in comparatively low disposal income. These are all things Canadians in general take pride in, but it also makes the market less interesting to businesses.

Canadians are even more in debt than Americans:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/personal-finan...

Do you have a source on that last point? It's very interesting and I don't think I've heard it before despite living in Canada. I'd love to get a deeper look at this.

>" Canadians don't spend as much"

compared to who?

I had Pandora in Canada years ago.

Ah so I wasn't dreaming, I was sure I used it for about a week then it was blocked.

Canada is a developed market, with ready access to US internet resources. Russia a decade or so did not have a market that was appealing from a tactical point of view to Western companies (ie. lack of access, lack of customer $, lack of legal framework, etc).

Now Russia is a more relevant market, but the home-grown competitors are already embedded. Canadians may be miffed at Google.ca's lack of caring about Canada, but they still use Google.ca, and will use voice when Google lights the service up.

(I use Russia and Google here as illustrative examples)

What I mean is: until you've won in your primary market. Until you've won, your effort is better spent on winning your primary market than expanding to new markets.

Canada might have the second largest land mass in the world, but its population is just about the size of the California. From a Total Addressable Market, that's quite small. Foreign entities, IMHO, are reserved at the idea of investing large sums of money into a social engine of lesser significance.

Simply put, Canada is too small to be relevant.

In and of itself, California is the 8th largest economy in the world. So I don't think having a population the size of California's is actually a downer. And Canada is one of the largest 10 economies in the world. That's not exactly insignificant.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16600877/ns/business-us_business...

So you're saying that California is also too small to be relevant?

If I operated a business and told the shareholders "Yeah, we've gotta spend some money on lawyers so we're not going to sell to California." I'd be out so fast you'd hear a sonic boom.