America to this very day gets to dictate how computing and aviation work. Knots, feet, ASCII and so on are just the obvious signs of that.
>utf8
Case in point, UTF-8 (aka Unicode) has ASCII as its starting point. ASCII can be converted to UTF-8 without data loss easily and perfectly because the first entries in Unicode are literally ASCII mappings. This is the virtue of winning first and getting to write the rules.
>airbus is a serious competitor in international markets.
And yet everyone outside of China and Russia still fly using knots and feet, that includes Airbus.