Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjelkeman-again | Hacker News Reader

We used to laugh at “Made in Japan.” Then they became really good at consumer hardware (cameras, music, cars, TVs). China manufactures some of the most sophisticated hardware in the world (smartphones, tablets etc). They do learn and iterate fast.

The one thing that makes me wonder if they can make really good electric cars is the software side. Japan fell from the throne in consumer entertainment hardware as they didn’t do software well. They still don’t. I think electric cars is a lot about software and batteries. Can China do really reliable, trustworthy, user friendly software? Without it I predict their cars will struggle.

View on HN

> Japan fell from the throne in consumer entertainment hardware as they didn’t do software well. They still don’t.

I've found this to be strange. Japan has produced some of the best video games over the years, especially in the early days of the industry. Games are some of the most complex pieces of software to create, with their extensive math and real-time requirements. It's never made sense to me how they didn't come to conquer the software industry in general.

I used to assume there's a whole world of quality Japanese software that never made it to the USA for lack of internationalization or something. But nowadays with everything open source, I can't point out any particularly visible/noteworthy Japanese projects or developers.

It's odd.

Apparently a huge contributor was the complexity of their written language.

English can be easily typed with a keyboard and stored in a 7 bit character. This meant the early computers could still store a reasonable amount of English, and were accessible to people straight away.

Kanji on the other hand is exceedingly complex. Computers had to get much more powerful before the systems which allowed typing and reading it worked well. The barrier for entry was therefore much higher for the average person.

developers in the Japanese market therefore focused on the areas of computing which didn't require written language - video games.

>Can China do really reliable, trustworthy, user friendly software?

You should try WeChat, the most popular Chinese chat application. Apart from the legally-mandated spying, it's super user-friendly, and quite lightweight compared to the likes of MSN Messenger, Skype, Facebook messenger and Slack (uses only 10s of MBs of ram).

The kind of software the parent was alluding to is the type that tightly integrates with hardware. It's an order of magnitude more difficult to pull off, since the two must work well together in concert.

You're comparing it to old junk. Whatsapp is far superior to FB Messenger. Discord is far superior to Skype, etc.

Does Whatsapp even have a desktop client? It didn't last time I checked. And Slack isn't "old" junk.

For a more recent example, products made in Korea were considered cheap and low quality through the 1990s. Then Lucky-Goldstar became LG, and Hyundai introduced the ten year powertrain warranty.

They have space program and airplane development one so they probably have the rtos capacity.

On the other hand I would probably pay more for dumber tesla. Not connected, not self driving etc etc. Cars are too full of software. I don't want Playstation on wheels.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com