How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan or out-Sony'ed Sony | Hacker News Reader

How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan or out-Sony'ed Sony

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"Japan's very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don't think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that's already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor. Out of that understanding, they will reinvent it in a more refined second-generation version. That strategy works only when what they're working with isn't changing very much. The stereo industry and the automobile industry are two examples. When the target is moving quickly, they find it very difficult, because that reinvention cycle takes a few years. As long as the definition of what a personal computer is keeps changing at the rate that it is, they will have a very hard time. Once the rate of change slows down, the Japanese will bring all of their strengths to bear on this market, because they absolutely want to dominate the computer business; there's no question about that. They see that as a national priority. We think that in four to five years, the Japanese will finally figure out how to build a decent computer. And if we're going to keep this industry one in which America leads,we have four years to become world-class manufacturers. Our manufacturing technology has to equal or surpass that of Japan." - Steve Jobs 1985

"Our manufacturing technology has to equal or surpass that of Japan."

Good thing China's manufacturing technology is equal to or better than of Japan's!

http://www.playboy.com/articles/playboy-interview-steven-job...

That interview with Steve Jobs has some interesting insights.

PLAYBOY: Like computers, the automobile industry was an American industry that we almost lost to the Japanese. There is a lot of talk about American semiconductor companies' losing ground to Japanese. How will you keep the edge?

JOBS: Japan's very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don't think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that's already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor. Out of that understanding, they will reinvent it in a more refined second-generation version. That strategy works only when what they're working with isn't changing very much—the stereo industry and the automobile industry are two examples. When the target is moving quickly, they find it very difficult, because that reinvention cycle takes a few years. As long as the definition of what a personal computer is keeps changing at the rate that it is, they will have a very hard time.

I think from a larger view, it has always been easy to beat SONY. SONY as a company doesn't care about the customer AFTER they have purchased the item. Look at ANY software that comes with a device, it's simply awful if it works at all. Even the PS3 has iffy UI. I had a fantastic device for recording for my podcast, but getting the recording OFF the machine was almost impossible. The last version, ver. 3.2, had menu options that didn't do anything. Absolutely NOTHING, and that was version 3!

Beat SONY by making the inside as good as the outside. Simple.

Sony of the late 70s early 80s was different.

You don't remember how bad everyone else's industrial design and build quality was compared to Sony - it was like Audi or BMW in a world of Buicks.

I feel like Sony hardware has almost always been really good and, for the most part, still is today. Sony software though... not so much. Which worked fine for decades where their products didn't include any software, but it puts them in a really bad place in a world where software quality has become at least as important as hardware quality. I don't know what I'd do if I were in charge of Sony, though - you can't just mandate "we're going to become great at software."

yes - the software is the most horrible code you can get - I bought the most expensive notebook Sony has and the only way to make it usable is to deinstall everything from Sony, I bought a Sony reader - the Reader Software is the most horrible rubbish... I bought a Sony camera ... it's unbelievable - but I think it shows what makes Apple different - they do both. There are not many companies who manage to be good at software and hardware. Maybe there is some startup advice in this: Don't try to be a software and hardware company. You double your complexity.

This. People don't understand how revolutionary some of the products were in that era, especially the cheap, light, and high-fidelity headphones that made the Walkman possible.

The PS3 and the PSP both have a great UI, perfectly tuned to be used with their controllers.

Their new portable UI, though? An abomination.

I actually like the XMB UI and I like that it's consistent amongst my two different Sony TVs and my PS3. The remotes for the two TVs are the same too, except the extra button for 3D stuff on one and the way in which you open the battery compartment.

This is a good a customer experience. I can upgrade my TV or DVD player or whatever I don't have to learn how to use a new remote or UI other than the new features.

Sony went corporate American.

After the Betamax debacle it decided it would win the next format war by owning studios.

That meant that anything it built for the consumer also had to be good for the studio. So for example it launched the excellent minidisk player (a 76Mb minifloppy) with better than MP3 quality when MP3 players were 32Mb for twice the price.

But it refused to release the minidisk drives for computers, because that would lead to piracy - so the only way to get music on the units was to buy all your albums again on minidisk (the studio's preferred option !) or record them on the microphone in. Then they did the same again with the PSP.

Suppose Apple had decided to ensure the success of the iPhone, not by making it great, but by buying a cell carrier - then limiting your calls to other iPhone users.

Sort of like how you can't do squat with music/movies on iOS unless it's through iTunes?

Pandora and Rhapsody seem to work just fine. Audible seems to have a nice app for all those audiobooks. Netflix also seems to work fine.

Apple certainly could have made it easier to put any old video you want into iTunes, I think they made a strategic decision to coax people into purchasing video through iTunes by making it hard to just drop AVIs into it. If they had tried this with iTunes - come out with the music store before the player and limited you to only listening to music you bought through the store, they'd have been dead in the water. I'm sure they're more than happy with the sales of videos in iTunes but they certainly left a pretty wide hole where iTunes could have been the default video player for everything instead of just their own stuff.

The version of the iTunes Music Store where people can put whatever media they want up for sale sounds, to me, as a consumer, less valuable than the single place I can go now to get almost any album on any label I normally listen to, or get the most recent episode of Parks & Rec. I'm sure there's great stuff on sale at flea markets too, but I don't want to shop there. Sorry.

> The version of the iTunes Music Store where people can put whatever media they want up for sale sounds

The op doesn't mean that iTunes would be used for selling media. Rather it'd be your personal media player for everything like AVI/Mpeg/etc. like VLC is.

I don't know how well iTunes can do this as is, but that's what he's arguing for.

You're obviously right. Sorry for misreading.

Not sure what your are trying to say or if you even use an iOS product. You can easily play music/movies not purchased through iTunes and there is other software out there that allows people to manage music/movies if they don't want to use iTunes. So no, it's really not the same thing at all.

Not quite the same though - Apple setup iTunes to make it easier for iPod owners to use their product - and making Apple some money in the process.

They didn't decide to limit the iPod to 32Kb/s playback to protect sales of their CD players

Actually, I'm not sure they learned anything from Betamax. Other companies avoid format wars; Sony launches them, always hoping for license fees. Minidisc, ATRAC, Memory Stick, Digital8, UMD: all formats launched into crowded markets, usually with little or no advantage over the incumbents.

(I thought Blu-Ray was an example, but a quick Wikipedia check says Blu-Ray was announced 2 months before the DVD Forum voted to develop HD-DVD.)

They've won a few, too; most notably, 3.5" floppies (where Apple crowned the winner by choosing Sony for Mac).

Format wars are like the lottery. If you play often enough you might strike it lucky one day and that will make up for all the tickets you bought.

I can see why they keep playing, the odds are considerably better than in the lottery, even if the price of the tickets is higher.

I bought an early Minidisk player (still have it), and you could record with it using ordinary line in RCA jacks. A microphone was not necessary. As a replacement for a cassette deck, it beat the pants off of it. Sadly, the copy protection on the disks (it wouldn't even let you do a bit copy of your own disk recordings) killed it.

Sorry I meant line in - the point was that you had to go the analog route because they wanted to restrict your use for their studio's sake.

If Sony had made a cheap PC drive that took minidisk it would have been as popular as floppies and been a real selling point for their PCs.

I agree. It's a sad case of what-might-have-been.

MiniDisc came out in '92, well before any portable MP3 players existed. MiniDisc recorders typically had optical digital inputs so you could get your albums on them from CD just fine.

How widespread was optical digital out in 2001 compared to USB ports?

What mattered is whether it was easy to get pirated MP3s from the PC to the player. Fiddling around with optical digital out compared to the much simpler USB seems backwards.

MiniDisks might well have been superior to cassettes but compared to MP3 players? Ugh.

MiniDisks would have been pretty cool (at least for a short time) if you could have plugged them into a USB port.

My point was not to debate MiniDiscs but that just about everything the OP is using to support their argument is factually inaccurate. It's basically gibberish with a little ZOMG APPLE/IPHONE indignation morsel thrown in at the end.

The OP was correct about saying that you need line-in. That’s what I, too, always perceived as the major downside of MiniDisk. (He said micro-in but already corrected himself on that. An honest mistake, he actually meant line-in. That doesn’t make it gibberish.)

when I bought my minidisc they were about $100, a comparable Creative flash based Mp3 player was 32Mb.

You could have a handful of disks with 80mins of HQ music on each whereas the MP3 players of the time were either very expensive (like the first harddisk iPod) or had so little space you had to chose a few songs for each trip.

The first MP3 player I bought had 128MB. (A Creative Muvo I bought in 2002.) I considered MiniDisk but having to use line-in seemed like such a hassle. (I didn’t have digital equipment and would have had to use the analog route and that just seemed like not worth it at all.)

I can understand how MiniDisk could have looked a bit more attractive a year or two earlier but not really in 2001 or 2002.

I don't have much to add to the conversation, I just wanted to say that was an excellent, thought-provoking article.

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