Japan's preference for hardware over software is fading

"Marc Benioff, the boss of Salesforce.com, a large 'cloud computing' firm in Silicon Valley, sees opportunities everywhere in Japan. Over the past year the company paid $212m for Heroku, which develops web services based on Ruby, and acquired stakes in Synergy Marketing, Uhuru and Netyear, three business-software firms."

With a name like Heroku, news that Matz is joining Heroku, and Heroku doing Ruby in the cloud, it is an easy mistake on deadline to conclude that Heroku is a Japanese company. The other three companies mentioned are all actually Japanese companies.

One of the most unforgiving is that users do not understand that their phones are connected to vast networks or that navigation system in their car is powered by a computer with memory, et cetera.

When I first moved to Japan I asked normal people on the street to tell me what they found interesting about their phones -- I was shocked to learn that many Japanese women and men told me that they believed the popular website Mixi was just a screen (画面) that displays when the press buttons! (In Japanese: ミクシーはあたしの携帯に入っている画面だよ！とよく言われた)

One of the other aspects of software vs. hardware is that hardware is relatively easier to debug than most software environments. You will find that easy to debug environments like consoles have many software developers. This is important because the Japanese are very risk-adverse. Making claims on others and keeping everyone/everything in check is a big part of life in Japan.

Finally, programming is considered more of an engineer's profession than a creative profession. Engineering is seen as directly applying nature's laws into practice and as such, the approach is one of: "if you want to say build a bridge then you may choose from these designs that we already know are best"

Programming in Japan follows this cookie-cutter model and although there are very bright, creative engineers and programmers in Japan, the schooling system is very rigid.

Business-Software patents number are symptoms of protectionism and central planning in the process of innovation(you pay the state, they give you monopolies over ideas).

Business and software patents make the big guys the masters and the rest slaves, when everything is becoming patented, from windows to clicks adding "on web applications" or "in mobile" to the super old idea.

In any case, it will be the quality, not the quantity what matters.

The different approaches to similar problems, how different factors have put different evolutionary pressures on the industry (e.g. language) is endlessly interesting.

Better yet, now with South Korea a major electronics player, and India and China up and coming very quickly....I have a feeling it'll be possible for a serious study of the history of consumer electronics to be a valid academic area of study.

The cultural obsession with making "stuff" or "monozukuri" is more a romantic notion nurtured by the economic slump as America made a massive comeback dominating every part of the IT field from hardware to software. Craftsman are highly regarded in Japan but great programmers see themselves as part of this tradition and peers regard them as such. It completely ignores the fact that the video-gaming industry and even anime is "soft" driven and a significant part of Japanese contemporary culture.

On the policy side there's just not enough support for entrepreneurship in general and more so for IT. Many of the first movers in the Japanese IT bubble crossed over into establishment quite quickly and the Livedoor scandal just provides government with a massive excuse to stay conservative. The fact that both Livedoor, Rakuten and SoftBank made hostile bids for media companies at one point probably did some damage as well in terms of turning traditional media against them.

Labor laws make it highly prohibitive to fire full-time workers and social benefits still tend to accrue to people who don't change companies. Of course, times are changing but policy still prevails. For any software startup in Japan hiring someone is hard because good people are conditioned to seek stability and hiring someone is risky for the startup because they are dealing with less talented people with the same employment guarantees. Although the IT industry in Japan mirrors general global trends to a degree, so there are more career changes, people are very risk averse and probably less mobile than a comparative sample from the states.

Also corporations tend to foster a false sense of homogenity which usually results in long hours and minimal incentives for performance. I've seen so many exceptional people, especially programmers, clash and ultimately burn against corporate culture. The rest go on leave for clinical depression.

In terms of education, the curriculum just plain sucks for science in general and for sciences more students flock to traditional engineering fields where the get to learn FORTRAN or COBOL and maybe play with R. Professors in Japan, even in the sciences, rarely lift a finger and many are completely inept with computers. Of course, younger professors aren't but with Japanese demographics they'll struggle to find tenure. Not to mention undergraduates don't study much compared to other countries since the entrance exam is the main event.

In terms of culture and language, Japanese allows for so much vagueness that I think it creates a serious barrier to clear and logical thinking needed for not only programming but interface design. People avoid debates of any kind and when they do occur, they quickly get emotionally heated. Also, a lot decisions for even the interface gets run by the committee or are consensus-based and that's not a good thing in general for design of any kind as you need a grand architect who knows what they're doing and can move with conviction.

I really can't do this topic justice unless I go and write a book so I don't think a short article by The Economist can address it either. Japan has a lot to offer too but those are my impressions on what's holding them back.

Notably, the "appliance mindset" (people own many devices which are not interacting), average japanese people not owning a PC in 2001, the popularity of gaming consoles and mobile phones.