Why Japan Didn’t Create the iPod (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Why Japan Didn’t Create the iPod (2008)

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142 pointssharjeelsayed132 comments

I don't know if it's why they didn't create the iPod but there are some noticeable differences in the music industry in Japan

It is (was?) almost impossible to find Japanese music online in legitimate ways. What I means, search for almost any western song and it will be on youtube either by the band itself, their publisher, or VEVO. Search for nearly any Japanese song and you won't find them on youtube, at least not officially. You might find a music video but it will often be edited in the middle with some interruption to basically make it not what you actually want (the full song).

I don't know why this is. I assume the Japanese music industry believes they'll make no money if the full music videos are available online. (note: this might be changing but it was true for many songs a year ago).

Example: The theme to Demon Slayer: LiSA - Gurenge (紅蓮華), searching brings up "officially" a short edited version, a practice version, and a live version but not the hit full song version.

Another example: Spice by Tokyo Karankoron the official music video cuts out after 1:30 and effectively says "buy it"

For whatever reason that's very different than the west.

Other random examples of differences:

* CD stores still exist in Japan (although they are clearly getting fewer in number)

* The Mini Disc was huge in 1997-2004ish. Normal models ran for > 200hrs on a single charge something no mp3 players I know of have ever come close to.

> Example: The them to Demon Slayer: LiSA - Gurenge (紅蓮華), searching brings up "officially" a short edited version, a practice version, and a live version but not the full song version.

Official Gurenge MV is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZBSjwVWaKQ

Previously, it was available, but is heavily geo-restricted.

Also nowadays almost everything is on streaming: Apple Music, YouTube Music, Spotify, etc. But with everything Japan, it's geo-restricted.

From Spain appears as "This video is only available to Music Premium members" :'(

Also, I remember the JASRAC to be very vigilant and strict...

Same error in the UK

For some reason I don't know, the Japanese entertainment industry is quite against globalization. I don't know if it's the fear of losing control over their product (through digital copies) or an archaic mindset. They have a lot of products that are demanded all over the world and they are letting those opportunities to go to waste. Only very recently I have seen some movement in this regard, like the portal created by Shueisha Inc. to publish mangas online.

I think is just a result of a nationalistic mindset and xenophobia. I don't think it's rational.

Either protecting your culture against foreign influences (the Japanese way) or pursing profit above all else (the US way) are rational or irrational per se, they just represent different value systems.

Another data point supporting this - it took till 2020 for Studio Ghibli’s back catalogue to appear on a mainstream streaming service for western consumers. They definitely faced the innovators’ dilemma of not wanting to cannibalise the DVD sales gravy train.

Better late than never I guess.

>>> For some reason I don't know, the Japanese entertainment industry is quite against globalization.

Alternative explanation: Most companies aren't global because it's too difficult to be.

That requires to translate/dub the product to other languages. To support multiple currency and payment systems. To have local stock for physical products. To adjust to each country's taxes, regulations and export controls. To market locally to the target audience.

It's very remarkable with tech companies. They try to corner the US market and get billions in funding, before they try to expend to the rest of the world.

This is very important, very unappreciated point, to which I'd add that there's a legitimate fear that, within the organization, as your business infrastructure increases in size to handle international sales, your core business of making the product is a smaller part of the organization. The whole idea of "make great products" gets diffused in a situation like this: you now have sales-driven input coming in from a much wider market, with more competing directions. The core product team has to address a lot more stakeholders, and the domestic market that built them doesn't carry as much sway.

I worked for a company that turned down an offer by Walmart to become a top-tier vendor for them. We recognized we couldn't do it in our current form, and would need to rebuild ourselves from the ground up to handle the challenge. Many businesses took the opportunity: Vlassic Pickles most famously became a company 10x as large, but it was a completely different company afterwards, which the president noted was not without certain costs (basically, the family business destroyed, and replaced by being a part of the Walmart supercomplex). Many other companies tried to do the same thing and failed, effectively destroying the business in the process.

[Heh... Walmart as the Gom Jabbar of retail. "They tried and failed?" "They tried and died."]

Most of the comments here see this as entrenched interests trying to hold back the tide, but there are many businesses that don't survive the transition, and many more internal cultures that don't. It's a legitimate business choice to remain focussed on a domestic market one understands rather than gamble on international expansion.

Interesting point. I guess US print and media companies get globalization nearly for free because everyone wants to speak English.

There's a lot of people who want to speak Japanese though. Issues getting money into the country?

Not just entertainment or global expansion - lots of companies are hesitant to promote even domestic sales.

There are widespread psychological safety/emotional security issues that effectively sets whole corporates in “deprecated / not accepting new orders” state. Everything is for existing volume customers only, local or foreign.

I’m guessing it has to do with salaries and pension plans; average income is steadily declining, and Japanese retirement plans are long said to go bust at some point. One headcount less when “it” happens should it happen is extra couple bucks to you, one mishaps on your resume is couple grands leaving your hands. Briefcases full of cash from guys you’ve never met is nothing, even if you are told it could save the corporate.

The article begins by setting up language/display barrier but looking at MiniDisc players of that era (which did in fact have displays and often a second one on a remote) all of them used English menus. And judging by sales the Japanese consumers were fine with that.

Also, in 2001 Sony introduced USB connectors on their portable MD lineup so they didn't miss the train by much (by Japanese standards).

> Also, in 2001 Sony introduced USB connectors on their portable MD lineup so they didn't miss the train by much (by Japanese standards).

It was still ridiculously tedious to transfer songs to a Sony device with USB. They did not support MP3 initially so you had to convert everything into their own proprietary format. Completely useless piece of hardware.

And from what I learned from my DJ friends, who wanted to record their sets, it was impossible to get it out digitally. The only way out was analog.

Yup! They were completely going amok trying to control everything.

I had a number of Sony digital music players like the NM-MS10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NW-MS10.jpg

Their main drawbacks you're required to convert all the MP3 into Atrac3 using their atrocious software. It is hard to imagine now, but iTunes was a few generations ahead of anything else in speed and ease of use.

They were a few generations ahead of other extremely locked down devises. They were terrible when compared to devices that just allowed you to copy files to them.

I used MP3 feature phones before I got an iPod and the music library system of the iPod was miles ahead of manually managing my music. Having new songs and album art automatically sync onto the iPod, having play counts sync back, having smart playlists update, it all exposed what a garbage system manual file management was and made me yearn for the future we were promised with the meta-data driven file system of BeOS

Yeah gonna have to disagree strongly with that. iTunes abstracted away the need to manually manage music files. Very few non-nerds actually wanted to do that.

Jamming iPhone-related features into iTunes bloated it up, but in the beginning iTunes was a pretty great piece of media-management software.

> I don't know why this is.

Strong aversion to anything digital. Even nowadays the number of ebooks in Japanese is ridiculously small compared to how easy it is to find most books online in English (through Amazon or other book stores). And that's despite Japan owning the Kobo platform (through Rakuten).

A lot of Japanese music is available on Apple Music and iTunes

Sony are the archetypal media savvy consumer products company in Japan, but they completely blew it with their rigid vertically integrated strategy. They tried to control the media production end with Sony Pictures and Sony Music, controlled the media format with Mini Disc and control the end user device with the players and Hi-Fi systems.

The problem with this is the other media companies - movie studios and record companies - saw them as competition. That means they wouldn't touch any of Sony's media formats or distribution platforms with a barge pole. This massive strategic foot gun has crippled their medial initiatives for decades. The media companies are nice businesses, I shed no tears for Sony, but they could never do what Apple did and cut ground breaking deals with all the major labels and studios.

>>> That means they wouldn't touch any of Sony's media formats or distribution platforms with a barge pole.

Sony made and pushed Blu Ray, which is the dominant media of the past decade.

The founders of the Blu-Ray Disc Association were: Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Sharp, Samsung Electronics and Sony.

The studios did try to push HD DVD but it failed in the market, they only went to Blu-Ray when they had no other choice. So yes that's a case where you could argue Sony 'won', but it was a lot more than just Sony and not at all comparable to the situation with say Mini-Disc which was a purely Sony technology.

Sony also helped develop Compact Disc and 3.5 inch floppy. Sony didn't develop Compact Casette, but forced Phillips to make it an open standard.

It's not like anyone used those things in the 80s and 90s. \s

My point was that Sony entering the film and music industries, which happened in 1991, soured their relationships with the other studios and labels. Compact tapes predate that by several decades and CD and 3.5” discs both do by 9 years. Clearly Sony had no problems getting their media formats adopted before that strategy shift. After that they had to fight tooth and nail.

> Example: The theme to Demon Slayer: LiSA - Gurenge (紅蓮華), searching brings up "officially" a short edited version, a practice version, and a live version but not the hit full song version.

The first hit for me is the full version on the 'LiSA Official YouTube' channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IkopJwRDKU

That link is not available here in Japan. It says “This video is unavailable”

If I type 日本女歌手紅蓮華 into google it gets me videos. I’d I type 紅蓮華 into Apple Music it gives me the song you mention as well as the artist LiSA.

I’ve never searched for anything like it before, and I’m from Danish.

There are some interesting ideas in here, but I feel like the author left out a lot of the story and many other possibilities.

1. The author basically says that, due to fonts, Japan focused more on “applications” computing rather than system computing up through the 80s. I mostly agree with this.

2. The author then completely leaves out the 90s and jumps to the 2001 release of the iPod. Excuse me?

3. In the late 80s and early 90s, the computing tech became robust enough to handle Japanese fonts somewhere between well enough to almost perfectly. For example, I fondly remember my Wordtank from the early 90s made by Canon that helped my Japanese studying tremendously. Note that some models had variable memory (e.g., marking something for review) and expansion slots. My Apple PowerBook from the early 90s handled Japanese almost perfectly. Japanese word processors (ワープロ) also seemed to have some basic system level functionality (I rarely used one, but many friends did).

4. The above suggests that systems were available and functional in the early 90s.

While some open systems like the Mac OS were not made in Japan, open systems existed, so why didn’t they become more widely used in Japan?

To me, that is the key question.

I think at least one other possible explanation is that Japan’s societal structure didn’t (at least at that time) really leave very much space for people to be able to make a living via these open systems [1], as such, these systems were not broadly in demand.

Another possible explanation is that the first “lost decade” (the 90s) saw very little space for innovation.

I’m sure other viable explanation are possible.

Side note — this is incorrect:

“For comparison, let’s look at a few common Japanese characters (these are ranked as the 35th, 64th, and 104th most commonly used characters, respectively):

議選調”

I wonder where they got this info from. Maybe they were thinking of the list of kanji that students start learning in secondary school?

[1] Note that some people actually did make a living these open systems, but they tended to be connected much more intellectually, professionally, and economically with folks outside of Japan. TWICS internet was publicly available in 1993, and that helped tremendously imho.

It's not the order, it's the frequency when analyzing a corpus such as all newspapers.

> It's not the order, it's the frequency when analyzing a corpus such as all newspapers.

It’s definitely not that either unless you have a very specialized corpus.

From https://www.manythings.org/kanji/top2000kanji.html:

書 - 35

場 - 64

男 - 104

議 - 285

選 - 187

調 - 263

It should be obvious that the exact result depends on the corpus and year. The one you link is apparently from 2003.

35 and 25 are in the same ballpark, so the article's point about it being a very common character stands.

You misread. 35 and 285 are far from the same ballpark, and it's not really possible to explain that with any corpus. It's much more likely that the author found a list of jōyō kanji sorted some other way, and thought it was sorted by frequency.

jisho.org doesn't provide the same numbers for these kanjis:

議 : 25 https://jisho.org/search/議%20%23kanji

選 : 57 https://jisho.org/search/選%20%23kanji

調 : 87 https://jisho.org/search/調%20%23kanji

and for instance

書 : 169 https://jisho.org/search/書%20%23kanji

I cannot tell how accurate these numbers are, but jisho.org is using the free dictionary built by Jim Breen of Monach University (see the about page for details). It's a well known resource in the open source world.

My parents had a super rare NEC X68030 HD compact in mid-nineties.

It came with files of the previous owner intact.

It took them few month to figure out how to switch the input to English, and learning quite a bit of Japanese in the process.

I have no doubt that "the language theory" the author has is a complete pie in the sky, trying to cue the reader to some "unique oriental deficiencies"

I remember a joke in Homestar Runner[0] in 2006 about Pom Pom making a movie on his phone. At the time it was maybe just barely possible. Some people were watching very limited movies or movie clips on their phones. A few years later, people were doing video calls and streaming to the internet.

So yes, there was a period of time where the iPod and digital cameras and other gadgets were tethered the PC. Picasa was a desktop app for years before google photos; but now everything is on the cloud. I've never connected my current phone to a computer. (I did with my previous one, but that was for app development and debugging).

0: http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/technology

STRONG BAD: Originally, tellular cellaphones {indicating Pom Pom's phone} were for sending misspelled messages to your friends, telling them where you are in the food court.

POM POM: {makes a few bubbling noises directed at Strong Bad, then resumes his conversation}

STRONG BAD: Pom Pom just bought movie tickets with his cell phone!

POM POM: {looks annoyed and makes more bubbling noises}

STRONG BAD: Oh, he just watched a movie on his cell phone!

POM POM: {looks angry at Strong Bad, makes more bubbling noises}

STRONG BAD: Oh oh oh! Pom Pom just wrote, directed, produced, and distributed a movie with his cell phone!

POM POM: {answers an incoming call and makes a few more bubbling noises}

STRONG BAD: ...and he just got into Sundance! High-five, brother!

The language discussion is pretty navel-gazey and easily falsifiable. There were loads of Japanese-market PCs in the early 90s (stuff like the MSX). Hell, Apple did huge pushes in Japan as well, thanks to its high-res stuff. If the language was maybe a barrier early on, it's pretty hard to argue that it continued to be so.

"Something" was different, of course. And maybe there is an argument for there simply being not very many cheap machines available for the Japanese market.

My pet theory is that the US in particular quickly started doing things like asking students to type up essays on computers to get them printed, and that basically served as the uber-excuse for people to all have computers at home in the US.

If you want more exoticism, people in Japan are less likely to have home offices because they would just go to their real office or whatever. Less likely to play DOOM on your parent's machine or whatever.

The specialized device aside is also super weird cuz it forgets to mention stuff like rental CD markets which make analog-in totally fine as a concept anyways. "Why is this problem not solved in Japan" can often be answered by "this isn't really as much of a problem because of some other incidental technical reason X, and the good-enough thing survives" (just like ACH in the US)

Has the myth that Japan is a uniquely technically advanced society been debunked in culture yet? I see this a bit among laymen but it seems the only Japanese technological advantage today is the manufacturing of factory line robotics and control systems. The large consumer tech companies have been effectively plundered (Sony is a shell of what it was in the 90s) and Toyota and Honda are routinely outcompeted by Tesla and GM in EVs. The rest of consumer tech seems to be coming out of Taiwan, PRC and South Korea now.

It seems so. I primarily see it played for laughs in media these days, with hyper-advanced toilets or useless robots.

Of course Japanese suppliers are involved in many advanced industries (image sensors, displays, solid-state storage, heavily-integrated packaging, battery cells) but now days they often outsource production too.

The OLEDs all seem to be LG designed these days. With you on the image sensors though - a few years ago it was one of the most successful Sony divisions thanks to their Apple deal for the iPhone

It depends, JOLED makes some panels for LG. Smaller scale but technically interesting.

Having spent a fair amount of time in Japan with the "hyper-advanced toilets", I would kill to have those easily accessible where I live now (South Africa).

Not only did they leave my bum amazingly clean, a packet of toilet paper literally sat there and gathered dust.

I think that there is a lot of tech in Japan focused on quality of life improvements that just sits in the background. Perhaps given the aging demographics of the society, this is a good fit.

Meanwhile in the rest of the world:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVHYTdGUAZM&ab_channel=ABCNe...

"It's not the Thunderdome. It's not Mad Max. We don't need to do that."

They make pretty good trains.

They seem to be doing well in zippers.

I don't think this and many other myths about Japan have been debunked nearly enough yet. For instance, the "there is zero crime in Japan" myth which I still see and hear repeated almost daily both by Japanophiles and the Japanese themselves.

Actually, I don't think there is any other culture in the world today where the reality differs so much from the myth-based image, and in almost every single aspect.

One reason is that the focus of serious Western journalists has shifted towards China nowadays, and Japan has fallen to the wayside, mirroring its economic slump.

The gap that this created has been filled with the views of American teens and twens who became interested in Japan through its pop culture. And of course, if you are an impressionable young person from a rural part of the US who moves to the center of Tokyo, you'll think you've moved to the future. But on close inspection, the technological prowess in Japan often begins and ends with little speakers and screens blaring a 24h loop of ads.

Most of what is written about Japan nowadays is the work of Japanophiles with very little interest in actual research or comparison. There are only a handful of books about Japan worth reading: "The enigma of Japanese power" by van Wolferen (quite long and dry), and "Japan - A reinterpretation" by Patrick Smith (more to the point and more casually written), as well as "Demons and Dogs" by Kerr.

Japan is not uniquely advanced, but by an objective measure of economic complexity, Japan does have the most advanced economy in the world.

"Complexity" here essentially means that a country exports lots of different goods that other countries rarely export. A country that only exports unrefined petroleum will rank very low in complexity, while a country that exports a roughly even mix of goods across a wide range of different sectors will rank high in complexity. Japan is at the top of that ranking, followed by Switzerland.

1. https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/countries/114

> Has the myth that Japan is a uniquely technically advanced society been debunked in culture yet?

One hypothesis I saw put forward by a Japanese-American vlogger was that Japan basically "does not do software".

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqMSWuSeDPA

Software is treated as a second-class career in most major corporations. There's less cultural prestige with being a software engineer.

I'm not sure that Japan is uniquely advanced, but it certainly is skilled in certain niches. Does any doubt the quality control of most things manufactured in Japan?

Culturally it seems to be content with the old way of doing things in other ways (e.g., using cash (wrapped in envelopes)).

> Japan basically "does not do software".

I guess they dont know how to do UX either. As a tourist using Japanese (English) websites was a terrible experience. I dont know why the web designs is still stuck in the 90's

I asked this exact question in Japan. The usual answer was "because it is safer" - when I asked to elaborate what "safer" meant, I was met with annoyed stares. Questioning things isn't really known in Japan, if someone sometime decided that it's safer, then that's what it is.

Apart from some boutique startups, UX isn't even a thing in Japan. Similar to how it worked in the 80s in the US, UX is done by the same people who engineer the application who have no formal training or talent in UX.

Good article on this from a few years ago https://randomwire.com/why-japanese-web-design-is-so-differe...

> Software is treated as a second-class career in most major corporations. There's less cultural prestige with being a software engineer.

While I can't comment on the latter half of this statement, the first still rings true even today. The PlayStation 5 came out and featured a completely new system interface, and there have been numerous complaints about everything from navigation to moving saves forward from the PS4 to the PS5. Microsoft, Sony's biggest competitor in the space, chose to iterate on their interface, and while there are still some complaints, keeping the same wheel let them focus on things like easing the transition between hardware boxes via game updates and syncing saves.

For example, if you want to move a save game from a PS4 to a PS5 running an updated version of the game:

- Start the game on the old PS4, and make sure the save is synced to the cloud service.

- Install the PS4 version of the game on the PS5. On launch, the system didn't do a very good job of distinguishing the two versions of a game.

- Launch the PS4 version of the game on the PS5, just to pull the game down from the cloud service.

- Launch the PS5 version of the game on the PS5, so it can ingest the now-local cloud save.

Microsoft set up some system-level infrastructure to handle installing the "correct" version of the game (useful since they're selling two boxes with different specs) and has always handled save games as cloud saves, so moving between platforms can be as simple as "install game, start game", provided the developer/publisher hasn't opted out of the upgrade infrastructure (so they can sell an upgrade path).

What you are describing definitely happens, but it is 100% up to the specific game dev implementation. Some games indeed require that weird dance with "launch ps4 game on PS5, launch it, download ps5 version, launch ps5 version, etc."

But plenty of PS4 games that got corresponding PS5 versions don't require that, and getting your PS4 saves on PS5 version of the game is as simple as just launching the PS5 version and continuing from there, without any dances surrounding PS4/PS5 version swapping (assuming you have your PS4 save files either locally or in the cloud).

Which makes me reasonably believe that it isn't an issue inherent to PS5, but to how the specific games implemented that save file import functionality between PS4 and PS5.

Despite that example you used being a bit flawed, I totally agree with the rest of the general points you've made.

Some games have been patched to resolve the issue; however, that's something the developer needs to do (and QA), so it won't happen on every game. Compare it to what Microsoft does (developers get that functionality by default), and it's frustrating as a user.

Along the same lines, Sony also has issued different title IDs for bundles vs. the base game. Horizon: Zero Dawn[0] is one such example; I had the disc version, beat that game, and then wanted to play the expansion when it was made available free-of-charge last year. However, the free version was a different title ID (CUSA10237) than the disc version (CUSA07326), and neither was updated to pull the save file from the other version, so I was stuck restarting the game from scratch instead, losing about 60h worth of progress.

This isn't a hardware issue, it's entirely in that Sony hasn't made the proper investments in their backend or system software to make these transitions seamless.

The article is from 2008. Anyway I feel like the article makes many leaps which weaken its specific argument:

> the direction that the Japanese electronics industry took makes perfect sense. Everything needed to be designed as stand-alone appliance.

> By the year 2000, most of the technical difficulties facing computers in Japan in the 80s and 90s had been resolved, and home computers were becoming mainstream. Japanese consumers wanted PC connectivity from their appliances, and the iPod offered a well-designed, highly functional package. So Apple created the iPod, and Japanese electronics manufacturers were left to re-evaluate a new world where the home computer is the hub for digital media.

For me, it's really about CD/Mini-disc vs Mp3. Before the Mp3, I remember my friend showed me the mini-disc and I was blown away by it. Crazy better than CD's in terms of size.

But then Mp3's showed up, but I think specifically Napster, Limewire etc drove the crazy crazy adoption of Mp3's. Sony and other portable companies took notice and built Mp3 devices. Japan was slow to adopt the Mp3.

Why was Japan slow to adopt the Mp3? I'm not sure, could be because of the lack of personal computer? Or was it the lack of rampant piracy? My feeling is music hardware was "good enough" for what the market wanted at the time.

Eventually Mp3 became the standard and anyone slow to adopt it was forced to accept and switch over, like Japan.

[EDIT] Quick search shows that Japan had rampant priacy issues, but simply avoided the Mp3:

> But as of the beginning of 2004, Japanese record companies have largely avoided an online file-sharing epidemic.[0]

Still not sure why the Mp3's adoption was slow in Japan. Could very well be the lack of personal computer.

[0] https://anthropology.mit.edu/sites/default/files/documents/c...

Just talk about MP3 codec: Sony already developing their own ATRAC. Panasonic (and Sony) contributes for developing AAC (from patent list). Since AAC was standardized in 1997, maybe mp3 for 2000s looks a bit old from their perspective.

Japan had a major real estate crash in 1989, the Nikkei index crashed from 38,000 to 7,500, and never came all the way back.[1] It's only at 27,795 today. For a while in the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to take over the world. But that didn't happen.

The US had a similar crash in 2008, but it wasn't as bad. Although it did seem to result in what's now called "secular stagnation".

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/stockdetails/fi-a9j7bh?durat...

I think Japan's products often miss the bigger picture. They often excel at one specific problem, but lack cohesive strategy to tie back into the whole ecosystem. In this post, there was discussion about SD cards and music hence why they needed some kind of PC connectivity. I view that as a symptom of the lack of a bigger strategy. Apple came out with iTunes that was one answer to the music industries problem, and that allowed them to eventually iterate into the iPod with less need to support alternative ways for PC connectivity such as the SD card.

That's a result of mindset and approach. Japanese can't focus on 2 or more problems, neither they can assess influence of one issue against another and see an ecosystem.

It's neither good nor bad - it did allowed them to extremely excel in transportation for example, but terribly fail in any IT related matters simply because this approach won't work in IT.

True that, I live in Japan and notice it almost daily. Sometimes it can make meetings extremely frustrating, as in we have three problems, you propose a single solution that can fix all of them at the same time, and they don't like it, they prefer a single solution for each problem, which of course you have to apply serially because as you said they can't focus on several problems at the same time.

I wonder how much kanji is to be blamed for this mindset. I mean if you need a different character for every single word, maybe it's easy to extrapolate that idea to other aspects of life.

Not sure if kanji are to blame - chinese use same alphabet but their way of thinking is totally different.

I'd suggest the root cause is in arguably failing japanese education system. It makes them very rigid in the way they see the world and make decisions.

It's same reason why they adore Excel so much, btw.

Holy shit Excel! Don't get me started on that... I would like to know who are the idiots at my company that decided that making complex forms with pictures and shit in Excel is a good idea. Like they don't know Word exists for a reason?

Yeah sort of lacking the concept of hierarchy and/or recursion. “We need Z to do Y to do X” - no no the operand can’t be a pointer to executable address. That’ll fault.

> The PC-9801 featured a standard resolution of 640×400, which would not be surpassed as a standard in the west until the release of VGA and Macintosh II in 1987.

Small niggle: this isn't quite true. The Amiga 1000, released in 1985, supported a graphics mode at 640 x 400 (NTSC) and 640 x 512 (PAL) standard resolutions that on a standard TV would display interlaced (leading to flickering), but could be displayed without the flicker with a "flicker fixer" and a multisync monitor. The Amiga also supported overscan resolutions so these pixel counts could be exceeded on both the horizontal and vertical axes (I forget by how much though).

As I say, a small niggle, but a niggle nonetheless.

The Olivetti M24 (also sold as the AT&T PC 6300) from 1985 did 640x400 as well, plenty of software could use it.

The Japanese corporation Toshiba created the drive formfactor that made it possible, and Apple bought exclusive music player rights to it.

The Nomad etc. maybe didn't actually lose because of lacking wheel as popularly mythologized, its successors were stuck with a bulkier more power hungry laptop drive because Apple owned exclusivity.

Well, the IBM MicroDrive already existed in 2000 with sizes up to 1GB. Apple itself used them for the iPod after a certain year, so the technology for tiny drives weren't that exclusive or hard to get - I think the mindset was really the big factor at play here. Japanese conglomerates definitely didn't get the appeal behind the iPod as much as they didn't understand the iPhone in 2008.

The microdrive was IBM with Hitachi (another Japanese company). That was first used with the mini. Probably not enough capacity at its 1.0in at launch of original iPod. The original iPod with Toshiba drive was 1.8in.

In some ways, the iPod or the iPhone are largely not technical innovations, but political. For the iPod, you had to get the catalog online and digital. For the iPhone, you had to get the data rates in USA low.

In the most important ways. It's a huge difference, and it's something many of The Followers of Jobs don't seem to understand.

It's never just about engineering or nice design or being an asshole. The pieces have to fit together to create the UX, and the box the user carries is just one of the pieces.

Sony seemed to be attempting the opposite - locking their customers into their own tech and content - and unsurprisingly that failed.

One common trope I've heard for the reason why PC gaming never took off in Japan (vs. Korea) is that the PC became home for erotic games so PC gaming was viewed as rather obscene. This explanation however makes more sense.

Gaming PC and monitor is big for some urban Japanese house, and not suitable for living room unlike PS2.

This could be a reason, yet it would be strange because in all other areas of Japanese life, there is almost no stigma attached to erotic content or even hardcore porn. Ride the subway in a big Japanese city, and every other man in there will be openly reading some kind of pornographic material, either as mags or on their phones, with children being able to see the extremely lewd cover page or more.

In every convenience store, the lewd mags are also on full display. In primetime comedy variety shows, the comedians make gross jokes about beating off or "f...ing" all the time. American stand-ups do those jokes too, but surely not on NBC at 7pm.

Even hardcore porn actresses are mainstream "stars" in Japan - they are regular guests on mainstream TV shows or do ads for chain restaurants etc. Accordingly, there is no stigma attached to young women choosing a career in the adult entertainment world. Their parents will be proud of their hard working children.

I was on a flight to Japan once where the Stewardess had to tell a Japanese man sitting next to me to please not read his porn because the "gaijin" people around him could be uncomfortable.

Hacker News' exoticisation of Japan is exhausting. Probably further proof that nobody here is capable of discussing society.

This is just completely wrong.

Yes, there is porn at some convenience stores (several chains have outright removed this though). You _might_ see people outright looking at porn in the subway, but people around that person will find it disgusting that they're doing it there.

This stuff is available and relatively easy to access, but people are still going to judge you if you're renting 18+ DVDs every week. Especially if you don't keep that stuff to yourself.

Your TV comment is also basically wrong. The "time of day" at which more crass commentary from show hosts is allowed on the TV is definitely earlier than the US, but it sure ain't 7 PM. More likely for that sort of stuff to be airing from 10PM onwards.

There's a lot of degrees of difference between Japan and Europe about this kind of stuff (the US is its own brand of puritanism that is _not_ the normal), but this sort of hyperbole is not representative of what a random Japanese person on the street thinks (unlike what you might have read on Tokyo Reporter or whatever).

How can it be wrong, when I've observed it with my own eyes, for years now?

Yes

People criticize USA, a lot for racism and discrimination but the reality is that there are not other country in the planet where immigrant can be integrated so fast to the workforce and don't find themselves trapped under a glass ceiling, it probably happens but with less frequency than other countries, other countries are competing with their limited pool of talent that people in power let succeed against the world itself.

Talent can come from everywhere, and USA will continue to dominate the innovation scene for years to come

I'd argue that most of Europe is much better at this than the US. Not only is there freedom of movement within the EU allowing people to work anywhere, but also many states are more progressive than the US and have slightly less of a race divide.

The US gets something right with innovation, but I don't think this is it.

Freedom of movement exists within the US, many US states are more progressive than the EU, there are slightly more people of another “race” in the US, but most importantly: there are far more people (# and %) of non US/EU background in the US, and the only countries with more % are other “Anglo” countries like Australia and Canada.

I doubt that some guys from any country outside europe, can become the ceo of some of the more prominent companies. Probably can happen in UK, but doubt that it will happen in any other country of europe, or Elon Musk in Japan, nah I don't see that happening.

Past threads from way back:

Why Japan didn’t create the iPod - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197702 - March 2010 (88 comments)

Why Japan didn’t create the iPod - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=181224 - May 2008 (4 comments)

Because only Apple could create the iPod? Duh!

No, seriously, there were a lot of competent MP3 players before the iPod, but Apple did it the was they do it most of the time: wait until a technology is really ready for mass market adoption, and then present their own compelling version of it. In the case of the iPod, it was the integration with iTunes (the software and the store) which made the iPod easier to use than the competition. Of course, it helped that Apple was also a computer maker and had far more software competence than a regular electronics company. Also, Apple was in an unique position to convince the record companies to "play along" with the iTunes store.

And then they did it again with the iPhone...

Very interesting, also would be curious to know how everyday things evolved today: booking travel, ebanking etc? since here in the west we sometimes see the home computer beeing pushed away by mobile/tablets or the home printer starting to disappear.

It is sometimes said that usage of PC by young people is decreasing faster here in Japan compared to other countries. Because of most people don't use Qwerty input on smartphone, and there are very few PC usage at school other than IT class. Using PC on class is now in progress (partially thanks to covid), they start buying Chromebooks, but it's long way, because teachers aren't good for PC and too restrictive for students' activity.

Online banking/booking on PC/smartphone is widely available but some people still prefer telephone, real travel agency, ATM, or real banking (or just lazy to sign up).

Having lived there for a while, some observations:

Travel: major airlines have robust enough mobile sites or apps to make a 100% smartphone experience seamless. Printed tickets can be obtained from ticket kiosks inside any convenience store. Big travel agencies such as JTB or HIS also still play a large role.

E-banking: might be different now, but 2018s Japan still eschewed credit for cash, and rely on passbooks [0] for teller/ATM transactions. Most Japanese people I socialized with regularly carried around $300 USD equivalent in cash.

Transferring money to other individuals or companies is easily done through ATMs.

Bill payments: either auto-withdraw, or paper bills mailed to you and paid for at...convenience stores(called conbini in Japanese)! Just have the cashier scan the QR code and pay in cash! Miss a payment? No worries, the grace period goes for something like 60 days and the balance due will just roll into the next paper bill.

Online shopping: the spot that shows the greatest amount of credit card adoption...but you can also pay for things using gift cards (sold at the nearest conbini) or ...you guessed it, more QR codes and kiosks (at conbinis).

Subscription services: All major streaming sites sell gift cards for various time amounts. Or you can tie your apple or google pay account to your phone provider and have the charges added to your phone bill (payable via conbini kiosk).

By the time I was leaving there was a greater push for app-centric user experiences but for the most part, life goes on via cash and conbinis. It is very possible to live life with just a smartphone in Japan.

Something also of note is that unlimited SMS is not a thing in Japan and the Line app rules the day for daily communication. Line has been pushing their digital wallet really hard lately, and I had to mute the app due to incessant pleas to make me throw my hard earned cash into Line...

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passbook

Why are most innovative consumer products and software from the US, would be a more relevant and contemporary question.

A very large native consumer audience that (more or less) all speak a single language goes a long way. You can get access to a lot of customers before you need to do anything international.

You don't have to be in the US for it to be easy to initially target just the US market though.

It sure helps though. You can't just stroll into the US as a foreign entrepreneur (unless you are very wealthy already or well-connected) and sell your product.

Mhm, the last 2 German startups I worked for basically went to the US very quickly after originally targeting the German market and if you're "just" putting up a subsidy company while employing Americans for sales and keeping development where you started it doesn't seem too bad.

>Mhm, the last 2 German startups I worked for basically went to the US very quickly after originally targeting the German market

Same thing happens in video games. Consider French studio Dontnod; other than its first game Remember Me (set in a futuristic setting), five of its six other games (including the Life is Strange series) are set in contemporary US and the sixth in 1920s London. The US/English-speaking market is just too big to bypass unless there's a compelling reason.

(A good example of a compelling reason is fellow French studio Asobo, which put out the widely praised A Plague Tale set in France during the Black Plague. A sequel is coming, but the main bread and butter of the studio nowadays is Flight Simulator 2020, which is "set" nowhere and everywhere.)

In most areas of the German economy, IT is still seen as a necessary evil to be able to run "real" businesses like auto manufacturing.

With the success of big American social media companies like Facebook, the public mindset has started changing, but on a glacial timeline - too little, too late.

German internet startups are comparable to their American counterparts nowadays. But the majority of IT jobs aren't at startups, but in other industries - and they still suffer from the image of being a necessary evil rather than an asset.

One example is the desolate state of car-entertainment software even at the luxury brands. No German car manufacturer could come up with something like CarPlay or Android Auto. Not because they don't have the money to acquire the talent, but because of a "what we have is good enough" mindset.

America is exceptional. There’s a good reason why Jobs was Syrian-American and not Syrian-Japanese or even Syrian-French.

Japanese consumer growth stalled during their lost decade while Clintonomics gave us a boom. Americans are significantly wealthier than their Japanese or Western European counterparts, with the only exception maybe being Norway. A large, prosperous, and open society breeds innovation.

>Americans are significantly wealthier

Mean or average?

I think you meant to ask mean or median? (To me 'average' means mean, median OR mode. Although in general usage often specifically refers to mean).

Mean and median are higher by most accounts, mean significantly moreso.

If you mean median or average, both actually. You have to quite poor to be worse off (on average) in the US than in Europe (don't know about Japan); last time I checked it was something like the 10-20th percentile. FWIW, I am European, so no bias.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...

The median net worth seems to be higher in Western/Northern Europe than the US though. Eastern Europe pulls down the statistics quite a bit. Canada also has a higher median.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_map_of_median_wea...

The GP specified Western Europe, so I doubt the 10th-20th percentile statistic is accurate since most Western European countries are not that far off from the US median[0].

If one takes into account the social services (education, healthcare, etc.) and general worker protections (mandatory PTO, parental leave, etc.) I think it’s clear the median earner in Western Europe is doing better than the median US worker in quality of life terms.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income

In aggregate. Our middle-class can't get enough of expensive consumer tech, to the point where you can be in debt and still sign up for a payment plan on the latest $1500 iphone.

(on second thought, maybe our wealth comes from our credit-worthiness, aka our willingness to owe each other money)

> with the only exception maybe being Norway

As far as I'm aware, while the government of Norway has a lot of money, Norwegian people don't. But the Swiss do.

But where do you actually see that prosperity? I don't think the average American has a better lifestyle than the average German or Swiss or French person.

> There’s a good reason why Jobs was Syrian-American

Wasnt his birth father Syrian and then he got adopted by "American" parents so I dont know why the Syrian heritage is relevant here?

Life expectancy in Japan is 5 years higher than in the U.S, which does not suggest the U.S. population is benefitting from this alleged prosperity.

High output of consumer products in general, which unfortunately also comes with a high consumption of resources.

Same with software.

From California to be more precise. USA is huge and there are a multitude of 'nowheres' like small factory towns that do not participate a lot in this innovation process.

This then ties into something more important that geography. Culture and freedom from physical, psychological and monetary oppression. It is not that people in rest of the world or rest of USA are less smart on average. It is that they live in a system in which some form of oppression exists if someone higher up in the food chain learns of their success and starts beating them down so they never reach greatness as in California. This someone higher up does not even have to be the government or the local mob. Could also be family/relatives and/or cultural standards (better safe than risky, rich is evil, distribute your riches to the poor ASAP etc)

> It is not that people in rest of the world or rest of USA are less smart on average. It is that they live in a system in which some form of oppression exists if someone higher up in the food chain learns of their success and starts beating them down so they...

... move to California. Well, at least I did ;).

Is this article true though? I use MP3 players and small pocket computer from Casio and Sharp. Are they not connect to the PC? Or are we talking about the wrong history here.

I know their pc standard is different from ours. But iPod is really 2000s things. Many problems solved.

It is just like why no one has iPhone. There are smart phone. Just you want to have the genius to reinvent the game. There are MP3 players before iPod. Just wait for a genius or a company that look for user pain points and solved it.

I think that discuss reinventing history.

2 years before the iPod, there was the NOMAD digital audio player designed and sold by Singaporean Creative Technology they had offices in Japan, but they promoted MP3, and even encouraged ripping CDs. Sony et al did not like it, Steve Jobs came to their rescue with his thing. https://sg.creative.com/corporate/pressroom?id=6225

Sony could possibly have ushered in the MP3 revolution years before MP3 did, using their ATRAC audio compression, but being a record company as well as an electronics company, they were presumably concerned about piracy, something which may have also slowed adoption of MP3 playback.

Sony already had a successful product line in terms of MiniDisc players and also had the Memory Stick Walkman. These devices supported ATRAC and SDMI DRM. Presumably they could have used the same 1.8" Toshiba hard drive as the iPod to make a higher capacity version (as they later did with the Network Walkman, which initially did not support MP3.)

Fast forwarding to the iPod, it was a great way to play stacks of (usually unlicensed) MP3 recordings, and in 2001 "Rip/Mix/Burn" Apple was less worried about piracy because it wasn't a media company.

Subsequent to the original iPod, the initial incarnation of the iTunes store incorporated DRM (apparently at the behest of record companies) which was folded into the iPod as well.

> In Japan, however, things were different. Perhaps the easiest way to understand the Japanese market at the time is to imagine that home computers did not exist.[...]It all makes sense if nobody owns a home computer, and when the mobile phone is the dominant form of Internet connectivity.

I ellipsed all the SD card mention, but I find this summary of the situation fascinating, as this is pretty close the world we have today for a lot of people. Mobile phone is the dominant form of internet connectivity for a significant portion of the population.

An insight from that could be that Japan didn't create the iPod because that global need didn't make as much sense in the context.

I personally think it is really Sony being way too confident and stubborn, preventing the digital walkman from being the universal player it could have been. What they had was somewhat good enough for a big span of the Japanese market, but way too clunky and outdated for the rest of the world; and their position as an incumbent made it harder for smaller company.

Dogmatism , arrogance and hubris lead to the downfall of all great powers, eventually.

As somebody who had Japanese gadgetry frequently around me 1995-2005 when I lived in Vladivostok, I find the premise silly.

Japanese versions of PDAs, and mini-PCs (exactly, PDA sized PCs) had zero problem both with display, and input of their language. 16x16 was the font standard.

I frequently got second hand devices with data intact, and I wondered how in the world their font designers managed to pull it out.

Second, Japanese devices had superb connectivity to anything from abroad, a completely 180° of the picture the guy draws.

Clies, Zauruses were able to go to the internet by themselves in around year 2000, and every trendy gadget came with sync cables for those. I had sync cables for my MD walkman for both Zaurus, and Clie. I even saw Sony digital tape players coming with some digital audio i/o adapters.

So, the author feels to me to have zero idea of what he is talking, just pushing the standard trope of "smart, but unimaginative Asians"

There's this obsession with the iPod like it was the first mp3 player in the world. It wasn't even the best.

I had an MP3 player before I heard about the iPod, moved on to PDAs with MMC cards for music (because why have two separate devices), had smartphones before the iPhone was even released, had an MP3 player with a high quality DAC/preamp (big difference with good headphones).

Apple is just good at marketing and Americans are good at buying (hence, the initial and continued success of many American companies). You'll have a harder time getting most Europeans to buy your new revolutionary/life-changing/world-saving stuff, imo. Probably the same for Japan.

For the same reason they didn't create PCs: they had a different idea of what the Japanese market wanted which was calculators, not computers. And this drove the entire Japanese semiconductor and electronics industry during the 1970s and 1980s. Different Market. Different Culture. Different Technology Strategies.

And the Japanese are super sure of whatever direction they've picked once they've achieved "consensus" - NOTHING can change it; not other markets, and not situational changes.

The consensus part combined with risk aversion also meant they'd sooner duplicate the Moto flip phone or Nokia than step out to the iPhone touch screen button design.

Honestly it's easy to grok if you've spent time in Japan and/or doing a lot of business with Japanese companies.

Well, Morita got old and sick in 1993. Before that time, Sony brought out or popularized transistor radios, trinitron tv’s, higher end pc’s and a damn good, overengineered walkman. The one I had in 1989 was metal and plastic, took one aa battery, ran for 3+ hours and had good in ear phones. Followed this up with discmans, but the accountants were making themselves felt by then (cheap plastic).

Couple the Kaisen culture with a visionary and things happen. Let the bean counters run things and you get dividends. Sony put lightning in a bottle for a while. So did IBM, so did others from time to time. Apple was rare in that they did it more than once, but have they kept it up?

tl;dr - Language (kanji are hard) and culture (electronic devices as standalone devices, not a digital hub).

The iPod was a triumph of consumer-friendly embedded systems.

I got interested in iPodLinux, having a computer more powerful than my Mac Plus in my pocket that I could program! Now I'm an embedded software engineer at a medical device manufacturer. If I saw embedded engineering as boilers and fridges, I doubt that my teenage self would have been excited about it (not to insult those working in those essential industries!)

Culture in the west has changed since 2008, though. The "digital hub" model has shifted to a cloud-based SaaS subscription model. This is more profitable for service providers, especially phone companies.

But it's not because people like the cloud! It's because the iPod had no data input, no social experience. The music community was separate at the time (on MySpace). The iPhone came, threw music to the side, and pushed everyone towards cameras, screens, and sharing photos with each other (Facebook, Instagram). The network effects of community were stronger than the technical superiority of the iPod (larger storage, reliable software, USB disk mode).

I believe that these things go in cycles, and personal music will become popular again. Probably in some open-source, decentralised way, which can leverage that community effect. It won't happen until concert tours can restart, but it could be powerful enough to displace the major players (Apple, Google, Spotify) who seem to be neglecting the music community that brought them their market in the first place.

This is very interesting article from 2008. I would be interested to also read one which does an analysis of current trends and market in Japan and compare how it evolved.

(2008), but my first time reading—I only realized when the date when it started talking about Wii in the future tense towards the end, which brings me back!)

Previous discussions:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> It all makes sense if nobody owns a home computer, and when the mobile phone is the dominant form of Internet connectivity.

It did feel more advanced at the time, because phones were ubiquitous. Interestingly the rest of the world is now heading in that direction.

I never thought that something so basic as an alphabet could have such profound effects. Nice story

Nah, Sony was hell-bent on ATRAC and their proprietary memory stick standards. Not sure about the other major electronics manufacturers in JP, but the only one that sounds "technological trend setter" in my mind is Sony, so if they weren't doing it nobody else was.

And Job's Apple was throwing their hearts into open standards big time, abnormally so compared to the industry landscape.

Nope, the iPod could have only been Apple

It is the same reason Apple/Google will not create "the AR glasses".

ironically (and anecdotally), pre-touch iPods are still popular in Japan. still see them being used (edit: sometimes) in pristine condition

Is that because Japan is also poorer and presumably most folks have less disposable income? Because my understanding is iPhones are still the #1 or #2 selling phone model in the country.

No. Japanese and Americans have similar levels of disposable income.

https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/japan/

$29k vs $45k. https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/

your link highlights the trouble with using the mean average :> But there is a considerable gap between the richest and poorest – the top 20% of the population earn nearly nine times as much as the bottom 20%.

The wealth gap in Japan is much narrower. I suppose I would want an iphones-per-capita measure to compare whether our buying habits are similar.

I know the OECD is supposedly a respected institution, but I love how nonsensical nearly every item on the list here is.

Just comparing these two, they say the US is below the OECD average lifespan while Japan is significantly above. Yet Japan is near the bottom end of the health chart and the US is near the top. Japan and Korea are below Brazil and Mexico in health. I find that... questionable, to say the least.

Also interesting how Japan has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world (possibly only Singapore is safer), yet Japan is in the middle of the chart and not far above the US. Somehow the UK is considered safer than Japan.

Makes me wonder how exactly they calculate everything. Loads of wonky results there.

That’s not the case in my experience. I’ve been living in Japan since 2006 and can’t recall seeing an iPod in forever.

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