A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?
disruptingjapan.com
disruptingjapan.com
The problem isn't that Japanese companies "missed" the opportunity to do software at X point in time--the problem is that they are culturally Japanese. Japan is about consensus-based design, there is a high penalty for making mistakes, and individuality/creativity is not valued. 出る杭は打たれる - "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down". Certainly you can develop software this way, but the Silicon Valley model of rapid iteration, "if it doesn't work rewrite it", "move fast and break things", etc. gets you there sooner.
But what about Matz and the Ruby core team, you say? Certainly they are a zany, free-thinking bunch. I attended Ruby Kaigi last year and noticed that most Ruby core team members are hired by domestic Japan-focused tech companies, think Cookpad, Tabelog, etc. They are kept for their HR value to attract tech recruits and allowed to spend all their time on whatever open source project they want. Meanwhile the peons work on the actual product.
Source: I've worked in software in Japan for 15 years; 5 at a Japanese bank and 10 as a CTO of my own company. We run circles around our Japanese competitors.
*(often free or packed into "1001 games for free with this magazine" disks)
Similarly there are far more people fluent in English so small dev teams can reach a much larger audience without considering translation issues.
Other reasons PC gaming might not be a thing in Japan. It takes a lot less room for a console (especially NES/SNES/Gamecube) than it does for a PC. You plug the console into your exiting TV. A PC needs it's own space with it's own monitor and desk. Japanese houses and especially apartments are small.
I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons than just that a PC costs more.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the thesis here, but it seems contradictory. I do think PG has a point with an ingrained culture of quality being hugely important. I just don’t think that necessarily contributes to bad software. In fact, I’m quite certain it doesn’t, since companies like Nintendo manage to produce absolutely beautiful pieces of software regularly.
In the US, consensus would be achieved through brainstorming, open debates, etc. and at the end maybe a vote, or maybe the leader just says "let's try it my way, and if it doesn't work we'll do it your way."
In a Japanese company, people in general do not speak openly in meetings, because they are afraid of disrupting group harmony. Ideas need to be circulated in a series of one-on-one discussions--this is called "newashi" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi). This means that for a group of N people, it's N*(N-1)/2 private discussions that need to happen. And everyone needs to be in agreement and comfortable that the idea is "right", and that there is nothing the slightest bit off with it. Only after all these discussions have happened and everyone is fully bought-in, there is then a meeting to "rubber stamp" the idea.
What if is in the middle of the hierarchy?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia)#Japanese_usag...
Sounds the same as ignoring the disagreement, and a bit remembering who disagreed.
Now tradition prioritizes quality. Do it the right way, like it always has been done. Tradition is not a good ingredient for software industry. If your motto was write software "like it has always been written" you are missing the boat because there is no need to write the same program again and again.
There's no reason to write the same software again - because then you could just use old existing code instead of retyping the same characters again in your editor. Déjà vu. Groundhog day.
And I have an explanation: Japanese education imprints and emphasizes for the whole duration of it that work is strictly for community goals, education is for learning officework punctuality and not for skills, and fun at work is nothing but slacking[0]. Some attribute those to agricultural tribalism; I don't know, but I think these imprinting statements fits behaviors describe in GP and of Nintendo(et al.).
"Move fast and break things" would be just display of laziness, ease of use would be just enablement for saboteurs, iterative design would be just poor planning, under this thinking. UI improvements based on subjective individual opinions would be considered an attitude incompatible with the concept of work, especially for business applications. No wonder that GP runs circles around others when the impediment is in individual successes that products offer users, which the whole culture is united to always look firmly away in all professional settings.
This become less apparent in games and gambling because business goals just happen to align with joy and ease of users, hence Nintendo seems unaffected from consumer standpoint.
0: Such words as "comfort", "efficient", "precise" are used as euphemisms and self deceptions when pursuit of fun or ease cannot be avoided
I experienced this working for the US arm of a Japanese company. To report a bug would cause the programmer to lose face, so we had to waste a lot of time going through all kinds of contortions to lead someone to the bug without calling it out. We wrote a lot of "feature requests" that were really bug reports.
I'm sure there are some bugs that are directly caused by a programmer, but what about all the other inevitable bugs like a vendor upgrading their library, breaking changes, etc?
At least in SWE, the biggest "mistake" here is conflating that bugs and mistakes are the same thing.
Running https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project !1!! :-)
As it is now, software engineering us not respected as real engineering because we neglect to apply general engineering principles. We throw away battle-tested solutions and learnings very few years in favor of shiny brittle toys, in the name of "disruption".
I guess the only thing that would change things is something I call some kind of consistent regulation. Too much gate-keeping like in traditional engineering or medical fields can stifle innovation. However, software used by a certain minimum number of users, and software used in certain fields like medicine, transport, finance, need to be subjected by regulatory agencies to certain objective (hence automated?) tests to ensure they meet some minimum reliability, usability, security, and performance requirements. In this regime, small-time SaaS software, or hobby projects, would not need any regulation, but flagship software products of Facebook, Google, SAP, Oracle, Tesla, etc would need it.
Examples include large older tech companies like IBM and Cisco, defense contractors, and banks.
Even Google's CEO has been talking about how the company has become unproductive and unable to move fast, because that actually matters now that the outlook for the economy is not great.
Similarly, kaizen was all about continual factory process optimization, not optimization of a codebase through iterative refactoring. In fact, the mindset is very much "write the code once, never change it, and keep it running it forever basically without upgrades or patches."
"Reduce muda" (we might say "reduce toil") is laughably out-of-place in Japanese software shops. To give an example, an acquaintance worked as "DevOps" at Rakuten. His job was to release new software versions by opening up 200 SSH terminal windows.
Another posible reason, very few people in Japan speak English (at least that was the case when I worked there in the 90s). That might have affected international penetration of their software. Perhaps this is why we don't see much software from Germany either.
(US CTO living in Germany)
(I would have guessed the opposite, thinking about patent trolls who ... live in the US?)
You've setup companies in other countries as well, to mitigate risk, or only in the US? If I may ask
And high-speed pizza delivery!
Why is software so special?
I would argue that the kind of risk aversion that holds back software companies is just as evident in most of Europe as it is in Japan. It is also the norm in a bunch of American companies in the tech industry, especially the older ones. And China, which is also often brought up as a society where individuality is not valued in business (due to "Confucianism" and similar tropes), is not held back by similar risk aversion and has a massive software industry that can compete internationally.
The reality is that only a few countries are dominant in software, and they dominate to such an extent that they draw in software engineers from the rest of the world. That didn't happen because all the other countries have a Japanese business culture... A convincing explanation of why the world is that way needs to be based on traits that are not unique to Japanese culture.
My point was the inverse, that the archetypical Japanese approach to engineering suits the iterative careful development that hardware requires.
But because software is "virtual" it can change-shape in whatever way as long as it does something useful. The software products change rapidly whereas we are still in the beginning of trying to understand what are the best processes for producing it, why because process depends a lot on the product. So if the product changes fast process must change too. And when it changes fast it is difficult to improve it gradually.
Video games are a strange exception I suppose, because they are software. But it seems like above-described culture obsession with not making mistakes doesn't apply so much to the arts.
...because it is the intersection of art and engineering.
Shadow of the Colossus infamously ran pretty badly on its original release platform (PS2). A good amount of the N64's library ran at sub-20fps in certain areas. Bloodborne launched with 60-second load screens. Hell, remember GTA5's multi-minute loading screens that people put up with until someone reverse engineered the code and found it was mostly pointless JSON parsing? Dark Souls was 30fps on PCs for years (without a mod that caused bugs of its own) until the remaster came out.
There's lots of examples of badly-running and/or ugly and/or buggy games that are still regarded as great.
If the software development is done under their "office culture", instead of the "factory culture" that was changed, it would be a very good explanation for why it's not very innovative. But I have no idea if that happens.
At the time, Japan was going to eat our lunch while it simultaneously kicked our butts. Its government-academic-industrial complex was how to do things. It was the technological and industrial leader, the one everyone was chasing. (This was possibly entirely due to the automotive industry, but.... And consumer electronics had something to do with it.)
Then the wheels started to come off. In the software world, the Fifth Generation project came up with...a PROLOG machine. At the same time that Lisp machine companies were going belly up all over the US. And then Japan disappeared entirely. From what I saw and heard, the Japanese software industry became very insular and remote from the rest of the world. And then, the lost decades.
The process described in the article does a better job (and a more relatable one) at explaining what I saw than "they were Japanese", I think. But then, I don't know what the last 20 years have been like, since I haven't needed to follow the Japanese software industry. (Well, there was Ruby, but that was a pretty big mistake.)
I find the "it's just Japanese culture" explanations to be weak sauce. Examining the market and political forces at play will usually get you closer to the truth.
The fact is, Japanese companies have taken big, creative, successful risks in many industries. If you look at the developers who work in console gaming, they find ways to push those machines far beyond what they were designed to do. If you've been in Japan for a while, I'm sure you've seen the amazing levels of creativity that exist here in both engineering and the arts.
It's not that Japanese are more risk-averse than Americans. It's that the risk-reward equation is different in Japan. On average, people are behaving rationally in both places.
If you want to change the "culture", change the risk-reward balance. That's why I find it more productive to look at market forces and game theory than attribute things to "Japanese culture:".
Therefore, something like Javascript would never emerge from Japan. Only an American would be able to create an abomination like Javascript.
What do I mean by this? Basically: If you're a wizard at peeling the skin off an apple with your knife you never need an apple peeler; consequently, you never get a good peeler industry going. Meanwhile, Americans manufacture the best apple peelers because they can't skin an apple with a knife to save their own lives.
Likewise, Japan doesn't /need/ or /want/ the conveniences and luxuries afforded by genuinely good programming. Japanese can and will get by with the hard(er) way and won't care.
Tools exist to address an inconvenience. Good tools exist to make a convenient inconvenience even more convenient. And good toolmakers exist to enable such better conveniences. None of this can exist if there aren't inconveniences in the first place.
This also extends to the hardware side of things, too. Take flash memory, for example. Flash memory was invented in Japan by Toshiba, but nobody cared because Japan was too good. Meanwhile, Intel and the west seized upon the invention and made bank.[1] We all know where Toshiba is now.
This I feel is why Japanese programmers continue to be utterly inept (most still can't produce unicode programs), and why the wider industry in Japan continues to be irrelevant on the world stage from a programming perspective. There is no Japanese equivalent to Microsoft or Google or Amazon because Japan's too good for that.
The idea of Japanese people honing a skill/job to perfection is definitely a stereotype where I am from. Perhaps it might be a justified stereotype which ties into this. Definitely the apple peeler example rings true.
I can literally see the difference in stitching quality between Lexus and any other brand vehicles. Even poor Porsche gets brutally mogged by the LC500.
That's quite a sweeping statement! Plenty of Japanese programers I know are extremely competent.
Maybe the programmers in question are smart as in book smart, but they clearly don't know how to reflect that in practice.
Also, it truly is ridiculous that so many Japanese programs still can't unicode.
Can't, or won't? In truth, Unicode is a completely braindead standard
In my experience, many programmers that are book smart can contribute to great working software, but can also produce crap when left to their own devices ("who cares about UX, look at this slick 3NF data model I fleshed out") or managed incompetently ("We fixed all the bugs that were in our bug tracker, therefore the software must be complete").
But plenty of Japanese programers you know who are extremely competent != all Japanese programmers are extremely competent.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
* at least according to how swiss tell this story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_clock#History differs substantially. (but does mention Longines ca. 1966, which may have been how the story I heard arose? In any case, these days Longines has long since been bought by Swatch...)
Also many deca billion dollar spinouts from Xerox Parc: 1. SGI / silcon graphisc based on Jim Clarke's work on 3D chips. 2. 3Com / ethernet based on Bob Metcalfe's work. 3. Adobe based on John Warnock and Charles Geschke on vector graphics and printing. etc.
Its not that. Its that pushing digital photography and other stuff and monetizing them would kill their existing business. However you look at it, its a risk.
Even if someone sees that and is somehow able to sell it to the board, that would also need to be sold to the shareholders. And there comes the real challenge. Its not easy to go to shareholders and say that you are going to start a new product line that will kill the profits of another, but ask the shareholders to trust you, because this is going to be the 'thing' of the future. On one side billions of dollars of investments in stocks, backed by a gigantic market held by a flagship product. On the other side predictions of future.
The investors and even the markets wouldnt like that. In a sense, capitalism hampers innovation by providing the wrong incentives.
Kodak with digital cameras. Nokia with smart phones. etc.
Ahh. This explains why Perl is so much better than Ruby. Makes sense now.
Perl is my preference of the three (Perl, Python, Ruby). I agree with 'There Is More Than One Way To Do It', and disagree with 'There Is Only One Way To Do It'. And Perl has the best support for regular expressions. Ruby is OK, but I learned Perl first, so it feels more natural.
To me this sounds a bit like driving to a supermarket three towns away because it has the best selection of coffee filters... :)
But sometimes there is a builtin module that makes something easier to do, so I am faced with a 'Kobayashi Maru', a no-win situation
I've never used Nim or Crystal. Rust is too complicated for me to bootstrap and not particularly compatible with older architectures as far as I remember (I believe had trouble with compiling 32-bit)
echo 1 #[ deactivated ]#, 2
The programming language Ruby has to be the most famous Japanese open source software of them all
Feels like there is a heavy influence of Buddhist thought (mindfulness) on the silicon valley community.
Perhaps people that come from minority spiritual communities have to "think different?"
Christians are only 1% of Japan, but eight prime ministers have been Christian! <https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/a-chr...>
[1] https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/rest-in-peace-itojun-...
FatFs from Elm-ChaN is very popular in embedded systems: http://elm-chan.org/fsw_e.html
Information wants to be free.
See how Western games are still overwhelmingly closed source, despite the now known rewards : like Civilization 4 (2005) opening most (but not all) of its C++ (dll) source code, as well as easy to mod XML & Python scripts resulting in a still alive modding scene even today, 18 years later, and after 2.5 (much more restrictive) sequels !
I had thought about the same concept you mentioned here when comparing eastern and western culture, and I thought it might come from diet, but I didn't backup with any research.
However, if you have a small number of dishes so that you can't afford to wait 3-7 days between washings, and need to clean them daily, the dishwasher makes no sense.
Water makes it soft again in a minute. Postponing dishwashing is not worse than doing it right after eating.
If your dish is covered in dried yogurt & avocado slime - a lot of time the dish washer won't even get it off.
Ideally, I would probably run it every day right before bed and then unload it first thing in the morning. As is, I forget, then there are too many dishes to fit in the machine and I need to wash them by hand to cook with immediately.
Maybe the appliances sold here are also better optimized for pods? I do have a brand new dishwasher so that could be a factor as well.
Another thing is I don't like the smell of washing liquid very much, I choose not to use it at all, even when washing dishes with hands
My favourite apple peeler is the Jonas peeler from Sweden.
https://www.kitchenkapers.com/products/linden-original-jonas...
If you're eating a fresh apple, it generally isn't an issue.
TIL, thanks.
[0]: https://www.emeditor.com/about/about-emurasoft/greeting/
Two related examples I can think of:
- China skipped credit card to use mobile payment directly as credit card is already perfect for the western world.
- Apple didn't iterate over blackberry, the then perfect phone.
On the other hand, do we count games as software? Japan still produce lots of great game AFAICT, no?
His optimizations for linear algebra computations on commodity hardware are widely, widely used even to this day.
The usual meaning for "perfect is the enemy of good" I've heard is the danger of spending forever to perfect something instead of releasing and learning from experience.
(I'm also a firstborn American German so this is personally culturally interesting)
As an example, in the late 90's i was part of a group developing a Office Software Suite for a Japanese Company. The specification they gave us was very clearly done by some Hardware Engineer who had just learned OOD/OOP. All classes were named like hardware part nos. eg. MDK_C1001, MDK_C1002 etc. All methods were declared pure virtual in C++. We had to convince them to throw out their specifications, sit with us and re-design it together (and implemented using Visual C++/MFC framework).
Famously this was a major issue at Nokia and Blackberry, who institutionally believed that their competitive edge was in the hardware. Device specifications would change late in the product development cycle due to constraints on manufacturing or cost targets, and the software devs would just have to work around it. Adopting software platform, like Symbian at Nokia, was primarily seen as a cost and resource saving move to speed up development using a generic solution.
The success of American Software Companies is a direct result of limited structure, controlled chaos, lots of money to experiment with and loose financial controls pioneered by DARPA and transplanted to Silicon Valley.
This particular point is addressed directly in that the ready access to money made Japanese corporations stagnant. Why innovate if you can continue to get rich doing what you already do?
Nintendo went overconfidently into the 5th console generation with the cartridge-based Nintendo 64, allowing Sony to step in out of nowhere and eat their lunch since Nintendo alienated developers who obviously wanted the format where they weren't bound to the small storage sizes on cartridges. Including their bread-and-butter partnerships like Capcom with their Mega Man games and Square with the Final Fantasy series, both defecting to make PlayStation games.
Albeit their lunch was eaten by another Japanese company, but Sony made an overconfident hardware misstep themselves a couple generations later after feeling invincible with the success of the PS2, releasing the PS3 which was technically impressive from a hardware standpoint, but difficult to develop for, causing them to alienate developers (see Gabe Newell's famous comments) and lose steam for a lot of that generation.
Curious, I read the wiki page and if I'm reading it correctly, at the time DOS was already dominant in Japan and TRON/BTRON being incompatible with it made it economically unviable, which is the main reason why it was cancelled as a national standard.
> the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued a preliminary report accusing BTRON which only functioned in Japan of being a trade barrier and asked the government not to make it standard in schools.[12][13] TRON was included along with rice, semiconductors, and telecommunications equipment in an April 1989 list of items targeted by Super-301 (complete stop of import based on section 301 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988).
> According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, in 1989 US officials feared that TRON could undercut American dominance in computers, but that in the end PC software and chips based on the TRON technology proved no match for Windows and Intel's processors as a global standard.[14] In the 1980s Microsoft had at least once lobbied Washington about TRON until backing off, but Ken Sakamura himself believed Microsoft wasn't the impetus behind the Super-301 listing in 1989.[15] Known for his off the cuff remarks, in 2004 governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara mentioned in his column post concerning international trade policy that TRON was dropped because Carla Anderson Hills had threatened Ryutaro Hashimoto over it.[16][17]
It seems clear the US government did pressure Japan to kill the “BTRON in schools” project. It also seems clear that the project was facing its own internal obstacles (like the DOS compatibility issues you mention), quite apart from any US government pressure. The respective weight of those two factors in leading to its demise is a matter of opinion.
Good question. The same question can be asked about the defense industries of the UK, Germany and many other NATO countries. In some cases, the US killed their industries through threats and bribery that were later revealed as scandals.
> But the rest of the word was moving in a different direction. The rest of the world was moving away from dedicated hardware and towards innovative software running on standard hardware platforms.
This piece is about Japan vs the world, but looking at countries other than the US I'm not sure this narrative works.
For instance did the UK become a Software behemoth ? France ? Germany ? Brazil ? India ? Perhaps each country has their own failure story, but if we see the same result accross the board, are the individual specificities significant ?
Most advanced country have seen a few successes and has a decently sized software development power, but not that much bigger than Japan, and certainly not to the scale of the US. The real story would be to me "the US ate everyone's lunch"
It seems sort of consistent?
(even if there weren't a substantial rate difference: it is far less painful to stay awake until Pacific Time to coordinate with people who grok remote development than to attempt to deal with people in my time zone who do not)
Bull for instance. Ubisoft and a bazillion other video game company. Alcatel / Lucent / Thales for industrial stuff.
For the deepness of my ass I would say failure was tree fold :
- France like a good old top down approach. That … mostly don’t work for software.
- France decided to listen to our American friends and sell the familly heirloom to the market. ( I’m bitter on this one )
- France like to do it the “right” way, and that is, of course, the French way. That lead us to build our own internet in the 80’s ( see : minitel ) ( see : point 1 )
The US has won the Software (ie: not the games, but the core Software market) because it had pocket deep VCs that understood tech. Everything else is secondary. This is of course, my opinion.
I'm pretty sure a story similar to this was playing out throughout the software world.
I work in startup on both side, it’s … different
LVHM grew and flourished, but there was no love for the software industry. I kinda think there was no alternative scenario where it would have worked out, culturally most people really don't give a damn.
Also having a smaller internal market makes it harder to bootstrap new ideas to a decent size before getting it out. Even now successful startups might target France and Spain, but going beyond seems to be a very hard sell while the EU is supposed to make it easier in theory.
But that was bringing just enough to get by. Then we expanded to Italy and Germany with great effort. Each country was a whole new market with different regulations, customer expectations and so on.
We ended up spreading ourself very thin.
In insight, we also made mistakes, but that was not helping that each next 500 deployment was a large, hard to quantify effort.
Just to say that I probably wrong / not very informed.
Can you please expand upon this, and especially what "the familly heirloom" references?
France holds their own in software IMHO: Dassault Systèmes CATIA is still a behemoth, for example.
Having a national identity seems to be a double-edged sword. Brazil's soccer team, for example, is expected to win the Brazil way, dance, samba, which even for professionals may be a subconscious distraction from seeing a particular game situation clearly.
All this talk about why the U.S. is better at producing software could someday turn into the same burden.
It merged with Alcatel (French indeed) but that was in 2006. Well after the rise of Silicon Valley, right around the time of the Web 2.0 pivot.
And that's not to mention the success of Japanese video games.
The big problem that Japanese software has is simply that its market is too much smaller than anything which caters to English. This is why video games can do so well--language is of secondary importance.
As you say, they were really ahead in mobile, and docomo had an honest try to push imode in europe for instance, but it couldn't take off as the markets were too different.
The iPhone not supporting Felica gave the maker a small bubble to thrive but android was too far behind. Now they are barely surviving.
There were a bunch of silly operating systems in the history of computing, and Japan had a few too. TRON was pointed out in another thread, which still exists in some embedded stuff, even in modern stuff you may have used before, for example the Nintendo Switch joy-cons.
But TBH, there can only be a handful of operating systems that actually matter. So you'd have to outpush some extremely pushy companies in a very tight space, and the market for commercial operating systems is almost dead anyway.
Scotland did. We all know that the video games industry just exploded in Dundee about 20 years ago, but the whole area has a rich software development industry across a lot of fields.
One reason games became such a big thing in Dundee was because that's where the Timex factory where they built the ZX Spectrum was. And because that's where the factory was, everyone had one because everyone's dad knew someone who could "get" one, bypassing the usual supply chain hassles that Sinclair had at the time.
You could say that, but there weren't any problems getting ZX Spectrums in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh either, and the whole UK was awash with bedroom programmers making piles of games.
What I think actually put Dundee on the map was David Jones, attending Dundee Institue of Technology (now know as Abertay University) in 1987, employing his friends Russell Kay, Steve Hammond and Mike Dailly to form the company DMA Design. They had a series of successful games on the Amiga, releasing the worldwide smash-hit Lemmings in 1991. This encouraged Abertay to offer the world's first computer games degree course in 1997. You can see how large an employer DMA Design was in 1996 in this interview [1] where they were working a little-known game called Grand Theft Auto they released in 1998...
I'd put the case that DMA Design and Abertay kickstarted the Dundee games industry themselves, they had a lot more influence than the Timex factory. Bathgate had the Motorola factory, Greenock had IBM, that didn't turn them into software hubs.
The thing is that while a lot of people throughout the UK, by Christmas '83 literally everyone in Dundee had a ZX Spectrum. Probably half the reason they had difficulty fulfilling orders is that so many "minor faults" ones on the lines ended up getting sold in pubs under the table, that would otherwise have been reworked and packaged for retail.
And I mean, literally *everyone*. If you wrote a game and you gave copies to your mates at school, by the end of the week everyone would be playing it, particularly if it was good but even if it wasn't, because it was *new* and you hadn't played it a million times.
While Timex may have played a part and the density of Speccies may have been higher in Dundee, I still think Timex's main contribution to Dundee's games industry was to make David Jones redundant, giving him the money to buy an Amiga 1000 [3]
[1] https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books
Valid.
But the FAANG/MANGA/Whatever acronym for the five/six near monopolies aren't from India. If I'm in Korea and tomorrow I want to use a cloud provider, I won't choose an Indian one short of wanting to market to India. But chances are it will be an US one. That's the gap I am pointing at.
I know there are serious efforts to cover all this ground, but have they landed ?
I’d actually see China landing first on that scenario, and while the future is too murky to say anything, if they ever get through the tunnel they’re in now, they’ll have rebuilt the whole stack literally down to CPU technology.
UK, France and Germany all are pretty big in software, as also in gaming. Japan is also big in gaming, but they started with consoles and hardware. Only in the recent decade became their software-side better, but it's still kinda crappy to be honest.
Brazil and India, were they not to poor to made it big in the early IT-years? Even today they are busy with catching up. Though, India has found their stance in IT at this point, at least as contractors.
They did. By virtue of being the only advanced economy that didn't need to focus on rebuilding after WW2. They have been capitalizing -rather successfully- on that breathing room since then -be it for the space race or software industry- and the advantage has only grown.
Other than Brazil, all of these countries have dozens of tech unicorn startups, and numerous established success stories. The UK has nearly 50, India has over 100. Germany and France have somewhat fewer. But those countries may have a more cautious VC style, with less American influence.
This left all the market power in hands of Sony, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Sumitomo, etc about 30 companies. And in the case of the major hardware vendors they also owned content libraries and firms eg - sony / sony music, bmi, toshiba warner brothers etc. they were extremely protective against piracy and especially digital piracy - this killed them.
We see the same in US, look how much innovation happened in virtually unregulated tech and software but not highly regulated Detroit autos - DOT, DOT, NLRB, OSHA, etc.
To back my point, the Walkman didn't come from two guys in a garage. The GUI wasn't invented by Apple, linux wasn't born out of VC investment, NFC payments weren't brought to market by drop out college hippies.
One of the first things he said was: look, this is the difference between the US and JP — you have three computers on your desk (he was counting the ICE), but I have to share "my" computer with two other developers.
At the time, I took it for self-deprecating exaggeration. After reading this article, I fear he had probably just been making a factual observation.
incidentally, Burning Chrome's description of how Automatic Jack lost his arm, over Kyiv, was coincidentally prescient...
To group and respond to a few common comments:
> 1) Is this unique to Japan? Most other countries have not developed world-dominating software industries. That is true, but most other countries did not enter the PC era after spending several disrupting and dominating multiple global industries. So, expectations of Japan were much higher.
> 2. Was cloud computing really that pivotal? Hell, yes! Being able to prototype and get a handful of paying beta customers for a few thousand dollars changed everything. It totally short-circuited the VC "experts" who would say "no one will ever pay for that".
It was a big ambitious well backed plan to pursue the silly notion (as if!!) of massively parallel computing with unheard of numbers of cores to jump start AI networks etc.
Are there any stories there on how that all fizzled out and came to naught back in the day?
(b) it took a lot longer for Moore's law to end for traditional ISAs than we had been fearing, back in the 1980s. Like many things in tech, maybe Fifth Generation had just been Too Early.
At the time I was tinkering about with a bunch of transputer boards, modding Minux, thinking about capabilities, and mangling Occam (the language) into something less awful (IMHO).
I was more curious about how this decade (roughly) long chapter in Japan's IT history didn't rate a mention in the authors article (aside from "Japan plowed ahead with hardware in the 80's" (IIRC) throw aways)
1) Could you share examples of bad, good, and open-source Japanese software? Outside of the gaming industry and except for Ruby.
2) Does they have some kind of the hacker culture?
3) May you know links which answer question: Why Europe/Brazil/Turkey/Russia/etc failed to build well-known and international software companies, FAANG-like.
> 1) Could you share examples of bad, good, and open-source Japanese software Outside of the gaming industry and except for Ruby.
"Outside of Gaming and Ruby" cuts out a lot. There is plenty of very good software, but not much that has made it outside of Japan. Nulab has made some cool stuff. I love what Mui Labs are doing with UI.
> 2) Does they have some kind of the hacker culture? We are getting there. I think there are almost two "hacker cultures" in Japan. There are developers who model their lives on the Silicon Vally lifestyle, and there are people who just love programming. The overlap is not as large as you might imagine.
> 3) May you know links which answer question: Why Europe/Brazil/Turkey/Russia/etc failed to build well-known and international software companies, FAANG-like. I'm not an expert in those counties, so I don't have a great deal of insight. During the dot-com book, companies like SAP and Nokia did great, but this time around the US has certainly been the winner in this winner-take-all marketplace.
Do you have an email addres? I want to ask you some questions regarding my startup approach with a big Japanese company we are engaging with.
Indeed. Read any US computer magazine c. 1980 +- four years, and the one assumption/expectation in the background of every article discussing the industry is that the "Japanese are coming". This belief directly caused several things to occur in the US industry, notably Commodore's pivot from a seller of high-priced desktops sold to schools and European companies to a focus on low-priced home computers starting with the Commodore 64.
I'm also much less optimistic than the author about the future of the Japanese software industry. Mobile dev in particular is massive across Asia and Japan has no competitive advantage over (say) China, Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia etc here.
I type in Chinese with friends and family everyday and so do my kids. Hardly anyone uses voice messages. I find leaving voice messages on messaging systems more popular with Spanish speakers than Chinese speakers, and Spanish is one of the easy languages to write for native speakers.
>Software development was an exercise in box checking. You implemented a feature once the customer had asked for it and the contracts had been signed.
I recall a meeting where we were trying to set some requirements for a product based on what our potential customers would need. It was a requirement that all customers would need, not some unique thing that would probably change based on each customer. I understand pushing back against scope creep but as an analogy, we were building a PC designed to put our customer's peripherals inside. But we decided not to add a PCI slot even though the potential customers made PCI cards. By the end of the meeting it was agreed that since there was no signed-up customer yet, there could be no requirement. Our eventual customers of course needed that PCI slot to be added mid-design.
In general it takes a lot of consensus building to add a requirement in the first place, and once it's there, it's seen as the exact and maximum. Going beyond is seen as only adding risk. It's very difficult to ask for effort to optimise something within a given constraint. There's good and bad things about this.
>There was no real career path in software development. I mean, maybe you could move up into project management or over into sales, but if you were still actually writing code when you were 30, people kind of wondered what went wrong.
It was common to interview senior software engineers with a good resume, but find out they were one of two types in the interview. Type 1: a middle manager that has done nothing in the last ten years aside from passing excel files back and forth between junior software engineers and other managers. Type 2: considers "software design" to be making block diagrams in Visio (or worse, drawing things in excel as if it were Visio), and considers writing software to be beneath him. This type usually plans to outsource the actual development work
- https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1080343&seq...
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_programming...
- https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/IVH_UqOGsew
I took a programming languages class with a cool professor that spent some time discussing the history with us.
So there's still the unexplained question of why Japanese software is still bad, in 2023. And I think the answer is the language barrier. Windows and Mac dominate the world's computer systems, and the development tools for those environments are English-centric. The translations are lacking or no existent. The struggle of a Japanese developer to make an app is greater than that of a primarily English-speaking developer.
Also, outside of USA/China/India, software developers are still not given much respect or seen as equal to say, mechanical engineers or electrical engineers. So there's little reason for Japanese students to major in software.
I wonder if the Windows/C#/VS ecosystem translations are actually decent leading to Japanese developers not being forced to learn English? From what I have seen, Windows and Visual Studio have usable Japanese translations and documentation. I have seen code from Japanese devs that if the original writer had had better grasp of English, they probably would not have made the mistake by understanding the English and argument names.
This also means that outside of the MS ecosystem, it's a huge language barrier to overcome. It's probably not the main factor but just some foods for thoughts.
And yet somehow, Chinese developers manage just fine?
China is better than Japan in software development simply because they pay (much) better, which causes more people (esp. more "smart" people) to pursue this career for the money.
And the reason why Japan doesn't pay software dev as well is in the article.
We’re at a really interesting point where that calculation may be reversing with China being a huge domestic market with strong pressure for independence.
I think its to do with their protectivism culture. My previous job was doing digital distribution of advertising content around the world. The Japan market was difficult to move because they could pay someone to ride a bike down the road to deliver an advert. And they activately avoided moving digital as it could put alot of people out of work.
When they did begin the move to digital in ~2018 they formed a comany called CMDeCo. https://ad-edi.com/cmdeco.html
It doesn't serve any real purpose at all, but what it did was move a bunch of tape jobs into digital jobs. But it made what should be a simple process into a complicated process.
> And I think the answer is the language barrier.
You need to learn about a dozen English keywords to use something like C++. The rest is abstract thinking. Windows, Visual Studio etc have been available in Japanese for a long time. By that logic, every country that doesn't speak English should suck at software development.
As I read the article, post 2000, the simply wasn't any path forward for a startup. Nobody would give you money. Nobody would take you seriously. There was no easy way to distribute your software. It didn't cross anybody's mind to do so.
Better to say every country where the professional class can’t be expected to read English can be expected to suck at software development. I can’t think of an obvious counter example. Being mostly isolated from the mainstream of software development doesn’t mean you can’t achieve anything but it does make it harder.
Another thing I've found particular interesting is that this language barrier also seems to cause some technique or design pattern to be extremely popular among the local developers out of proportion to the English-speaking world. For instance, Clean Architecture is extremely popular in certain industry (e.g., SI). I believe, it was due to the book having a decent Japanese translation, the lack of Japanese-language commentary against it, and the tendency to follow manuals due to social norms.
This may contribute, but it's not the main issue imo. I've worked with tons of Japanese devs and English didn't hold them back much.
Plus look at Ruby, which was all the rage in webdev at one point. It was invented in Japan, and it had better documentation in Japanese than English.
Bigger issues for Japan's tech industry in 2023:
- Lack of VC/Startup investment (0.02% of GDP vs. 0.52% for USA)[1]
- Lack of government support
- Lack of strong CS university programs
- Risk-averse culture (failure is congratulated in the US but condemned in Japan; people don't want to risk building a startup)
- Continued prevalence of "System Integration" rather than in-house dev teams
- Outsourcing of dev work to cheaper countries (India etc).
- Difficulty of moving to Japan (visa issues, high taxes etc; hard for immigrants to start businesses here)
[1] https://www.boj.or.jp/en/research/brp/ron_2021/data/ron21031...
Survivor bias?
Ruby has somewhat infamously had a divide between "Ruby programmers" and "Rails programmers". The fact that it was invented in Japan is fairly unrelated to anything about why it succeeded.
Ruby took off here due to Rails, and to a lesser degree _why's work way back in the day that made it so beloved.
It's easy for a company to hire foreigners and get a visa for them. There isn't even a local market hiring test like there is in most countries. If you're skilled enough in the newish points system[1], the process is fast-tracked and you get benefits like your spouse can work without restrictions and you can get permanent residency in as little as one year.
Or you can get an investor visa[2] to start a business. The main requirement is having ¥50M of capital. If you can't swing that you may be able to get a startup visa[3] with relaxed requirements.
The taxes also aren't that high and while salary is much lower than US for tech people, the cost of living is also much lower. If you're coming from Europe to Japan, you'll probably enjoy a similar salary, with lower taxes and much lower cost of living. And slowly, there is a trend for tech companies to allow remote work from within Japan, with occasional visits to the HQ in Tokyo. I know a few people taking advantage of this to move to a low-cost area to live a quiet family life, or be close to skiing or whatever.
[1]https://www.lb.emb-japan.go.jp/Points-Based-Immigration-Trea...
[2]https://www.japanvisa.com/visas/japan-investor-visa
[3]https://www.meti.go.jp/english/policy/economy/startup_nbp/st...
The lack of translations is true for almost every country and culture apart from the natively English-speaking ones. Some western languages such as German or French might get more in terms of translated (or natively written) documentation and teaching materials but many smaller ones have next to none. I've also seen software development materials with translations to Japanese or Chinese and nothing else (beside English).
I can't remember the last time I read any software development material or used software development tools in my native language.
There may still be some cultural differences that could lead to there being more or less of a language barrier, of course. Other languages may be closer to English, at least in terms of the writing system. In some cultures people might be less inclined to learn English as a second language well enough to be comfortable than in other cultures. Japan, having a large economy with a large domestic market as well as a strong language identity and a relatively homogeneous culture, might be one of those. (I seem to remember that, anecdotally, some highly educated Japanese people I met in the past were surprisingly uncomfortable speaking English, but I'm not sure how much of that was due to actual skill and how much it was about confidence or a lack of experience.)
But the anglocentrism of development tools and culture alone isn't enough to explain a difference between Japan and many other countries.
* Nintendo first-party studios
* Square Enix
* From Software
* Sega
* Bandai Namco
* Capcom
Note: Sony/Playstation is a Japanese company, but most of its first-party studios are outside of Japan.
The best example of this is Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Technically the game is not that impressive compared so some of it's RPG peers, but that's not the point. While no detail is by itself that impressive, the whole package is fantastic.
America still to this day fails at smart phones (see Apple)
On the other hand, Japanese game designs actually care about how the gameplay feels, whereas the West seems to think they're a kind of movie where sometimes you press buttons. (And indie developers think they're about making ironic platformers where you learn to talk about your feelings.)
People always create these complicated narratives for why non Anglosphere countries don't create many consumer or business facing software products and the answer is simply because they're at a comparitive disadvantage both in terms of culture and scale.
This also correlates well with my personal knowledge of the industry. Japan has a great track record of game design, but they aren't exactly known for innovation in software specifically. Some examples:
Teenagers from the UK where hired to write the code for Starfox, because they could and Nintendo's programmers couldn't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to4Ekb0kXiE
Xbox spearheaded the consoles in the online space, and Nintendo is still far behind.
Japan runs circles around the rest of the world when it comes to making successful fighting games. Yet western modders are also known for coming in and fixing online play by adding network rollback.
But what we're talking about here is Japan's software industry at large. The majority of software aren't artistic programs, they are programs written to enable someone's productivity. The quality of the code consequently becomes a larger or even the only factor, and Japanese programmers on average really suck at their job compared to their peers from other countries.
It even applies to their QA department (https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Mario_Club).
To name some prominent example: the latest Pokemon-game released 2-3 months ago, is infamous for how bad the graphics were, how many bugs it has(had?) and how bad the performance is. And this is from an old established company, making billions with their games.
They've had their ups and downs but will regularly appear with a piece of software and technology that roasts what western developers have built.
Rather than take an 80% pay cut to partake in the salaryman lifestyle, I'm going to have to start some sort of business. This podcast should have some relevant info, haha
The service in the SF Bay Area is really amazingly dismal. It's embarrassing every day to be an American living here. People at restaurants, stores, etc are all angry and stressed out.
I'm hoping I can convince her to move somewhere else in the USA with me, since it'll be a lot easier to find some remote work in my same time zone
And Americans are all angry and stressed out everywhere else in America too. It became a really miserable place to live in my experience during the pandemic, so I was really glad to get out and move to Japan where everything is civilized and people know how to act in public.
I'm hoping I can convince her to learn to drive.. Although if we move near my friends and family, I could just have one of my minions drive her around every day
Hopefully I can work out a way to earn $8k a month or so doing something online. Then I could maintain residences in Tokyo and the non-HCOL part of the USA, and pop back and forth occasionally.
Is she some kind of slave or something? Being in a place where you can't get around by yourself is not much fun, and doesn't feel very free. I can totally see why she wants to come back to Japan; you don't have to live that way here, and can easily get around almost anywhere (except the countryside) without a car. It's a totally different way of life, but it's something that most Americans I've found simply cannot comprehend at all. They simply cannot imagine life without a car (or a gun).
>Hopefully I can work out a way to earn $8k a month or so doing something online.
Good luck with that; most WfH jobs won't allow working internationally because of the taxation issues, though I suppose you could lie and just use your US address, though the company might notice that you always work through the middle of the night and have an issue, but I really don't know. I know digital nomads do exist; it's not much of a thing in Japan because there's no working visa that allows this, but a spousal visa probably would.
At this point I'm basically a nampa weirdo, hitting on all the Japanese housewives I come across to get their LINE info and try to arrange playdates for the wife
Honestly though, if you actually like living in the US, you should stay there (this goes for anyone). If you're not unhappy there, there's no good reason to leave for a country that's so completely different and unfamiliar, where you're not likely to be happy at all. The reverse seems to be true for your wife, so I recommend divorce so she can go back to a place where she's happy. The two of you seem to be incompatible. I've seen other marriages break up over the partners being unable to agree on where to live or to retire; to me it seems to be one of the most fundamental compatibility factors there is in a relationship, though it's frequently ignored or overlooked.
Also, jobs paying over $350k are not common in America as you seem to think.
Anyone have some good links to examples?
This economic malefactor is now hanging over many of the western countries, the UK potentially the next to collapse.
I sympathize with the lack of respect software developers have there perhaps, that I understand.
There is this cute photo of Nishi-san posing next to the young Bill Gates:
https://ozeidi.wordpress.com/2015/10/10/my-first-personal-co...
This gives a good overview on Ascii Corp: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Corporation
If you're asking why they don't have a Google, Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook, could it just be because they speak a language that's only useful in Japan and not anywhere else in the entire world?
If you're actually in Japan they have tons of apps, tons of software, tons of games, tons of many things "software".
Certain things fit Japan better than others but for example Mercari (the ebay of Japan) is 1000x better than anything I've seen outside Japan.
Japan's feature phones ran rings around the rest of the world's phones until iPhone.
There are certainly other factors like possibly underpaying, not valuing experience, etc... but I think the basic premise of the piece is probably missing the forest for the trees.
The remaining 1%, it is usually scientists or mathematicians coding.
even the concept of "Galapagos effect"is easily explained by government created market distortions.
1. Japan was a closed country for~250 years, until the US "Gunboats of democracy" opened up Japan under Commodore Perry threatening to flatten Japanese cities. Prior to that there was restricted trade/trading posts with the Dutch, Portuguese, and then Germans.
2. With the US military threats, Japan side the treaty with the US and realized pandora's box was open, they say the Western operations, war and colonies and said, time to get moving. Thus, German and Prussia in particular suited Japan well culturally and in many aspects - so this tight tie up, creating or promoting trading companies or families (Zaibatsu) & forming their own colonies, China, Taiwan, Korea, etc.
3. There are many other factors within the run up to WWII and after but Japan was a major innovator, especially after WWII as central control imploded - think Honda, Sony, etc. the issue is that as PCs came into play Japan was highly centralized again & there were numerous issues of lacking vc or risk capital, social risks, financial risk, labor mobility ,etc. And even today most software devs cannot hardcore sell - imagine 1970, 1980, 1990s.
4. The native ERP market was highly customized (mostly SAP) using SIer's and they wanted it specific to their unique workflows - the old 80% of what I want is not enough - funny enough that is a competitive advantage again.
5. At same time, most of foreign program work was either L10N or integration ,sintalls, support/maintenance for the foreign software vendor - Oracle, SAP, MSFT, etc.
6. Btw the time we got to 1990s, Japan had many innovations in software, BUT this ran into a wall - it had a horrible startup ecosystem and so it was occupied by ossified rent-seeking incumbents like Sony, who fought their own engineers. Sony was the original Apple, Akio Morita the original Steve Jobs, including taking the most important case, Sony vs Universal Studios to the US supreme court and winning. Ipod, imac, etc. are simply the 2.0 or 3.0 version of the sony innovation products. I have interviewed a dozen of these engineers and managers going back to 2006. And also other interviews state side of how products like Slingbox/Slingmedia were just sony products and so on.
7. At this point the social risk, the financial risk, the career risks and labor mobility of joining a startup or high grow firm in nascent industry are greatly reduced, more programming resources than ever, smart hard workers, it is just the opportunities -- opportunities that were artificially restricted by ossified rent seeking incumbents using regulator capture.
Sony and Nintendo are two of the world’s biggest companies, and a key part of their business model is creating great games franchises, either in house or working with local studios.
This is all driven by an ecosystem of great software companies, making the best games in the world (or at the least, outside of America).
So I don't feel like they're demonstrating Japanese software quality at the moment. The Alpha series cameras are pretty nice, but not as much as they could be.
Recently while visiting Japan, I tried to get a eSIM card through "Docomo" the national phone carrier via their "online shop". I know...but I had to use them for other obscure reasons.
It was incredible to me how long it took to get the eSIM card. Days and days of problems, hours on the phone. I hit so, so many edge cases it was hard to believe. I actually felt depressed how bad the experience was. Everything was so obscure, and so so many things had to line up in their system.
I actually debugged the software by talking to support people and gaining clues, I finally worked out how to hack the inputs to allow it to give me a eSIM.
The problems were mostly that I had a middle name, which Japanese people apparently never have, say your name is "Ella Mary Smith" but your credit card is "Ella Smith", the "people" won't accept it and their web app does weird things, like removes the space between your first and middle name when you put both of them into the first name field. You some how have to work out through trial and error, the system / process / people don't care about spaces.
The process involved many people "checking" my application and almost being able to arbitrarily deny the application. There was almost no actual automation, I think it would've just been way way easier to visit a store and let them fill out the forms how they wanted, however they've made this particular process "online only" and so you're stuck with probably one of the worst user experiences in the world.
Anyway, each time I applied, I had to wait about 24 hours to be rejected and resubmit the application. Sometimes the application would blow up or the website would time out, error and I had to resubmit all documents again and do a silly online facial identification thing, I did about 12 times. I truly thought I was going to go insane. I didn't leave the hotel for 12 hours trying to hack this beast and workout what was wrong, then multiple day of rejections until I got the combination of inputs right.
What was so striking to me was the way I, as a user had to invent my own solutions to allow the system to give me the eSIM.
For example, I eventually worked out that I must have a credit card which includes a middle name, even though there is only a place for a first and last name when inputting the credit card. So I just lied and said my credit card actually is written as SMITH ELLAMARY (which it doesn't), and the "person" who was checking the application, believed this fairy tale and finally accepted the application.
It was a classic example of so much software I've interacted with in Japan in recent times. It always has this kind of "best effort, just works, sort of works if you're a foreigner and you know how to work around the quirks" vibe to it that I don't really experience anywhere else.
Ha.
I live on street with a long but not that long name (18 chars for what it worth). I recently encountered a site what didn't want to accept my address because the full address was way too long.
> credit card actually is written as SMITH ELLAMARY
And here I am who specifically writes BANK NAME in the CARDHOLDER input instead of card holders name where I can.
1. The name on the card is rather arbitrary.
2. Accepting names without spaces isn't really a good check IMO. If you wanted thing to line up exactly, spaces should be accounted for, but who cares? If it feels good...
This is a bit of a cultural thing I find common in Japan. It doesn't have to make logical sense, but it's a requirement and compliance is very important.
In the US, that is. Other places put the name on your ID on your card :)
It serves no real purpose, hence how I could get a eSIM by supplying an incorrect name.
And overall, why do check on the card and not on ID?
The MacOS IME is much easier to use, and was the singular excellent use of the MacBook touch bar. It lets you pick the correct character, pick autocomplete suggestions, and convert between full-width, half-width, katakana, hiragana, etc.
All this just because you just had to try to use a US-spec iPhone 14 Pro instead of getting a phone with a real SIM slot. eSim isn't really a thing in Japan yet, or anywhere outside the US, so support is iffy. Dual-SIM phones, OTOH, are normal and common in Asia. You could have saved a ton of time by just buying a 30-day SIM card at the airport like everyone else. The first time I went to Japan, I just bought a SoftBank SIM card at 7Eleven, popped it into my phone, followed the procedure in the instructions, and within an hour I was set.
For people with iPhone 14 Pro phones from the US, the solution is really simple: just use international roaming. If you can afford the top-spec iPhone, you can afford roaming charges.
>The problems were mostly that I had a middle name, which Japanese people apparently never have
No, they don't. Middle names don't exist in Japan, just like names written in Kanji aren't recognized in the US. Foreigners get around it by concatenating the first and middle names, or dropping the middle name altogether.
>like removes the space between your first and middle name when you put both of them into the first name field.
Why would you put a space into a single name field? Japanese names don't have spaces in the middle; they're single words (one each for first and last name).
>For example, I eventually worked out that I must have a credit card which includes...
Or you can just buy a SIM card at the airport with cash or a credit card (paid by scanning so your name doesn't matter).
>If you want details and debate about exactly how Japanese software falls short, or if you just in the mood for some good old-fashioned venting about being forced to use it, check out Reddit or maybe Hacker News. This topic comes up pretty often there.
>No, for the sake of this podcast I’m going to assume that we are all in agreement that on average, Japanese software. is just … awful.
What are some examples of Japanese software? I'm not aware of any Japanese software I use besides a few random apps from the App Store, all of which seem fine to me. "Japanese Software is awful" is a common topic on Hacker News?
Mostly the UI, but also weird restrictions on the input / output while it was a 20k professional pieces of hardware in a highly normalized market. ( easy to see that Dolby was NOT restricting it for instance )
We had a good run. Thanks Sony.
Detail : the setup of that industry made it that Sony and other HAD to let some api open for us insects. That was our opening.
e.g, quite a number of banking apps
It could only me but the way it is written obstructs the consumption of the content. Two long paragraph went on before started to talk about the actual topic, after elaborating about how much the author worked and work on it and what is not going to talk about in a stage entertainer kind of inflated manner (the comment "I am not going to waste your time" is ironic then). It kind of derails the focus from the content in my opinion.
Edit: the story is pretty interesting btw.
Japanese love kata - kata is pattern so there is no reason they cannot use state of art of select from a variety of design or development patterns.
And they do.
> Cloud computing drastically reduced the capital and time required to start a startup. In the dot-com era a decade before, starting an internet startup required purchasing racks of servers and paying system administrators to keep them running, but suddenly fully configured, maintained, and secure serves could be had for a few cents per minute — pay as you go.
> Suddenly Japan’s software developers didn’t need to explain their idea to a VC and convince them that it would sell. They could just build things and get people to start using them and start paying for them. And that’s just want they did.
Your hosting cost, whether you're on bare metal or the most opinionated git-push-your-rails-app is a tiny line item on the P/L. Rarely have I seen an instance where the pay-off period for spending, say, a month of one engineer's time (for a nice round number, say, $10k) reducing the hosting expenses is less than a year (say, $1k/mo in hosting expenses).
In just about every case you're better off spending that developer-month building a feature or delivering a contract.
So yeah, maybe cloud computing saved you, at the outside, $10-20k server parts and a rack in a colo or whatever.
TLDR with or without The Cloud, 2022 or 1999, your server costs are tiny in comparison to what you spent on payroll getting to market.
Yeesh.
Cloud computing turned asking permission into asking forgiveness, and that's a real benefit politically.
> ... and paying system administrators to keep them running.
That agrees with your main point, which is that employee time is the main relevant cost. (Nowadays, cloud services seen to have gotten so complex that you still need an eternity of employee time to set them up, but that's another matter.)
With "cloud computing" (to me even before there was the word cloud around, but thats nitpicking) suddenly your only real investment needed was your own time, which to you is "free" if you can somehow make a living on the side (some people simply accept to live poor for some time, some had their family, etc.). The few Euros for a vserver (or "webspace" at the time) were doable for most if not all. Not to mention student programs, free credits to lock you down to hyperscaler X, etc. we all have nowadays.
Or comparing it to myself: I learnt programming at the age of 12 because we got a free environment alongside our ISP contract for executing PHP with a mysql database behind it. I would never have spent any money. Now I have been a professional software developer for almost 16 years which I say is thanks to that way lower barrier of entry that was created along the lines of ~ 1995 - 2005.
> me: can you summarize all the information I gave in three sentences
> ChatGPT: Japanese software is known to be of poor quality, but there are historical and cultural reasons for this. The zaibatsu and keiretsu systems that dominated the Japanese economy in the past prioritized hardware innovation over software development, leading to a lack of respect for software developers. In recent years, the emergence of cloud computing and the smartphone market have allowed Japanese software developers to become more influential and respected, and the industry is slowly improving.
This article describes how Japan's economy and the software industry evolved from the post-WWII years to the present day. It explains how the Zaibatsu, large corporate groups that dominated the economy before WWII, were dismantled by the American occupation forces and replaced by the Keiretsu, weaker but familiar forms of the Zaibatsu. It highlights how the Keiretsu focused on the domestic market, rather than expanding globally and developing a software industry, during the 1980s and 1990s. This had a negative impact on innovation and caused Japan to fall behind in software development. The article then goes on to explain how cloud computing and smartphones have enabled Japan's software developers to start their own companies, rather than working for large corporations, thus creating a more vibrant startup ecosystem. It also suggests that Japan's software industry still has a long way to go to catch up with other countries, but there are positive signs of progress in certain areas.
This is the most alarmingly stupid bit of text I’ve seen on this website in years. It’s wildly disconcerting that there exists some sort of apparatus that allows people to buy top ranking on the front page with utter garbage that clearly has zero value.
What’s the going rate?
Edit: There are two accounts that are happy to publicly disagree with me within seconds of eachother, and three-six that are are happy to downvote privately within those same seconds.
Maybe I’m magically guilty of having The Wrong Take or there are some people that will kneejerk use their network of accounts to downvote things that aren’t useful to their buddies.
I've downvoted all of your comments on this thread because they are completely unrelated to the subject of the article, and consist solely of a joke spectacularly flying over your head to the point where you're getting aggressive and throwing around conspiracy theories about downvoting rings.
I'll be dipping out of this conversation after this reply.
Perhaps if you scrolled down to the actual article you would have found it interesting?
edit: bonus points if you can explain two posts with identical responses within seconds of eachother
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321582 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321579
edit: with identical responses to mine, seconds apart.
It's not at the top of HN because of that specific joke.
At least twice?