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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

The key part to me:

> 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"

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France had more than ok software company.

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 )

By that definition, Japan has its own software companies too. They are also big in the gaming world. I didn't check the numbers, but I'd bet it's bigger than France.

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.

Yes, even in games this is the case. Market leadership in gaming followed market investment. Japan had a large manufacturing presence in games from early on which propelled the corresponding software industry. And the US was pioneering in funding pure software businesses - gaming became part of Silicon Valley's VC pool in the 80's. In other countries, they faced difficulty raising the capital needed to grow as productions got bigger in the 1990's, and mostly got absorbed by US investment, either through acquisition or talent poaching. Ubi was a rare exception to this trend.

I'm pretty sure a story similar to this was playing out throughout the software world.

I think you are correct :)

I work in startup on both side, it’s … different

Yes. Also France made a real big effort to protect its agriculture, wine and luxury industry.

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.

I’ve seen the market thing play out first hand : my former company was dominant in France ( in a tiny niche market )

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.

This is an aside, but you can explain the phrase "For the deepness of my ass"? Never heard that one before!

It’s me freestyling English :)

Just to say that I probably wrong / not very informed.

France also has CATIA from Dassault Systems.

> - France decided to listen to our American friends and sell the familly heirloom to the market. ( I’m bitter on this one )

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.

> - France like to do it the “right” way, and that is, of course, the French way.

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.

Nitpicking but Lucent was an American company. A Bell Labs spin-off according to the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent.

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.

Very valid nickpick. Thanks, I had no idea.

> For instance did the UK become a Software behemoth ? France ? Germany ? Brazil ? India ?

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.

India has been a significant force in IT since at least the 1990s. Look at Infosys, Wipro, Tata, etc - all huge multinationals that give the IBMs, HPs, and Accenture's of the world a run for their money.

How long before the future in which indian english does, in turn, to american english what it had done to british english?

Japanese mobile phones kicked the ever lovin' crap out of western phones for a very long time. The Japanese got into social media way before the West did. And Yahoo Japan actually still exists and seems to be doing okay.

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.

To me the main difference is they failed to push an operating system.

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.

I'm probably misreading you a little bit, but here's my two yen.

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.

>> 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"

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.

All the countries that see/saw software development as a trade instead of a highly paid white-collar position fell behind.

It seems sort of consistent?

In the 2020s I largely invoice in USD, despite being a european immigrant, because almost no one else pays.

(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)

The euro-america centric view in claiming that India failed in software is simply absurd. India has giant software companies powering one of the most advanced governance, finance and business societies and not to mention a major destination for the west to outsource software jobs!

We're not talking about straight failure. There's giant companies all over the world and sure they'll produce software.

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 see where you're coming from but that is a very narrow view only taking into account B2C service type software, and that too for a sample size of you. Not to mention the fact that FAANG hires a ton of Indians

Is Cloud Services B2C ? or computer OSes ? Do your Indian giants give their sales team laptops with an Indian OS managed through an Indian Directory system backed by an Indian Cloud, and make them build spreadsheets and presentations on an Indian Office suite ?

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.

The phrasing in the previous comment makes me think that you are talking about a B2C aspect. The point in trying to make is that software industry is much larger than the specific examples you mentioned, which are also very "English speaking user facing" for lack of a better word

> For instance did the UK become a Software behemoth ? France ? Germany ? Brazil ? India ?

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.

In Japan's case, they kicked the ball into their own net 25 times. Because of the Keiretsu market power coupled with Japanese culture (social status, financial risks, career risk, labor mobility rates and bankruptcy laws) very few startups existed, especially in this space even though the capital requirements are far lower.

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.

This is a weird point to do here, but in my opinion startups aren't the end all be all of innovation: they are needed in a system where incumbents are mostly static, but in different configurations the role of a startup can be accomplished inside behemoths or through joint ventures, or other settings.

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.

> For instance did the UK become a Software behemoth ?

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.

> because that's where the Timex factory where they built the ZX Spectrum was

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENyPdBo-yVI

Neither Bathgate nor IBM made inexpensive home computers that could be picked out of the reject pile, sneaked out under a jacket, repaired, and sold down the pub for 100 quid.

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.

I don't know if this is specifically your childhood experience, but you're describing also my childhood too, and I didn't grow up in Dundee. There were plenty of first- and second-hand ZX Spectrums to go around, VIC-20s, C16s, C64s, Amstrad CPCs, and the schools had BBCs. The UK went home-computer mad. Remember when there were type-in listings in C+VG? The Usbourne computer books? [1] INPUT magazine? [3] Kids were swapping tapes like crazy, and writing their own demos and games, all over the country.

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

[2] https://archive.org/details/inputmagazine

[3] http://www.javalemmings.com/DMA/DMA1_2.htm

> 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

Valid.

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