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Comment by timoth3y | Hacker News Reader

Hi. I'm Tim, the author. I'm delighted to see the interest in this subject on Hacker News and happy to answer any questions.

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".

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I'm as surprised as SovietSwag ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321796 ) to see no mention of Japan and Fifth Generation Computing in the 1980s.

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?

(a) cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26953443 for one aspect. It didn't do much good to have massively parallelisable logic programs without any equally massively parallel hardware on which to run them. I ran jobs on top500 machines back then, and even there coordination overheads would kill anything too fine-grained.

(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.

(a) is the nub of the question - the spiel from Japan at the time was that they had massively parallel hardware in the works that was on the cusp of delivery...

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)

Hi Tim, thanks for the podcast and the blog post.

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.

Great questions!

> 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.

>> 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.

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.

Tim, as a Mombusho exchange student in Kanazawa (and Rotary before that in Sapporo) your post brought up some great memories of my time in Japan in the 90s.

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.

I do. I don't want to post it here. If you go the the disruptingjapan.com site, you'll find it pretty easily.

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