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Comment by ChainOfFools | Hacker News Reader

What happened to the incredibly futuristic basis in the smartphone space that Japan had with NTT docomo back in the mid-late 90's?

Was it motivated purely or mainly by a need for a workable kanji/kana interface for mobile texting, with no sense of the larger implications of such a capable system as a basis for a very comfortable head start 10 years later into the smartphone adoption cycle?

It feels like such a perfect textbook example of a culture that embraces "how" much more than it embraces "why," a culture that is not endemic to Japan but actually quite common at various scales globally, because most of the time its the right mindset. But when it isn't, it becomes an enormous handicap.

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Docomo commissioned phone manufacturers to ship phones at half-year cycle. The idea was to sell it like women's clothing. But manufacturers didn't commoditize parts and optimize businesses for that cycle; instead they sped up and staggered development to match that cycle, in the process burning lots of cash and people's careers.

By the time iPhone came out, the tech debts and bureaucratic overheads had grown so much that nothing could be done to save the industry and platform. Everything from devices to institutional knowledge and existing moats all went down the drain until enough was shed off that reasonably usable Android phones could be manufactured, but not much points were left in making those.

> Was it motivated purely or mainly by ...

I'm sure Docomo execs had sane long-term plans, but ideological and hierarchical thinking isn't Japanese forte so executions were counterproductive and/or micromanagement mess. Kanji/kana interface has nothing to do with it, all Nokia phones handled Japanese language perfectly fine, certainly more than adequately for ... a dozen model or so sold over a decade.

I'm not familiar with that era, but I think cell phones back then were more focused on hardware and brute-force style development than sophisticated software. It's unbelievable how tough it was to survive the NTT Docomo's R&D center, YRP. Depression and suicides were sadly common, which caused a lot of Japanese to avoid the IT industry for years...

>What happened to the incredibly futuristic basis in the smartphone space that Japan had with NTT docomo back in the mid-late 90's?

Nothing, really. Remember that most advancements in computing still happened outside of Japan (Windows 95, Pentium, et al.), or in the case of NAND flash happened in Japan but was shitcanned only to be picked up by the US.

Japan never was great at tech beyond a certain point, but that only became really obvious in the 2000s when even their Galapagos phones were finally outdone.

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