Why Is Japan So Weak in Software? [video] | Hacker News Reader

Why Is Japan So Weak in Software? [video]

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18 pointsphonon13 comments

Japan isn't weak in software if my game library has anything to say about it. ;-)

Fascinating that Joy-Cons run a TRON-compliant OS.

Docomo was certainly ahead with i-mode, but as the video notes i-mode wasn't successful abroad, and it was eclipsed by iPhone/iOS and Android, much as other mobile platforms (Palm, Blackberry...) were (though it will continue to operate until 2026.)

Line (perhaps similarly to WeChat) also pioneered the super-app space, but it was mainly domestically focused.

Incidentally it was SoftBank Mobile (formerly Vodafone Japan), rather than Docomo or KDDI, that adopted the iPhone in 2008, as an exclusive until 2011. That probably turned out to be a good move (though maybe not as good as investing in Alibaba.)

Games or selling to consumers is a totally different line of business than enterprise software which Japan lacks talent or incubation for. There is just no upward mobility and little regard for software profession.

Line was made by Korean engineers and owned by a Korean company.

i-Mode is interesting but seems like there were no strides to innovate further than running a server side HTML application to proxy off of but Japanese consumers are unique in that they will put with mediocre or annoying.

I personally blame Son Masayoshi's monopoly and his close mindedness, too much focus on maximizing profits rather than innovation.

I don't agree with much of this. And on a fully personal note, some of the best software developers I know are from Japan. Not to say their software was great, but individually, they were tip toeing on savant.

There are also many Japanese programmers who are the authors of some very important contributions to widely used open source software projects.

A typical example of such work, characterized by careful optimizations, was the GotoBLAS library of Gotō Kazushige, which at the time of its introduction (two decades ago) was a great advance for open-source numeric programs and it has strongly influenced all the later open-source linear algebra libraries.

My only experience with japanese software is for cameras (e.g. mobile Apps which can connect to your camera via bluetooth/wifi) and these apps (I used Nikon and Panasonic apps) are definitely not that great, which you can also see from the reviews these apps get on the App Stores.

There is also a Video "Why are all cameras Japanese" https://youtube.com/watch?v=JKMsjXs4uq4 at minute 13:10 he also talks about the software culture in Japan.

He states (alledgedly sourced from an Interview of Software Developers in Japan) that Japan does not really respect software development as a career and it's viewed like a blue collar career, meanwhile craftsmanship and hardware stuff is considered a white collar career.

Software is as much a cultural product (like books, movies and pop music) as it is a technological product. All human interfaces exist in reference to expectations and assumptions based in culture and language.

Japanese culture isn't compatible enough with "the west" for their cultural products to have a world wide market, aside from niche things like anime. This combined with "winner takes all" markets makes it difficult. Basically, they can't expand services internationally that work domestically.

Individual Japanese developers are brilliant.

but if Japanese developers are brilliant it doesn't make sense that there hasn't been wide success outside Japan like American software has.

I also used to think it was a cultural issue but I realized that consumer adoption cannot come without risk takers and also a prioritization from the government mainly the MIC which Japan lacks.

You really can't minimize the impact America's MIC had on software adoption the same way Japanese CCTV surveillance equipments were allowed to proliferate in China (it wasn't purely for profits to give you a hint).

As a software developer in Japan enterprise sofware isn't exactly the target for anything I've been involved in. Almost everything software related here is usually tied to a company (along with their goals/deliverables). Software in Japanese companies is tailored to their needs and processes. The itch exists here in Japan but it tends to be a very domestic itch (if not niche as well).

The underlying thesis seems to be that Japan doesn't have a thriving software economy due to things that happened 40 years ago?

did we watch the same video?

hardly the main point as those instances of piracy of IBM software was due to lack of proper trade laws

video points to cultural issue of not valuing software engineers due to many competing engineering fields around this time which were deemed more traditional

Here are the dates displayed or mentioned in the video, with timestamps:

1:09: 1925

1:14: 1938

1:28: 1949

2:18 1964

4:15: 1969

5:20: 1971

6:41 1976

12:02: 1984

14:32: 1987

15:17: 1995

17:57: 1999

18:05: 2003

19:36: END OF VIDEO

Maybe he should rename this video "Why WAS Japan So Weak in Software" and make a follow-up that actually deserves the title "Why IS Japan So Weak in Software", with an explanation of why Japan hasn't caught up in the last 20 years not covered by this video.

Manufacturing economies seem to have a generalizable problem with software.

Programming docs, help, guides are mostly in (fairly advanced and nuanced) english.

This makes it hard to keep up with modern trends if english is not your primary labguage. So you get software at a never ending “just left CS 5 years ago” level.

Same problem China is facing and why they’re thinking of hard porting languages to keep up.

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