A mistake that killed Japan's software industry? (2023)
disruptingjapan.com
disruptingjapan.com
- Graduates don't apply to a job, but to a company. The company decides where to place then. The first years are generally a rotation between departments until it is decided where to allocate them. This means that they will be often misplaced in positions for which they don't have the necessary background nor motivation to learn or contribute because in 6 months they'll be somewhere else.
- It is not uncommon for developers not to have a CS or coding background. They learn on the job how to "program" but lack best practices, etc. and figure out things as they go.
- Standing out is frown upon
- People who are good at their jobs are generally rewarded with more work. One can know who the manager's favourite is by who busy the person is. At the end, the good ones end up burned out, over-stressed and brain death.
- Looking busy or hard working is more important than the outcome.
- Combine the above, and there is no point to do a good job: There is no reward other than more pressure to deliver but on the other hand, as long as you look busy, not delivering is not "punished". Clear what option most people will take.
- As already commented, decisions are top down and often very conservative replicating old methods digitally.
- Many customer facing products will try to cover as many cases as possible to avoid complains, perceived discrimination or causing trouble, for example. This results in over bloated software, websites, flyers full of information, etc.
Physical products: you are buying them for their software. That’s why you choose an iPhone over an Android phone. They’re all rectangles with screens.
When Sonos screwed up its app it was a crisis because: people pay for the software not the hardware.
Is this true about cars? EV design is converging. It will be. CarPlay controversy is a great example: people choose cars that support it.
Vanmoofs have a lot of hardware problems but the reason people bought them was software (like location tracking and e-Shifting).
So “well known when it comes to physical products,” that may be, but all products are software products.
“Software is eating the world” was all about like, replacing human labor or whatever, disruption. Marc Andreesen thinks he was saying something forward looking when it was all backward looking.
The story is differentiation and customer choices. Truly forward looking. But are Japanese firms incapable of that? Of course not.
Once there was a guy on here who said he had the brilliant idea of using a web browser to make an airplane UI. Listen brother, everybody knows how to write good software. It’s a business strategy not execution problem.
> Physical products: you are buying them for their software. That’s why you choose an iPhone over an Android phone. They’re all rectangles with screens.
> ...
> So “well known when it comes to physical products,” that may be, but all products are software products.
You're just plain wrong. Most physical products have no software, so you're not addressing the very real question (which is basically "Why does Japan produce such perfect physical products, but suck so bad at software? Why hasn't the attention to detail transferred?").
As an aside, it's actually really interesting to be how you could so wrong in this particular way. It kind of dovetails with a vague pet theory of mine that (roughly, very roughly) software engineers are sometimes so enamored with computers they can have a weird cognitive distortion where they see computers as everything (so a computer is the solution to every problem, and they're an expert at everything because everything's a computer or should be).
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As my contribution to answering about physical products. I met a woman once, while I was traveling, who spent a couple months in Japan. She said that Japanese cosmetics are very good and relative cheap because Japanese consumers are very picky and have very high standards. Maybe the reason is Japanese consumers just have higher expectations for physical products, but someone got enured to badly designed software.
I'm just trying to be thought provoking. I can't generalize about whole cultures, other than to say, no one culture owns excellence.
Down this thread people are talking about stuff like, I don't know, home goods, or you're talking about cosmetics.
Are cosmetics software? Well the people who sell the most cosmetics have to master digital marketing.
"Chinesium" on Amazon is mastering software. It doesn't look that way. But the reason you are choosing things on Amazon is because of fulfillment software, advertising software, logistics software, that specifically the manufacturers of those products have all mastered. They are really smart sellers. The reason you choose a particular cosmetic is due to mastery of advertising and logistics software. You will never buy a cosmetic that isn't marketed by software.
Sure there's this box of, software on hardware means the thing that draws the pictures on an LCD screen. And indeed a lot of things that don't need LCD screens end up with them, and you know what? Consumers choose them. But that inside-the-box thinking aside, anything that reaches an industrial scale where you are able to buy it in many stores in America depends on mastery of some kind of software. The best of those choices happen to master both the logistics and the end-user software, whatever that may mean.
Just tacking on the word “software” to other fields does not mean that the program is the selling point.
Give that same software to a mom and pop shop and they will not become Amazon.
Give it to Walmart even, and they won’t become Amazon.
Software is a tool, not a selling point.
Most people buy from Amazon because they deliver addictively fast. That is, in part, because of their logistics, but also because they are very vertically integrated.
The convenience is what makes you buy. Pretty much all their customers wouldn’t care if Amazon switch to old school paper records if their delivery times didn’t change.
Being obviously wrong is probably not the way to do that.
> Down this thread people are talking about stuff like, I don't know, home goods, or you're talking about cosmetics.
It's all kinds of products. I have a Zojirushi travel mug and coffee maker that are both ridiculously well made and designed. The travel mug keeps things hot, never leaks and has a spring tensioned juuust right to fling the lid open and lock it behind a stop without bouncing back. The coffee maker has an unusual design that makes it very easy to clean. I've been using both daily for going on ten years. Japanese stationary is very good. Until recently, a Japanese company made the best chalk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagoromo_Fulltouch_Chalk). Back in the day, Sony CRT TVs were the best you could get. That's just the stuff I have personal experience to rattle on about without doing any research.
Japan has a longstanding reputation for producing very high quality products, which you don't seem to be very aware of. I'm kind of wondering if you're trying to make a point when you don't actually know anything about the topic.
> The reason you choose a particular cosmetic is due to mastery of advertising and logistics software. You will never buy a cosmetic that isn't marketed by software.
Like you're trying really, unusually hard to miss the point and reach to pull the discussion back to software. Again, I find that really interesting. At this point, are you just digging in your heels or is something else going on?
And the woman I met wasn't seeking out Japanese cosmetics because of marketing software, for the obvious reason that she was visitor buying things marketed to a domestic audience.
"This product does not contain machines!" "No, but it is made using machines!"
(Remember the 6 classical machines: screw, inclined plane, wedge, lever, wheel and axle, and pulley.)
Perhaps, just maybe, the real problem here is that the basic machines the world has standardised on are junk, and you can't make junk into something good?
You can use junk to make good things, but you can't make good things out of junk.
Maybe the problem isn't Japan. Maybe the problem is that all modern software is junk, and even Japan can't make that good.
I believe most of the world has become complacent with “good enough” and a factory (be it hard or soft ware) that does not churn producs out of the door quickly enough is seen as “unproductive” Probably Japan software industry is trapped between being productive and excellent being neither after all.
No. For a physical non-software-driven product, those things are pretty much orthogonal.
If a product is good, it's due to the attributes of the product itself, and those are mainly due to the design decisions and priorities of the manufacturer.
All the things you list may make the business more efficient and more successful, but they have little to do with the kinds of products I'm talking about.
I don’t know why you are being so hostile about my knowledge levels about $5 versus $30 pieces of junk. But I’ll just say that you are buying these things because you can buy it on Amazon, and Amazon wrote all this software to fill in the blanks like returns which Zojirushi would never do, and because Wirecutter told you to, and their affiliate marketing machine is very software enabled. It is actually a good example of my point: can you think of a Japanese brand that in your opinion has great purely mechanical products like mugs but advertises as aggressively as Apple does? What about a brand that can reach people with ad blockers, so therefore it must innovate, like by managing fleets of influencers, digital product catalogs / product syndication, affiliate schemes, etc.?
I'm not being hostile, but I think you're being very non-responsive. At various points I've been trying to figure out why, because it's so baffling. I mean, the question is "Why is Japanese software crap when their physical products are well designed," and you're going on and on about Amazon's logistics software, which is pretty much a non-sequitur.
To me, one reason is that in some markets inside Japan, people do not yet pay for software. For example hardly anyone in Japan pays for Spotify subscriptions. However they do spend in gacha games. So it’s not as black and white as, tangible versus intangible goods. There’s no broad strokes generalization about a cultural difference that is persuasive to me. The article talks about stuff that is basically ancient history or industrial policy, which is also interesting but unpersuasive. I bring up the Amazon logistics software as an example of the possibility that even stoic hardware companies are software companies, and people like Zojirushi, so then it is sequiter to say, we’ll actually Zojirushi is good at software. So really we mean “bad at making globally important social media apps” which is a totally different thing than “bad at software.”
Does your pet theory extend beyond the adage “to a child with a hammer, everything is a nail?”
I think it’s self evident that anyone who works in a specific field will see the world through the lens of someone who works in that field…
And anyway, Toyota's most innovative and market-making vehicles, like the Prius: software plays a pretty big role no? I don't think you can reduce a complex product like this, but I'm not wrong: a car with great user-facing software is pretty exciting to consumers. The Apple Car would probably be pretty successful, the Tesla has pretty innovative software that differentiates it from other EVs, the deployment and preferences for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto enabled cars... it can be true that someone buys something despite the software being bad, but that's not where the trend is going.
Because Honda also exists. I kid, I kid..
A lot of Americans buy American cars simply because they're loyal to American brands, or European cars because they want their neighbors to be jealous of their ability to buy such overpriced transportation. I think software is low on the list.
There was a meme a while ago where thing thing people used to want out of their car's entertainment system was satellite navigation and fancy everything, whereas the thing people want now is a dumb standard plug to connect their phone to the car's speakers.
So is software in European and American cars. Testing is expensive. (the overall quality of software has gone downhill in the latest years)
How did you manage before smartphones and even email/text for meeting people and generally coordinating activities generally? People managed.
I guess that could change at some point but would guess that there would be a lot of pushback to Operating this vehicle requires a working smartphone especially given there's no cellular access in a lot of places.
It sounds ridiculous but what is a software-enabled hammer? A construction robot could be a pretty big deal no? That might not exist today. You might still be buying hammers but everyone will want construction robots.
This is one set of facts, totally correct, that you are talking about:
iPhones are made in China.
They cost $770 or so with tax.
They make a 55% margin (or whatever) per phone.
Consumers prefer premium materials like titanium, and they don’t prefer things like replaceable batteries.
Everyone’s phones are made in China.
But of course iOS is made in the US.
Consumers are choosing not between a titanium and aluminum phone, but almost always, they are choosing between Android and iOS
The margin on the software is like 99%
Apple News, the App Store, etc have a very powerful DRM scheme, where Apple is one of the only companies, besides maybe Sony, where you cannot pirate things they sell for the iPhone like services subscriptions, game IAP and extra iCloud storage.
The price of the iPhone isn’t its $770 sticker but the LTV of the owner.
This matters to firms everywhere not just Japan. If you can’t make 99% margin software someone else will. And consumers LIKE software. So everything you are saying is true but it doesn’t really disagree with me.
But they are very shy. /s
By the time software came around, Japan already had a well stablished manufacturing industry that had a reputation for quality (this wasn't always the case).
Software was something totally new and wasn't considered important, why? perhaps management didn't understand it or didn't know how to handle it and did nothing.
The above made a career in software not very attractive compared to other industries. Since then, companies struggle to get good developers, who can move to more attractive sectors or countries than trying to change things within Japan with its rigid hierarchy.
How things move in Japan is generally by someone breaking the status quo and the rest following if it is a success. That was the case with Toyota in manufacturing for example. For software it hasn't happened.
Another problem IMHO is that code is invisible to users. If the app works, people don't care if the code is beautifully made or not, and without consumer pressure, management doesn't care either. Compare that with the complains they'll get if a physical object had the sightless defect.
Finally, there is a higher entry barrier for physical products than software. Any teenager can build an app in her bedroom, it is a different story to develop a bullet train. Inefficiencies and slow decision processes in manufacturing are less obvious than in tech (though manufacturing industries in Japan are struggling as well because of this), and Japan simply isn't competitive in this area, making it less attractive to invest.
And perhaps, the most important: People got used to it and don't have higher expectations.
It was not an accident that software did well in the most hippy region in the US, San Francisco. On the contrary, hardware development, due to much more constraints from the laws of physics and economics, has been done well in Japan et al as careful top-down planning is the edge, not individual-level agility.*
I am a little surprised that the author, who is active in Japan, is off the mark. I regularly talk to many engineers/entrepreneurs in the region, and the cause-and-effect are quite easy to see and are unanimously agreed upon. Kudos to people there who are trying to change the software development culture for the better.
* Elon's ventures seem to challenge this conventional dichotomy as he attempts to bring both agility and top-down leadership into his firms. More power to him.
But I think it is not just the risk aversion, Japan is a very rigid country with an strong emphasis on following the hierarchy and rules, no matter how ridiculous they are, but introspection and critical thinking are not appreciated. This works well for industrial environments, but not for software development.
I remember being a junior engineer and spending time to really make my software good and my first review had a comment that I spent too much time adding "bells and whistles" (which was only partially true). So it gets drilled out of you in US software.
But after 6 years living here, I find the image of the Japanese as perfectionists to be a myth. Sure, the old sushi master that has dedicated his life to the craft might a perfectionist; most other people are not. Take a look a the average Japanese city with its ugly buildings, chaotic street layout, and insane cabling. Or the average office or shop, with a mess of boxes and piles of documents everywhere. Or the countryside (where I live) and the abysmal state of most roads and infrastructure. Those are not the signs of a perfectionist society.
Heck, A LOT of things that have that desirable "made in Japan" sticker are made by abused migrant workers with very little protection and pay. They aren't even made by the "mythological perfect and careful Japanese hands."
Note: been here 15 years and I have many friends in the manufacturing industry
Same with made in Germany and the US. Actually, Made in Germany is worse.
Every consumer electronic I have labeled Made in Germany is absolutely crap. The Bosch stove has the sealing gasket wrongly mounted, the Siemens vacuum cleaner is poorly designed and built, so is the Fujitsu laptop I just sold which felt like bottom of the barrel e-waste.
Electronics from Xiaomi, Huawei, etc feels way better built and better designed than stuff labeled made in Germany.
More like finding a handful of people in the whole of US history making paintings by sticking pasta onto a canvas, and presenting it as some huge cultural thing.
They are perfectionist, just not anal about it. Their perfectionism is not about tidy small shops.
And compared to the average US city, the average Japanese city is a masterpiece, including the modern buildings and streets.
Second, I don't know how the average US city is, because I have never been to the US, but I think that you really overestimate how the average Japanese city looks like. People who have never lived here think that all of Japan is like the cool neighbourhoods of Tokyo, but that could not be further from the truth.
The average Japanese city suffers from serious urban sprawl, most are just a bunch of big box stores interconnected by stroads, and little houses scattered everywhere without any kind of planning. There are plenty of old, decaying buildings everywhere and streets in pretty bad condition.
Look, I live in Misawa, Aomori. Please take a look around on Google Street View, and then tell me how much of a masterpiece it is: https://maps.app.goo.gl/d5DDV3PT6MiSNYPYA
I beg to differ. They just apply perfectionism to different areas compared to what you have listed.
Different cultures attract efforts to different areas.
You can argue that they've succeeded in other areas in the past like TVs and cars but software and apps imo are much harder to communicate usage and much harder to localize.
It's not just localization, it's close zero conscience of the world outside of Japan by most people in it. That is not to say people in the USA have more consciousness of the outside world. It's that they don't need it by luck that English works with 1.4 billion people
The big difference is capital markets, as SK along with other Asian countries became more attractive for Japanese capital than Japan during the 2000s.
This shows that even on HN, all you have to do is sound confident.
Anyone who has spent a lot of time residing in both countries could tell you this is not true. English proficiency levels are significantly higher in Korea, to the extent that this difference has a societal and business impact on each country.
In both countries I found English levels to vary widely based on which industry and location you were in. I think Korean society in general has higher English skills among younger people especially due to the number of Koreans that have spent significant time in the US. But among IT industries and top graduates I'm not sure there's a big difference.
Of course this difference disappears at the top 1% level, but this holds pretty much anywhere in the world. China might be an exception because it's so big, not sure, but elsewhere you're not going to be at the forefront of things if you can't participate in the international community.
Basically conglomerates grew so big through foreign investments that they control large parts of the legislative and executive body. The families regularly get threatened by some aspiring/greedy politicians, then they threaten to fire a lot of people, and then they get spoken free.
I'd argue that this was the inspiration for the Mr.Robot series (apart from enron group), as it's portraying a similar disfunct democracy that's effectively owned by oligarchs or is effectively an oligopol.
I will say they come out with some dank video games like Lineage, Guild Wars, MapleStory, Black Desert Online, PUBG
The software Samsung puts on their phones may just be a layer on top of Android but is still very influential by being run on billions of end-user devices.
The country's definitely low on internationally impactful SaaS, though they do exist e.g. Sendbird and Moloco.
Sure, most of it is Android, but even, like, using the darn thing needs more software proficiency than average
Though Nintendo and Sony kinda do a good job (a lot of development is done outside Japan though - same for Samsung)
Or do you just mean it came from Korea? I guess I should have been more clear that I was talking about software that is known internationally.
To put this in a more relatable way: Most people will invent apple peelers to peel apples, and make better peelers to make peeling easier. Some will just be lazy bastards and eat the apple skin and all. Japanese peel the apple with just an ordinary kitchen knife, their cutlery technology thus never advances beyond kitchen knife because "Why?".
Japanese simply cannot grasp the appreciation of good tools made for purpose because they can do everything with their bare hands, they can't understand WTF good software is because they don't need it and don't use it.
And no matter how much vi(m) might be a plugin-bloated mess that never really gelled for me, it also never lagged out or randomly failed to do things like autocomplete or formatter running to nearly the extent VS Code does daily. And it didn't use half my CPU just sitting there.
Autotools, now, that's some real self-flagrllation.
It isn't until very recently that new houses in Japan were built with insulation. Why? Wearing a bunch of layers, slippers, sitting in front of a kerosene heater or under a kotatsu... It works, so why fix it? Maybe it's a lack of creativity, critical thinking, or suppliers.. but it doesn't matter. If it kinda works, don't fix it.
Which is interesting, because hundred of "keep warm in your house" little junky products have come out in the past decade like USB warmers and whatnot.
And yeah, there are some arguments (other than the status quo) against insulated houses: more cost, when houses are seen as a one-type-thing and not a long-term investment. No basements for a furnace for central heating. Earthquake standards. But really, it's mostly just the same "Why" from your comment.
Or look around your typical supermarket. Instant noddles, pre-made curry mixes, pre-cut meat and vegetables, instant miso soup, precooked side dishes and so on. It’s not like this stuff cannot be prepared at home. It sells well because it’s convenient.
P.S. the skin is the best part of a good apple.
The chief example are mobile phones, the poster child of Galapagos Syndrome[1]. Once Japan figured out mobile phones they stopped moving. They kept reiterating and ended up with the craziest mobile phones known to man, but they got 1HKO'd in broad daylight by the invention of the smartphone and haven't been relevant since.
Another is the Mitsubishi Regional Jet. With expertise building licensed F-15s and the pride of restarting Japanese domestic aviation manufacturing since the YS-11, they built one of the best regional jets ever and failed to sell a single one because they couldn't figure out how to document how the thing was made and thus the required certifications from the FAA and other authorities.
Both examples are of Japan simply not understanding what a good purpose made tool is, because they don't need to. Why would anyone want a smartphone? Why do we need to explain how this jetliner is made? Of course they realize why once they're crashed in the dirt, but by then it's way too late.
While not immune (eg: the ancient state of US banking), the rest of the world and the United States in particular on the other hand respect good products that shake the markets, people and companies who don't (eg: Boeing and Intel for recent examples) are tarred and feathered for their insolence.
I don't agree with this, I have researched English proficiency across the world and South Korea consistently ranks quite a bit higher than Japan. Here is one example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index
I also regularly talk with many people from both Japan and South Korea (being that I learn the languages), with those people having wildly varying degrees of English literacy... but in talking to all of them, the one consistent thing everyone has agreed on is that Koreans by-and-large definitely speak better English than Japanese.
Japanese people aren't that serious about moving out (at least my generation. Your people look a bit different though.)
This is mirrored in Europe where countries using subs (Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, etc) have better English language skills than dub countries (France, Germany, Spain).
I'm not sure if any other countries than Japan do that, but I smell something similar might be going on in public education in rural China; it's a somewhat usable alternative where immersive training is not available.
Not even that. It's just about financing.
Japan's domestic capital markets collapsed due to the Asset Bust in the early 1990s, the Asian Financial Crisis in the late 1990s, and the Great Recession in 2008-12, and domestic asset managers turbocharged the "Flying Geese" development model in order to make themselves whole.
There's no reason for an Asset Manager at SoftBank, Nomura, or MUFG to invest in a Japanese startup when a South Korean, Chinese, Indian, or Singaporean startup can command outsized returns in an IPO or Acquisition.
Japanese asset managers play a major role in Tech VC/PE in Asia, but they prefer to invest abroad.
Look at the outsized returns from Alibaba (SoftBank), Flipkart (SoftBank), and Grab (MUFG) compared to anything that came out of Japan in the last 30 years.
> but at best, keiretsu is a symptom
South Korea and China both use the same corporate model that Keiretsus use, as much of the reform era leadership in both SK and China studied in Japan, and both countries got significant technical and economic advising from Japan via the "Flying Geese" model
Keiretsu not caring about a market forces new comers to go for the blue ocean strategy, as they won't get investments for fighting in the more crowded markets.
As the keiretsu also hold the capital, they also shape markets and should totally be blamed for what happens there.
To compare to the US, Microsoft wouldn't be there if IBM didn't invest in it. Apple also benefited from Xerox and got saved by Microsoft etc.. That's the kind of dynamic the Japanese market only saw in cars and customer electronics manufacturing.
An illuminating question is, is Japan a leader in boutique shop games?
Maybe it's a matter of Japanese firms becoming rigid and hierarchical at a faster rate in their lifecycle than Western firms do.
What do you mean? It's fairly clear that most of the innovation in Japan was in the 80s and 90s. Since then, there's hardly any outstanding titles coming from Japan. Every year at the TGS it's just remakes and sequels or prequels. A sign of a dying industry.
> still punching above its weight
I'd call that inertia. But you already see that signs of decay: Final Fantasy is selling less and less, Capcom relies way too much on Monster Hunter for their own good, Konami is mostly dead (selling remakes contracted to third party studios), SEGA may be the most successful but that's mostly thanks to Atlus at this stage. Even Sony has hardly anything to show in their first party line-up. It's getting depressing.
However, I think in the main you're right (the industry is slowly dying), I just don't think it's as manifest (or irreversible) yet. I do think if Nintendo and Game Freak prevail against Palworld, things will get bleaker for Japanese development, though.
It’s well documented how lenient the U.S. was with enforcing international law on Japans high ranking military and political leaders. The U.S. covered it up and whitewashed Hirohito’s role in WW2. It’s why Japan still has never apologized or even admitted to genociding Chinese and enslaving and raping Korea.
Open up a Japanese textbook on the early 20th century and you will find a glowing portrayal of an Imperial Japanese Empire.
I'm not talking about Hirohito, Yasukuni, the failure at regulating the zaibatsu, the occupation, or Japanese conservatism at all. I'm very familiar with Japanese history. I'm specifically talking about IT corporate culture in Japan. Not sure why you're bringing politics into this.
So, Japan could be doing software like many think it should be done: as an well designed engineering practice.
But it didn't. It did well in Palo Alto. It only moved into San Francisco when Palo Alto decided it was full, but the software industry continued growing anyway. San Francisco succeeded in software because it was near Palo Alto.
Games. Sony, Nintendo, are we really saying the country that makes PlayStation and Nintendo's is 'bad' at software?
And, Didn't someone in Japan make the Ruby language?
I didn't quite find it. How are they categorizing Japanese software as 'bad' compared to any other country? Was it just because US Silicon Valley has had a few bigger startups in general? Is that really a good benchmark?
The interfaces are simple. The touchscreens are instantly responsive. They support a variety of features.
Overall they seem better than the ones National ATM makes.
Of course, the attribution of causes to this is highly subjective and I expect every person to come away from the elephant with a different interpretation.
In my case, the very, very top down 'age hierarchy' culture was (and continues unabated) to crush any ideas and proposals that come up from younger and more competent engineers. In the last 30 years with Japan, I have met only a small handful of people that are willing to take input, let alone change direction, from someone younger than them. (a trivial example was a fellow company director of mine that was born 5 _days_ earlier than me. In 4 years working together, not once would he take anything I said seriously. Hmm...)
Give the number of excellent Japanese software engineers that I know, the burden of this "culture" is (to me) quite tragic on its impact slowing down national progress in an important global field. If anyone as ideas how to get around this, I would love to know and learn.
I live in a small country and there are foreign companies and while they have to adjust to local laws and have mostly local employees, they still are culturally different from each other.
I wonder how GE with a strong central process and culture control is doing in Japan?
It is not only in software that Japan has currently difficulties. It is in any domain that requires to "move fast and break thing".
Japan is excellent at incremental improvement (Kaizen) but absolutely terrible at managing disruptions.
And the reasons are exactly the ones you point out: Excessively hierarchical management practices means that mid-management will kill any evolution that is seen as a risk to them.
In Japan, home computers never really made sense until it was far, far too late.
In the west, you'd buy a PC (or a home computer) to play games, edit documents or manage your business. The latter two were pretty much impossible in Japan, as the computers of that era couldn't handle the complexities of the Japanese language and character set. Gaming was all that remained, and if you only wanted gaming, you could just as well get a NES (known in Japan as Famicom), which was much better suited for the purpose.
Computers eventually caught up, but some of the cultural impact remained, still making them less popular than in the west.
This is one of the reasons why Japanese were so good at consumer electronics, they just needed that electronics a lot more than we did, and the devices needed a lot more features, as "just plug it into a computer to do the complicated stuff" wasn't really an option there.
NEC sold a Kanji board for their Z80-based PC8801 mk II (released 1983). The original 1979 PC8801 didn’t have an official Kanji board from NEC, but one was available for it from a third party vendor. With a Kanji board, you could do Japanese word processing. I believe the same was true of many other 8-bit vendors.
Inevitably the greater complexity of Kanji required more advanced hardware, so Kanji-capable machines usable for business and education were initially more expensive than games-only machines that lacked it. But in 1990 IBM released DOS/V, which demonstrated that standard PC hardware had become powerful enough to support Kanji without needing any dedicated circuitry. And even before that, I believe already by the late 1980s many machines (such as NEC PC-9800s) were coming with Kanji support as a standard feature rather than an optional add-on card.
There were other Japanese machines which found a foothold in some overseas markets. IBM Japan developed a modified version of the PCjr, the PC JX, for the Japanese market. IBM ended up also selling the JX to schools in Australia and New Zealand (minus the Kanji circuitry), and many bought them (I remember using one at school when I was 9 or 10.)
Similarly, Fujitsu’s cloned IBM mainframes, the FACOM machines, were popular with Australian businesses and governments in the 1980s and first half of the 1990s. They were also sold in other markets, but in other markets were generally rebadged (or even manufactured under license) by vendors such as Amdahl in the US and Siemens in Europe, whereas in Australia they were sold directly by Fujitsu and generally closer to what was sold in Japan.
The biggest barrier to its adoption was vendors such as NEC (with their PC9800 series) and the AX consortium (Oki, Casio, Canon, Sanyo, Sharp, Hitachi, Mitsubishi) who had already invested in proprietary hardware for Kanji support and were threatened by the support of Japanese text on global standard hardware. (That said, some AX vendors decided to embrace DOS/V anyway, such as Sharp.)
Another barrier was that DOS/V had different APIs from those previous solutions so you needed new software that could support it.
I stayed with friends in Japan in 2001 who noted all their friends used email on their handsets rather than have a PC. They also could watch certain broadcast TV channels on their phone which was popular on the train.
The only people I knew with mobile email in my home country were some execs with blackberries.
Sure, some of it is that iPhones (Pixels) do a good enough job for a lot of us. But it's also that the gap has closed so much and a lot of it is about software.
Go to events in Japan and a lot of the design of posters and so forth just looks seriously bad to US (and presumably European) eyes.
And even in the large systems space, when I was an IT industry analyst, there was just a lot of quirky Japanese tech stuff that was out of step with the world as a whole.
I don't have a coherent theory for it all but Japan just fell out of alignment with mainstream patterns especially in the 90s or so.
Japanese companies and organizations (and people) love diagrams to present to the public. Whether how to navigate a website, book a ticket, check-in to a hotel, etc. the number of process diagrams in daily life (as a perceived effective way of communicating information) is unseen outside Japan.
Also, the amount of highly detailed posters in public places. For example, the departures board of a train line -- far more information than probably the average US rider knows how to comprehend even. Or is interested in.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stem-and-leaf_time_tabl...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/rqaoj3/the_crazy_t...
You have to wonder whether this generates a tolerance or expectation that detail is expected to be understood.
The format of metro map is actually based on London metro, the only major difference is the amount of lines.
I'm more impressed by their maps of where each station exit leads to, or where on the platform to wait based on your seat number. Those can be tricky to figure out as there are multiple wait points based on the train route and number of carriages. Shinkansen even take into account what end of the carriage you're closest to.
How do American public transit agencies present the same information?
Only distributed as a PDF: https://www.transitchicago.com/redline/
Overall train map: https://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/6/ctamap_Lsystem.png
Overall train+bus maps: https://www.transitchicago.com/maps/system/ + https://www.transitchicago.com/maps/downtown/
Sooo yeah, I agree the Japanese one is much nicer. I don't recall ever even seeing a schedule at the stations, just "train arriving in X minutes". The train map and per-line map are at every station, and the train+bus map is pretty common too.
But yes, it could still be made better by waking up the radios fast and having e.g. reasonably smart tethering based on an open de facto standard spec that would be only woken up when the camera is switched "on" (which is mostly a key lock in many cameras, not a boot up).
In short - downloading ephemeris data from the internet is fine, but if it also cripples the whole thing by not using the embedded GPS ephemeris data.. horrible.
I'm just a happy amateur photographer, but this fact has been annoying the sanity out of me for over a decade now. Mobile phones are taking increasingly large bites out of the camera manufacturers' market share, but companies like Fuji/Canon/Nikon/Olympus, for some unknown reason, are unable to adapt at all. Sure, there is still and will always be a market for larger glass and more pixels, lower noise levels, ergonomics etc. - but why in 2024 GPS, Wi-Fi, uploading to Instagram and similar functions are not standard in ALL cameras is beyond my understanding.
It's like watching the car industry in the early 2000's where manufacturers would pride themselves over finally putting a USB jack in their car.
Specifically on uploading to social media and having apps that depend on external APIs — maybe it's because putting Android on such devices and having to constantly keep the social media apps updated "dates" the camera and forces consumers into an upgrade cycle because of software bloat.
I've noticed that for some reason, cheap Android phones tend to objectively slow down over the years even without software or app upgrades — as if the cheap Mediatek chipsets and RAM are designed to eventually degrade. Something similar happened to some of the wi-fi connected printers I have owned, which slowly become sluggish and unusable even after factory resets.
On the other hand, I can still use my 16 year old full-frame Nikon D700 DSLR purchased in 2008 very, very well. Even back then, it supported a GPS attachment, though it's utter trash compared to in-phone AGPS these days.
I have a couple of good cameras and glass but they're getting old and I really can't imagine upgrading at this point.
Adobe (sorry, subscription haters) made up for a lot of defects in the manufacturers' PC software for downloading etc. But I totally get frustrated by the lack of GPS metadata at this point because I hate entering that sort of thing which geo data makes irrelevant in many cases.
As an European living in Japan, I can confirm. Japanese advertisement and presentations look like a competition in who can cram the most text in epilepsy-inducing colors in a single page/poster. Bonus points for cramming both horizontal and vertical text in the same page.
I don't know if they really like it, or if they just follow what everybody else does.
Leaving aside the fact that math is not only basic arithmetic, the reality is that they dedicate much more time in school to this kind of problems. But as usual, skills that are not used often atrophy over time, and in my experience the average Japanese adult is not much better than the average Western adult.
Why didn't software work for Japanese business purposes? Keep in mind the 80s and 90s were the peak of the Japan economy, and if they actually wanted a software system that could handle Japanese requirements, they had the resources to build it.
Where's the Japanese counter-part of Lotus 1-2-3 and Visicalc? Why didn't any Japanese firm make this software, or if they did, why didn't it become popular?
Certainly Kanji makes things a bit more complicated, but IIRC I've seen systems that mainly dealt with Hiragana and Katakana. It's a limited character set. Nobody says you need to use ASCII.
Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows.
At the end of the day I think the capital and investment aspects, market protections and political situations account for way more than sheer cultural or technical aspects.
Because if you're making something in the US, you have immediate access to a market of 330m[1] people, and they all speak a single language, follow roughly similar laws and regulations, and have relatively similar needs (e.g. software made for schools in Arizona is pretty likely to work well for schools in Kansas, because things like the A-F grade system stay the same).
This rich market gives you plenty of opportunities to grow quickly. Once you grow large enough, you have pretty easy access to other large and rich markets that also speak English, and then you can get into the hard stuff like internationalization.
If you start out as an EU company, you only have access to the population of your own country, and you're not large enough to handle internationalization or the 30 slightly different systems of laws, regulations, agreements with retailers and different store chains etc. It's a lot harder for you to grow at first, because the potential pool of customers able to use your product is much smaller.
You have markets like China and India, which are technically better, but at least historically, they used to be poor enough that the US was a much better option in practice.
I don't think this is the only reason for US domination, but it's definitely one of the reasons.
[edit] [1[] the population was different back then, but the difference in scale was similar
JIS X 0201 was released in 1969 and widely adopted on mainframe systems in the 1970s. It supports a modified form of Katakana (“half-width”) as well as the Latin alphabet in a 7 or 8 bit encoding. 8-bit encodings supported both, for 7-bit you could switch between Katakana and Latin using control characters. So, by the 1970s you could already do Japanese language computing if you limited yourself to katakana and romaji.
Kanji took longer because there are too many characters for a 7/8-bit code and their visual complexity required more advanced display hardware, but already in 1971 IBM was selling their “IBM Kanji System” which contained specialised software, printers and keypunches to support Kanji on IBM S/360 mainframes. In 1979 IBM added support for 3270 terminals (with additional Kanji circuitry) to enable Kanji in interactive as opposed to batch mode punched card computing.
Early systems without kanji support generally used katakana rather than hiragana, because if writing everything in katakana looks weird to Japanese speakers, doing the same thing in hiragana looks even weirder. Also, the “blockier” shape of katakana makes it more legible than hiragana on low resolution displays.
> Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows.
In the 1990s, Oracle licensed RISC OS from Acorn in the UK, and sold it in the US as Oracle NCOS (Network Computer Operating System). But the whole “network computer” thing was never as successful as its backers had hoped.
They sort of did. For a while Symbian had two thirds of the smartphone OS market. And the real winner in the global OS marketplace today is Linux (I'm including Android here, though you could debate that), which started out life as European. But I do agree about investment opportunities.
That's not really the case. There were a lot of PCs in the 1980s and Japan was a strong leader in the early laptop market as well. All these PCs and many hand-held devices for sale then handled the character set just fine.
JIS C 6226, the encoding for the Japanese language, was made in the 70s. While later than the US, I would not call it late.
In the 1980s, a major goal of AI research was to make CJK text entry effective and convenient (OCR or alternatives). It didn't pan out in time.
When the necessary tech was reading, emoji was huge in Japan first because it helped mitigate the text entry problem.
Some, much complex, JRPGs such as Falcom's titles (the Ys series), began on Japanese computers (though they did end up getting NES ports anyway).
There's also the proliferation of smut on Japanese computers, since you can't have that kind of stuff of consoles. This also eventually trickles down to some "underground" computer magazines in Japan having that stuff on their pages and coverdiscs - the stuff you would typically find on their weekly gossip magazines.
I see your argument and I raise you China and India.
There are a lot of great comments, but I'd like to collect and respond in bulk to the ones about keiretsu, since there are a lot of misunderstanding about them.
1) It's not the keiretsu, it's X. It's not just the existence of keiretsu in isolation. They keiretsu produced incredible innovations in the 60s and 70s. It was the combination of the keiretsu control and the shift to domestic markets (which the keiretsu also controlled) that killed the PC software industry in its infancy.
2) Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google are like keirestsu. They really are not. In fact, they operate on a radically different philosophy. Keiretsu would be willing to lose money (and a lot of it) in order to keep business in-house. Their supply chains were owned, integrated, and exclusive. Employees did not leave their keirestu group It fostered innovation as long as they were export facing, but it fell apart once they started to focus on the domestic market.
Thank you again for reading. I'm happy to discuss.
I think that program was a good example of a overall inward-facing industrial policy that dominated in Japan in the 1980s.
I'm not sure how much that one program was at fault, but it a great example of many similar misguided policies of the era.
When the feedback from the global markets was removed, most of this kind of planning just stopped working.
Why didn’t Sony, Nintendo and Sega become the biggest firms in Japan? They were well positioned to become its biggest media companies. Why is WhatsApp adopted widely without preloading but not LINE, which was way ahead of the curve in terms of media apps?
LINE is far more popular in Japan than WhatsApp. It's a Korean company, and if you mean why it never took off outside of Asia, I suspect its a matter of network effects, but I have not looked into it in detail.
Unicode is uniquely worse for Japanese than for any other real-life world language. You can't make an application that displays Japanese correctly using Unicode, unless you implement mumble mumble font selection mumble ranges vaporware, which no-one (except web browsers) actually does. Or you can sacrifice the ability to display Chinese correctly for the sake of displaying Japanese correctly, but no international software maker will do that.
The result is that Japanese software mostly doesn't use Unicode (because it sees no benefit), and, more insidiously, the whole Unicode-first (and, increasingly, unicode-only) world of open-source libraries and languages is much less useful in Japan. So whether by accident or design, Japan is cut off from the global market, in both directions.
I'm not seeing any reason this is worse in Japanese than Chinese.
Only in recent years has Chinese overtaken Japanese as the predominant CJK population (for tech products). For a long time the Japanese market was larger than the Chinese market. You can just check the historical GDP as a ballpark figure.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, we (context: Hong Kong) kind of thought knowing Japanese was so cool because it allowed us to type Kanji which we repurposed as Chinese characters in some systems. (I think it was mostly Japanese games or games localized for Japan, and maybe some obscure systems.)
Even today this isn't just a fonts issue. Simplified Chinese uses different codepoints for many of the characters, so international software makers need to localize totally differently anyway. There's no reason they can't use a Japanese font when the language is Japanese.
Why didn't Japanese software adopt Unicode in the early 2000s? Why did Chinese software adopt Unicode?
A priori yes, the fact there's a collision between Japanese and Chinese only tells you one of them is going to win and get the normal experience and the other is going to lose and have Unicode uniquely suck for them - history could conceivably have flipped which was which. Another reply suggests that China had laws requiring products sold there to display Chinese correctly whereas Japan did not, which could be the kind of thing that tips the default/standard.
I am not a speaker of either but aren't kanji and written Chinese the same language? It's like French and English, you can use the same keyboard except for certain diacritics. What's so special about Japanese that it can't be displayed by Unicode? Unicode seems to work fine for Korean and Chinese, and Japanese is basically a hybrid of those two.
If the Unicode standard has space for an ever-expanding list of emojis, they can fix their rendering issues with the Japanese language too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
Seems like Wikipedia has a good overview of the issue.
No. They're different languages, and the written forms are similar but distinct, akin to e.g. Fraktur - you can read glyphs from the other language, but it's harder and looks odd. (Yes Unicode doesn't have codepoints for Fraktur either, but no real-life world language uses Fraktur, so it's not a significant issue there).
> What's so special about Japanese that it can't be displayed by Unicode? Unicode seems to work fine for Korean and Chinese, and Japanese is basically a hybrid of those two.
Live everyday Korean is written in Hangul, Hanzi are only for historical documents, which limits the impact. Taiwanese glyphs (which you don't mention, but for completeness) get their own codepoints because the Unicode consortium had a certain amount of geopolitical realism. So the only collision in real-life world languages is between Chinese and Japanese, and everything gets set up to use Chinese glyphs by default (or, more often, to exclusively use Chinese glyphs) and Japanese is the only real-life world language whose glyphs don't have proper codepoints in unicode (and are fobbed off with mumble mumble font selection mumble ranges vaporware).
> If the Unicode standard has space for an ever-expanding list of emojis, they can fix their rendering issues with the Japanese language too.
Oh they absolutely could. They don't want to. Also migration would be difficult - you would have to make a hard compatibility break to ensure that people switched to the new standard, otherwise you'd have old documents that look almost but not quite right and now also where e.g. search doesn't work properly (because searching for the new codepoints wouldn't find characters encoded at the old ones, because no-one actually follows the standards for how to do text search, they just search for byte substrings and call it good).
Blog post I found with some examples: https://blog.skritter.com/2015/06/font-differences-between-j...
Check out the Noto Sans CJK fonts repo[1], as of now it has five variations: Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Hong Kong. There wouldn't be a need for so many variations if Unicode works perfectly.
But Unicode is already infinitely better than what existed before, so as I said above, we just kind of accept it begrudgingly.
Korean uses Hangul, which is an alphabet and entirely unrelated to Chinese or Japanese.
There was already the Japanese spoken language, and nobody in Japan had personal connections to Chinese people(having a rough sea between two countries tend to do that), so Japanese interpretation of "Chinese language" and its characters is completely its own thing - in China the script is called "Hanzi", pronounced like "kHang-zeh", rather than "knanJI" in Japanese.
With the "Simplified" form created by Chinese communist movement in the mid 20th century, there are currently at least 3 major branches of Chinese scripts: the OG "Traditional" kind, its alternate "Simplified" form, and the Japanese "Kanji" - plus (deprecated)Vietnam Chunom variant, (minor)Hong Kong PRC-traditional variation, Korean Kanji w/o post-war Japanese simplifications, etc.
Each ... has slight variations and significant overlaps. Unicode technically supports a lot of those, some by co-mingling, some by rubberstamped-in duplicates, some by IVS(Ideographic Variation Sequence).
To realistically support all languages in one font or app, there need to be distinctions based on languages rather than bandaging hand-wavy "it's all kanji" approach(the word kanji is Japanese, for starters), but the Unicode Consortium is not doing that.
You have to know the intended locale or the text to disambiguate and select the correct glyphs.
[1] One major reason is that pre-Unicode charsets exist which encode both traditional and simplified characters, and one of the primary goals of Unicode is to support round-trip mapping from any charset into Unicode and back without loss of information.
Given that there were thousands of such characters, some characters slipped through and the same code point was used by both Chinese and Japanese.
The Japanese have been bickering about the handful of those cases ever since.
Like, image if coordonner (french), coordinate (English) and coördinate (variant) all were encoded.as the same bytes.
As I mentioned in another comment, there already are separate Japanese and Chinese code points for most CJK characters. It's just a handful of cases where for whatever reason the same code points were used (maybe they forgot to separate some characters due to human error), and the Japanese (it's always the Japanese) has been bickering about the situation ever since.
This is prime /r/BadLinguistics fodder but you've ironically hit the head on the problem.
The underlying issue is that Unicode was run by people who thought 16 bits was enough[0], ran into the issue of Chinese characters, and imposed a bunch of very specific unification rules to work around their own self-imposed technical limitation so they could retain 16-bit codepoints. The rule is that characters that only differ in appearance are treated as the same character[1].
To explain how dumb this is, I'm going to invent a concept called UniPhoenician. You see, Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and a few other phonetic scripts have significant derivation from Phoenician writing, so we're going to just merge the letters that happen to have a shared pedigree. i.e. Latin a, Greek alpha, and Cyrillic a. Of course, once we do that, software now has to be consciously aware of what language text is written in so it can substitute the right set of glyphs to work around UniPho.
To make this even dumber, the limitation that motivated UniHan went away with Unicode 2.0, which went to 20-bit codepoints. Except we didn't fix UniHan, AND we subtly broke old software. You see, 16-bit codepoints was the only encoding for Unicode 1.0. Unicode 2.0 added UTF-8[2] and UTF-16, the latter of which is a series of rules on how to fit 20-bit codepoints into 16-bit text in a way that subtly breaks old software, which hopefully will get updated and then people can just pick what codepoint length they want.
Well, uh... turns out Windows NT and JavaScript already were using 16-bit codepoints, and integrating the new UTF-16 rules into them subtly breaks existing software based on that. So those can never be fixed, and any software built on their text-handling capabilities is subtly broken in the face of emoji, rare characters, and so on. Bonus points is that, because they can't understand UTF-16's special characters, naively written conversion functions working with 16-bit-only software will leak invalid UTF-16 sequences into UTF-8, as documented in WTF-8[3].
[0] Competing proposals for a universal character set, including ISO's UCS, used 4 byte characters, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Coded_Character_Set#...
[1] Unless the difference is between Simplified and Traditional Chinese, because Unicode didn't wanna piss off Mainland China but was okay with pissing off Japan and Korea
[2] AKA Filesystem Safe Unicode, which shoves Unicode in 8 bits in a way that is mostly acceptable and doesn't impose any Latin-centrism that non-Latin script users need to worry about. Bonus points is that it was originally designed for 32-bit codepoints (anticipating UCS?). If we ever needed 32-bits, UTF-8 could handle them, while UTF-16 would require additional layers of hacks that would spill over into WTF-8.
It really depends on how you look at it. I wouldn't fault the original designers of unicode who thought 16 bits was enough.
In modern unicode there are apparently 90k+ CJK characters, but honestly "nobody" actually uses more than the 10k. The thing is the unicode codepoints proliferate:
One for Japan, one for simplified and one for traditional. That's potentially 3x. Korea and Vietnam wants some too.
Then you have this thing called the Kangxi dictionary which was the most comprehensive Chinese character dictionary that includes all obscure characters people could find in the classical literature. Probably half of the characters in Kangxi have this description: "Variant of <more common character>". (I'm pretty sure a significant portion of these variants are just "typos" in old books)
If they were more "economical" in the usage of codepoints, i.e. don't create new code points for each country (just let them use the right fonts), don't include all the frivolous characters in Kangxi, etc... I'm pretty sure it's technically possible for CJK to use less than 10k characters in total. (which, if it did, will let unicode fit within 16 bits)
But this is a political nightmare and nobody wants this compromise. And the Unicode Consortium isn't going to prescribe some solution to some Asian countries on how their languages should be used.
So while the 16-bit limit was a bit tight even assuming optimal conditions, I really wouldn't fault the people who designed this limit to realize Asian cultural politics was so complicated. Heck, AFAIK, before CJK-unification, ALL East Asian codecs were 16-bit, and it was sufficient for each country respectively.
Phew… I got dizzy just reading your comment.
What "language setting", and how do you check it? Do your testers know that they have to test this Japan-specific thing, and how to even tell whether it's working or not? And what about users who need to read Japanese, but don't want their UI to be in Japanese - or, worse, users who need to read both Japanese and Chinese?
There are no particularly good ways or ready made frameworks for that, as it wasn't a huge issue pre-Internet because most people are monolingual in these languages: you pick a language in OS(or buy computers with a ROM) and everything user would see was in the user's language.
It's a giant pain today - there's no "Arial in Chinese", no easy way to mesh multiple fonts together in UI, or good ways to determine intended language of a string, and the fallback default is least common denominator of Simplified Chinese(PRC) for some reason - but not much is being done on those fronts.
It seems that there are Chinese regulation(?) that require Chinese text to be _always_ displayed in _appropriate_ font, which causes "wrong font" problem to Japanese users, while there are no such equivalent requirements elsewhere that computer software face no hard dilemma to follow two regulations in same code point; one is law and one is just unanimous customer complaints.
The rationale for that Chinese regulation(?), I think, is that Chinese computer users long had an exaggerated version of the same problem due to how Kanji was adopted to Unicode; the Kanji map was created by first enumerating common-use Japanese Kanji from reasonable existing tables, then merging additional Chinese common use characters not found on Japanese texts which are plenty. Duplicates were merged on loose and pragmatic-at-time judgements, some by shapes, some by meanings(!), some left as duplicates.
It seems to me that this had lead to a situation that lasted at least some period of time, that Chinese UTF-8 strings on a computer displayed in a mishmash of Japanese and Chinese fonts, Chinese one filling the gaps of Japanese rather than the other way around, which was frustrating(imagine top 10 most used characters of alphabets in Comic Sans and rest Arial), and solved by that regulation(the regulatory setup is a Chinese national GB or GB/T standard and enforcement of "applicable industrial standards", I believe).
There are such attempted solutions to this problem of same-system Chinese-Japanese text coexistence, such as registering all the Japanese Kanji as first choices on Unicode IVS map along legitimate Japanese variants, such that each Japanese characters with the IVS suffix sequences per each characters would be in Japanese form. Obviously there's no such font that this is going to work well with, and it's also unnecessary bloat and just a committee backstage influencing war.
The moral of the story is, the "it's all Kanji after all" approach never worked, simultaneous Chinese-and-Japanese support in Unicode and Unicode-based apps is a mess, and it has to be fixed higher up at some point in the future.
For more niche uses you can usually set the font or language on a per app basis.
Every Japanese phone is using Unicode already, as is most modern PC software.
If it's an app that uses the native UI toolkit, sure. If it's using one of the package-it-up frameworks, you'd better hope the developer configured it correctly.
> For more niche uses you can usually set the font or language on a per app basis.
You very often can't, or it's impractically difficult for regular users. Try changing your locale but not your language and watch how many programs screw it up.
I need to use Japanese language in a setting outside of the local language setting. Even my wife needs that (she's a native Japanese). Just switching everything to JA is simply not an option, and shouldn't be necessary if just UTF-8 could do the right thing. Granted, it does, to a certain point. But sometimes there are issues which I haven't been able to work around.
The PC software industry was organized around American operating systems that couldn't even display Japanese text without having your path separating backslash turn into a yen symbol.
Pretty much nobody outside of the USA or USA-based multinationals developed a globally relevant PC (no non-PC) software industry.
There are only some rare exceptions to this like SAP (German).
All the American software was developed for English speakers, with internationalization as an afterthought. Not for the global market at all.
You could not take this approach in Japan, like oh, I'm gonna write a word processor for people here in Japan and then we will throw it over the wall to an i18n team to internationalize it and sell it everywhere else.
Edit: Looks like each of them is about 1%, so 5% in total. Not shabby, but not anywhere near Zaibatsu levels.
A quick proxy for value added would be gross profit plus gross salaries. Ideally you’d want a measure of capital investment, but this is harder.
Also, since GDP is not revenue nor profit, it doesn’t make any sense to compare either sets of numbers.
[0] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nflx/market-cap/ [1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/marketcap/ [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/289659/youtube-share-of-...
https://theankler.com/p/netflixs-threat-isnt-in-hollywood
https://x.com/EconomyApp/status/1652380729425162241
YouTube has an insane moat. Netflix has a half dozen comparable competing services (Prime, Apple, Disney, HBO/Max, etc.)
The other big companies are much harder to avoid, they’re basically infrastructure.
In fact, I'm still somewhat angry at Netflix for wiping out disc rental and then killing their own DVD by mail which was a good source of reliable one+ year old movies.
Netflix is 27.
Its a cultural problem Japanese cant create software. There is no sense of "Hacking".
For them everything has to be formalized with detailed processors, costing and KPIs. There is a huge bureaucracy to slow down development as much as possible and complain when things get delayed.
They look at the company as a factory that output lines of code, bugs as product defects and treat developers as factory line workers who are insignificant and easily replaceable.
A lot of people in this thread have been mentioning the importance of risk tolerance in Japan's (lack of a) software industry. He gives some good examples of just how omnipresent that risk aversion can be; from getting funding, to renting an apartment, to finding a significant other, running a startup makes your life much more difficult in Japan than in eg the SF Bay. He also gives a bit more context on the matter of overall software quality, and I think that's an important point: writing assembly for small-scale electronics or cars or industrial machines is just as much "software" as writing a modern web app.
Also, while I'm not universally endorsing Japanese web design; dense UIs for the win!
Highlights from the previous thread:
"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."
"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."
"While the risk-adverse and face-losing-adverse traits of the Japanese culture can explain the (in general) slow development and response of Japanese companies (not limited to software), they cannot explain the quirky, often ugly and not user friendly UI of Japanese software. Germans are a bit risk-adverse, too, though not comparable to Japanese, their software, especially enterprise software are showing the same rigid UI and in general difficulty to use. In fact, you can not use them without reading the manual or being trained and that is expected from the end users, too! In a stark contrast, user-oriented software today are very intuitive, offers pleasant onboarding thus every user can use them casually."
"The same holds for Germany. Beside the "no pain no gain" attitude, the pursuit of "perfection" leads to weird outcomes. For example, the music band Kraftwerk dissolved because half of the members wanted to make sounds that looked "perfect" on an oscilloscope and not how good they sounded."
Also the claim the reason anyone left because half of the members wanted to make sounds that looked "perfect" on an oscilloscope and not how good they sounded - where can I see any confirmation of that?
The fact that I could code better than them (performance wise) was regarded as a marvel.
Compared to Telegram, I find Telegram to be much faster and robust, and the multi-device synchronization works better. IMHO, it is Telegram's strongest selling point.
But there is one LINE's feature that I really like and I have not seen in other messaging apps: the ability to create albums with your friends, to organize your pictures properly instead of having an endless stream of disorganized pictures.
I almost never use it for voice calls these days, so I haven't seen issues there. But the sticker thing happens to me frequently, and it's not a good sign I think. I'm guessing the app has gotten too bloated and now weird bugs like this are showing up.
From the reviews, it looks like the unhappy path wasn’t well tested.
The fanciest and most recommended ramen shops don't crack 3.9 on local review sites, the mindset is completely different from "oh nothing went wrong, 5 stars I guess!".
Because they don't use it.
>We're talking about 50% ownership of a messaging platform that's de facto standard in multiple Asian countries
Yeah, except Korea. If they think it's so great, why aren't they using it themselves? It seems hypocritical.
>Imagine the UK government trying to force Google to sell DeepMind.
Does Google or anyone in the US actually use DeepMind? If so, that's a poor analogy.
=. better than china.
People who run "official accounts" on LINE in Indonesia eventually moved to Twitter (the Indonesia-specific "base"/"menfess" accounts/culture were originally from similar LINE accounts allowing users to send anonymous messages so it can be relayed to many users, as well as from K-pop roleplaying on Twitter) and Instagram (for news, after LINE Today, their news aggregator, closed), too.
The author explores why with some surprises along the way. I would say it is like the "Mythical Man Month" from the Japanese side of computing.
The book also opened my eyes to the difficulty of mastering Japanese.
https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial- Intelligence/dp/019504939X
Alternatively, you could just search the name that was provided instead of demanding to be spoonfed
Not to mention, 100 people could manually edit the link, or one person could edit the comment - the latter is clearly the better option.
Rule 1, BTW, "demand to be spoonfed" bleh.
Asianometry has a good one on this. They’ve become dependent on US software (and hardware), and programming is considered a low prestige job.
A lot of this sounds accurate. Though, I am not sure if any keiretsu had an influence on my current employer.
From the creator of Windows' kernel:
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-longhor...
>Cutler found what he terms "the worst code he has ever seen," some IME code developed in Japan. He states that the code had no regard for bugs and that it got to a point where they couldn't fix some of the overflow plugs.
In the very same article he said:
>However, progress on this project halted as Windows XP's security had gone from bad to worse. Cutler states that his team alone fixed over 5,000 bugs while turning over some of the system's code.
His team fixed over 5000 mostly security bugs in Windows XP, and he still thinks it's still better than "some IME code developed in Japan". The mind boggles.
I think it’s not so much that the code doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. It’s that it’s an absolutely impenetrable mess. You’d never know if there were bugs unless your customer (or QA team) runs into them.
I disagree. Software is very bottom-up-orientated. The culture that developers create is a very strong influence on the industry as a whole. And Japan had for very pragmatic reason a serious lack of this. PC usage in Japan was for a very long time very low. Partly because they are expensive and big, and most Japanese homes are small and have no place for them. And partly because Japan has a very elaborated culture around their language and analog tools, which was hard to transfer to the digital world. This ultimately resulted in highly specialized, small and focused devices, which left no room for people to grow the same deep software-culture that other industry nations had. And this resulted also in kids not being embraced by computers from early on, preventing the growth of a serious foundation for the next generation in the 90s+.
Funny enough, we see the same now happening with younger people in western countries, who also are lacking serious competence in PC-usage, leading to similar effects.
It seems implied in this article that Japan has struggled in consumer or business software of the sort that startups in SV make. It would be interesting to discuss why that is while they became quite successful in games software.
South Korea and China both adopted the Keiretsu model for conglomerates due to Japan's Flying Geese doctrine, yet both still have fairly robust software scenes.
If I were a betting man, my hunch would be the collapse of domestic financing during the Asian Financial Crisis and Great Financial Crisis.
Japanese asset managers who concentrated on tech like SoftBank, Nomura, and MUFG had better options in Asia (South Korea, China, India) or in North America (USA) to invest in with better returns compared to Japan.
This is why SoftBank has always been a prominent checkwriter in those markets.
My view is different: software is a response to a need. And the Japanese have found ways to solve many of their problems without software. They are OK using a fax and it works excellently for them.
Sometimes software is a solution to a trust problem, or a reliability problem, or a synchronization problem. The Japanese are trustworthy, reliable and punctual in general and do not have those problems.
You obviously don't live in Japan. No one here uses faxes unless they're at work, doing business with old-fashioned companies. It's not much different than the USA, where fax machines are commonly used by lawyers and realtors.
If you consider ‘throwing bodies at’ a problem an acceptable solution, then yes, they’ve found something that works for them.
Personally I can’t stand watching the nonsense Japanese people have to go through to get their boss to like them.
No, If you do that you get the satisfaction from the shorter format and won't have fuel to get around to doing the podcasts of the same topic.
It's extremely severe in Japan. Percentage aged 15-64 is now nearing 1950 levels.
And it's only going to get even worse. 12% are young kids today. In 1950, it was over 35%.
You also need other people to work with, so even if you have an idea, it’s much easier when there are a lot of people in the area with the right skill set.
With a significant declining trend in population, especially in younger people, there just wouldn’t be as many opportunities.
Japanese software is not the only place where we are seeing a decline in innovation. This is the country that that provided us a lot of modern electronics as well.
35% of people are now over 65 in Japan. A much larger percentage of the economy now has to be dedicated to taking care of the elderly. The percentage of elderly in 1950 was tiny.
However, even though Japan invented the Walkman and early mobile phones, they couldn't keep control of the smartphone market.
This shows that having patents for gaming machines worked well, but patents for music players and phones didn't help Japan stay on top.
- How Law Made Silicon Valley by Anupam Chander https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a... compares the US, EU, Japan, and South Korea policy including copyright, intermediary, and privacy and US policy was more permissive and very importantly, offered more certainty earlier, to internet entrepreneurs; I don't recall the Japan-specific details but the abstract includes the line "Innovations that might be celebrated in the United States could lead to imprisonment in Japan."
- Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition by Jeffrey Ding (not open access that I know of) uses Japan/US competition in IT as a case study in its critique of the idea that "leading sectors" determine economic and ultimately geopolitical dominance, roughly the idea that early innovators capture global monopoly profits which ultimately accrue to the state/military; instead it argues what's determinative is diffusion of general purpose technologies throughout an economy. In IT, Japan attempted to translate "leading sector" theory into reality with its 5th generation computing project, a widely known failure. At the same time, it was decades behind the US in both establishing CS as a discipline at top universities and making CS education widely available across state/equivalent universities.
I imagine there's substantial interaction between the above theories and the keiretsu system but I don't recall (which doesn't mean much) anything on that in the above two works.
Funny how protecting the ideals of progressive democracy from Communism so often involved suppressing those ideals ourselves. Beat the Commies to the punch, I guess.
Advanced doesn't mean putting tech everywhere regardless whether it improves life or not
In General post-soviet countries have a larger focus on the digital industry as it was the lowest hanging fruit to build up the economy quickly as the other industries were not competitive after the fall of communism, too far behind the cutting edge west, and too expensive compared to the cheap east, so internet and software it is.