From what you wrote none of the factors seem to be specific to software/CS. But then Japan is quite well known when it comes to physical products. So I wonder what’s it about software the Japanese culture inhibits.
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.