As Apple and Samsung dominate, Japan’s tech giants are in a free fall
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For many years Japan dominated and succeeded with well-built consumer hardware. The best and brightest minds became hardware engineers at Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, etc… When the industry shifted to software and hardware blended together in a seamless fashion - an ecosystem bigger than the device itself - those minds were particularly ill-prepared for the fast paced, just-ship-it style development cycles that software demands. The product looked good on paper but the lifespan of the consumer relationship was inferior because it didn't include the user's newly found software lifecycle.
We all know how Microsoft missed the boat when the internet came along and disrupted their office/windows strategy. Now, imagine a whole country filled with Microsofts. Japan has floundered in denial for a while.
The good news for Japan is that the in the last few years I have seen a huge growth of people diving into it. There are a ton of coworking spaces and incubators popping up, and people seem to be focusing on software now. I actually think the big earthquake was a bit of an awakening for people here. More people want to work at a company doing something cool. The younger generation seems to understand that hardware is no longer king, even if they don't have the mentorship and guidance they would have in the US. It may take a bit of time but I think it is already under way. They have amazing work ethic and drive and I am hopeful that Japan turns the ship back towards innovation.
As many companies who have tried to outsource in the last few years and have been burned in the process have learned, the engineers they've been getting have a poor grasp of computer science and an even poorer grasp of English. Until the public school system is fixed so that the Indian masses can get a good education, the situation isn't going to rectify itself very quickly.
And of course the outsourcing industry is doing well - you have plenty of American companies eager to outsource back-office programming in order to make their next quarterly earnings report look more impressive. This is just one symptom of the MBAification of American businesses, something that cannot continue unabated if long-term success is a goal.
One company you won't hear about much when it comes to outsourcing is Apple. They have an office in Bangalore, but they don't have the sort of branches that Microsoft or Google do. Why? Because they care about quality, even if that means paying their engineers more. If they hire Indian engineers, they'd rather that they come and work in Cupertino, rather than trying to cut costs by leaving them in India. And look where it's gotten them - more than $100 billion sitting in the bank and some of the most popular and profitable consumer electronics out there.
0: http://www.rediff.com/getahead/slide-show/slide-show-1-caree...
What Software innovation has India done? Do you know of any compiler companies from here? Or any Operating System companies? How many linux kernel engineers does Infosys or TCS have? Both companies are sitting with billions in cash. Do you think any senior directors there are thinking - let's create a microchip, even if it's way behind Intel or AMD? I remember reading an interview of Bjarne Stroustrup - he said AT&T gave away their compilers to their competitors (like HP) knowing fully well it would strengthen them. Is any company in India on the same level as AT&T, who can see the bigger picture ? Maybe Tata's come close (not TCS). Indian senior management are like glorified buniyas - who when they put down 50 paise, expect Rs 1.5 back. It took Standard Chartered to come to India and sponsor a marathon. That should tell you a lot about senior management here.
On a larger scale is any Indian company thinking we can build a commercial aircraft? Only HAL builds fighters - but that's a govt company. Soon Microsoft is going to create an opportunity for everyone to erode their Desktop OS share by walling off developers? Do you think TCS or Infosys is building a Linux Distro like Canonical/Ubuntu? Do you think they have the balls to get into that market and try and take market share?
The fundamental thinking of India seems to be flawed. Everyone wants a piece of the outsourcing pie. Synergies and bullcrap like that. No products come from here. I believe we are already suffering a much worse fate than Japan. Videocon is a collaboration with a Japanese company (since the talk was about electronic majors from Japan). Where are the real indigenous products from India, so that we can have the same fate as Japan? The only advantage the 1 million "good" engineers you claim is cost. Once the cost advantage goes, people are going to be jobless, not bridging any gaps.
I went to 2 leading BPOs with my compilers for Survey Programming and Cross Tabulation. The VPs said the thought of writing such products never crossed their minds. They were not interested.
If you want to see the difference in Indian thinking - compare with Germany. Open source is available to everyone and that means countries too. I have read many articles about Germany using Open source in govt offices and there was an article about France and Libre Office.
India cannot go down the same road as Japan, because we dont have the products in the first place to go down that road.
I don't know if your "bridging the gap", means supplying engineers to other countries. If yes, then this is the typical thinking that creates the net negative cash flow in economies like ours.
What would be challenging products showing some tech know-how (note there is hardly an innovation in any of this, but demonstrates some level of tech competence)?
1. Take the g++ source code or clang, intercept it at the point it creates the parse tree and create a code navigation(cscope for c++) or lint like tool.
2. Chapter 6, PAIP has the bare bones of a flight search engine in lisp. You need to add more parameters and a different metric function. Open source the solution to disrupt current monopolies.
3. Google is solving the language translation problem.
4. Disrupt the big 5 in audits (PwC etc). Create an accounting /audit package that uses similar ideas as git. Use SHA1 entries to track accounting entries. PwC, screwed up Satyam's auditing and got away with it (because of bribing?). In the US, Arthur Anderson was destroyed as an entity for fudging Enron. Since we are used to bribing the govt to pass laws, TCS or Infosys could throw weight on the govt to pass a law to accept streams of accounting records using "git push". Audit data is now a weekly or monthly disclosure, using git push to a govt location. Much lesser chance for companies to fudge data once you have a much tighter cycle, tamper proof because of SHA1 checksums.
Actually, it was simply killed by the initial indictment, which for an auditor is a death sentence. Several years later the Supreme Court unanimously reversed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen_LLP_v._United_S...), but by then it was way too late. I.e. this was a typical abusive political Federal prosecution; Enron in general gave the usual suspects an excuse to wreck horrific damage, including most especially SarBox which was the final nail in the coffin of the VC funded hi-tech startup business model.
As for Satyam, at least in US auditors proceed from the assumption that the company it not lying to them and they do some spot checks to verify (e.g. "You say you have 150 widgets of this type in that warehouse; let's go look at them." And "You say you have 29 crores in this account at that bank; call the bank and authorize them to tell us about the account."). If the company is sufficiently fraudulent, as I recall reading Satyam was, auditor malfeasance is not assumed, you check to see if the auditor's verification procedures were reasonable and if they ignored anything they shouldn't have, but otherwise you can't assume they too were corrupt.
Auditing is expensive from both sides, the auditor and the company being audited, where a number of people are tasked with supplying the auditor the information they need and demand (e.g. those verification checks). If a company is running a sufficiently sophisticated scam, e.g. their official books are very carefully constructed fiction, I don't see how their pushing out regular records would help. I.e. the way they pull off their scam is to continuously make everything look good, as opposed to trying to put together a false set of books just before the audit, which would likely result in enough errors auditors would have a good chance of catching them.
I fail to see how it boils down to that. The demographics of Japan are changing (we hear about it constantly in the western media but holy hell spend one weekend in shibuya and you wouldn't believe it) but there's no way it could account for the effects we are talking about. Japan didn't lose their way because there weren't enough young people to fill their software industry; they hit this problem because they didn't even know they needed to be training people up to be software engineers. The best engineers went into solving hardware problems, not software. It's a quality thing, not a quantity thing.
As an aside, comparing apples and oranges is sometimes instructive to see if a theory has a kernel of truth to it. There are 1.8M total people in Silicon Valley (including food service industry and the like) and at least twice that many in just the 20-24 year old category in Japan. There are also at least 10 million more Japanese people now than there were in the 1980's when everyone was hysterical about them taking over the hardware business world. If Japan hadn't been so successful in hardware and had motivated their workforce around software instead, they certainly would be a significant force today. I don't think an aging population plays a significant factor (yet).
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=silicon+valley+populati... http://www.wolframalpha.com/share/clip?f=d41d8cd98f00b204e98... http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Japan+population
Before they had a fantastic reputation, their audio equipment was good to excellent for a small fraction of the price of the competition.
Rootkits, lawsuits and me-too products seems to be what they specialize in nowadays.
Toshiba, Fujitsu, Matsushita and many others (also in other branches than just electronics, for instance Toyota and Honda) have done a lot better and definitely didn't aim the shotgun at their own feet.
Another thing that hit Japan was that they were no longer able to compete on price with China and Korea.
Didn't wait for that. The issue with Sony is that they're historically utterly incompetent on the software side of things. I swore off Sony products after getting a NetMD. The software for that POS was so absolutely terrible it makes iTunes look good, snappy and user-friendly.
Also keep in mind that the rootkit came out of the 50-50 joint venture Sony BMG and was the brainchild of Bertelsmann as well. The guy who went on-air to defend the decision saying effectively 'if you don't know about it, why should you care?' was in charge of that division and originally from the Bertelsmann side. The old-school publishing industry has almost the exact same relationship with software.
I remember Sony for things like TA3650, the Walkman and their (excellent) reel-to-reel recorders. By the time they got into media (and don't forget betamax) they'd already lost their spirit, even though financially they had not yet peaked.
I just realized that from my window here in Tokyo I can see and recognize the tops of 2 large buildings: NTT (Japanese hardware) and Oracle Japan (foreign software). This is why I was so encouraged by the large acquisition of a foreign software company by Recruit this past week.
I asked him why he doesn't move to another company, something which is becoming more accepted. He shrugged and said they were all pretty much the same. He's planning to leave software behind as soon as he can get promoted, and they'll replace my friend with a guy whose only experience is a doujinshi game that was written by himself in college.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/24/3177332/ia-oliver-reichens...
>Japanese web or app design is not comparable to Japanese art, graphic design or architecture. I could fill a page explaining why. It has to do with the way Japanese read, with the corporate fear of doing something different, and with the generally low level of design for the masses.
>One reason why Japanese web and app design feels weak is that technology requires good active and passive knowledge of English. English is the lingua franca of contemporary web and app development, both of our tools and our discourse. Even if you master English-based Objective-C or JavaScript, if you are not able to communicate with the international community of developers and designers, you miss out on what is desirable, even what is possible. Japanese developers and designers that don’t speak English are trapped within the relatively low level of tech and design that currently reigns in the Japanese corporate world.
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>Even the Japanese companies’ strengths matter less now, as consumers have lost the willingness to pay a premium for quality.
This is not true or Apple would not be as successful as they are today. In some areas foreign manufacturers have caught up enough where quality is less of an issue such as TVs. Consumers now value the TV less. This is not true of smartphones, tablets, or cars. The latter is an area that Japan still carries a heavy amount of influence.
(I read your sentence with an implied subject, which is fine for casual grammar, but the second phrase is subjunctive because the first is, so "do not" and "don't" fit poorly there, even for casual speech.)
Just imagine everything in a different language. Hydro Quebec had an application in French.
This is more evidence that community is key for programming. Community even trumps native language!
That sentence did felt a bit awkward.
All mainstream programming languages are based on English and so are the majority of resources. Even APIs for the operating systems we use and the protocols for communication.
Everything is pretty much exclusively English. It'd be such a huge disadvantage.
So, you're saying it's inconceivable that someone could be competitive in the field without English skills, not that programming in another language period is inconceivable. I'm totally down with that.
Actually, you're wrong. That dubious honor goes to South Korea, which spends one of the highest amounts of money per capita on English education, yet has the worst results in Asia.[0]
So the point about English actually isn't very important, given Samsung's dominance in the smartphone industry.
0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_South_Korea#Englis...
South Korea may teach it poorly, but if they're trying to teach something recognizable as English they still ought to be doing it better. And then there's the close ties between our countries of various sorts, your Samsung example may not be apropos given all the other ways Koreans learn and practice English, in the military, I assume to some extent, which is not small in South Korea, in the flow of people to and from the US, etc.
I'm fully aware of how the Japanese teach/learn English.
> South Korea may teach it poorly, but if they're trying to teach something recognizable as English they still ought to be doing it better.
The South Korean educational system is no better when it comes to teaching English than the Japanese system. They pretty much use the same methods, many of which were taken directly from Japanese practices.
> And then there's the close ties between our countries of various sorts
There are close ties between Japan and the US as well.
> your Samsung example may not be apropos given all the other ways Koreans learn and practice English, in the military, I assume to some extent, which is not small in South Korea
It is actually quite small. The only significant group of people in the Korean military that gets regular English practice is KATUSA[0], and they are expected to have a certain TOEIC score just to get in.
The fact of the matter is South Korea visibly scores lower on tests of English proficiency than Japan, so I don't understand why you're so eager to state that their proficiency is actually higher than that of the Japanese.
Anyway, to clarify my point about Samsung, if there's a greater pool of good English speakers to pull from (even if in general the pool is poorer ... especially since in either case there's little to chose from being functionally illiterate vs. even more functionally illiterate???), it could explain their being able to pull it off. They must being doing something right....
Oh, I wouldn't doubt that higher level officers have a better command of English than your average rank-and-file soldier. But that's a relatively small number of people, right?
> They must being doing something right....
They're obviously doing something right in terms of being commercially successful. My whole point is that English fluency is not all that important for commercial success. For example, they could have the software engineering done overseas, with only the liaisons between the hardware and software teams fluent in English. This is all speculation. All I can say for sure is that South Korea's English education system is no better than that of Japan's.
Some things I can think of: 1) Korea got started later, and has not had the chance yet to get stale like Japan did in the 90's.
2) The population pyramid is not as inverted.
3) Korea has more PC focus, while Japan is about more gadgets. See how Starcraft, a PC game, is enormous in South Korea but unknown in Japan. That means more software and programming focus early on.
4) Lower labor costs. Not as low as China, but low enough to compete.
Japan thinks nothing will change, everything continue smoothly, nothing bad will happen.
... and yes I live and work here(Tokyo) for many years.
I think many of Japan's woes are really a direct result of its earlier success. Post-WWII Japan was extremely poor, and succeeded incredibly because they had a crazy-good work ethic, a relatively well-educated population and tradition of industrial development, and were willing to make sacrifices; as you state, "they were hungry." However the success that followed resulted in changing the very attitudes that engendered that success, and the bubble with its excesses accelerated this change greatly. Japanese confidence, lifestyle, etc, are all now firmly that of a rich, "we've succeeded! time to kick back!" country ... just in time to get the rug yanked out from underneath it.
The instincts and mechanisms that got them so far aren't well prepared to accommodate the changing world, but having tasted wealth, the country isn't really all that eager to toss out what made it wealthy, even when that clearly isn't working so well anymore... "better the devil you know..." etc.
This is the fate of all successful countries to some degree, but what I wonder is: without the extremes of the bubble, could Japan have achieved a more nuanced transition, becoming a rich country, but maybe remaining a bit more flexible and wary?
I don't think it's really true that everybody thinks "nothing will change, everything continue smoothly, nothing bad will happen." Japanese people very much see the country's malaise and feel worried about the future... but merely recognizing the problem intellectually isn't enough. There has to be a change in "gut instinct" too, and that is much harder. I suppose one way to do it is to increase the pain level to the point where continuing as-is becomes intolerable, and something has to change; unfortunately that seems to be route Japan is taking... :(
I don't know enough of the French software business, but it would be reasonable to assume that they had something similar when Minitel was replaced by the web. How did the companies react and recover?
So while your average American was emptying his wallet buying stuff on the web, French were still checking their bank accounts on the Minitel. That makes for a slow start, but eventually we moved on and there has been a lot of successful web startup in France (that usually end up either moving to SV, and/or being bought by American giant, but that's another story).
But if they have to pack-in their hardware business, they still have their IP, their human capital, their connections, their marketing abilities. Mario on the AppStore would be a licence to print money. They just wouldn't be in control of their own destiny as much as before.
I can imagine them signing an exclusivity deal with Apple, who unlike the other players in the game space don't have an internal development division.
Apple is now Nintendo's biggest competitor, a deal with them is a last resort and would certainly be a white flag end of their hardware division.
And these people are not going to rush out and buy the Wii U - most of them haven't touched their Wiis in years.
Also their mobile gaming market hasn't been decimated by Apple at all. The 3DS is tracking ahead of the (spectacularly successful) NDS.
I grew up in the decade[1] where Japan absolutely dominated the consumer electronics industry hence, I've always long held this view of Japan being one of the most technological advanced economy in the world. But when I actually went there, my view completely changed. They still are, to a certain extent[2], but from a tech industry standpoint they are starting to lag behind IMHO.
For example, when I was in Akihabara, I was told it was a electronics mecca filled with all the latest Japanese gadgets and gizmos but when I was there last month, all I saw was a myriad of chinese made/manufactured stuff. Most of the electronics stuff I've already seen in my own country and there was nothing much that looked truly new[3]. Maybe if I was walking down these streets 15 years ago, I would have been pretty wide-eyed. Even if you look at the one electronic device that a Japanese brand still dominates (which is mobile), the Docomo made mobile phones are all mostly using android and majority of them are flip phones[4]! And if you don't see someone using a Docomo made-phone, it will most likely be an iPhone.
Don't take me wrong, Japan still is a fairly advanced country[5] but my trip there last month made me realize that they are fast falling behind the rest of their Asian counterparts: China and Korea in particular. These once mighty Japanese tech companies needs to start making bold innovative moves instead of living in the past and being hankered down by bureaucracy. If they don't do it soon enough, one day it will be too late and it will have a devastating effect on the Japanese economy.
[1] Child of the 80s/90s.
[2] Japan may be losing innovative and competitive ground in terms of anything tech related but they are still quite ahead in some aspects. I.e. The transportation industry (trains in particular) are light years ahead. The Shinkansen(bullet train) itself was built in the 60s but still looks like it was designed in the 25th century.
[3] Most of the electronics were "new" and "latest" but none of them were "unique". They were the same Korean, Taiwanese or China branded electronics that you see anywhere else in the world (or at least in my country). You will be hard pressed to find any funky new Japanese gadgets or gizmos.
[4] http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2008/05/ntt-do...
[5] One thing I admired when I was in Japan is that, a lot of their technology (transportation system, infrastructure, telecommunications, etc) were built decades ago but it still looks fairly advanced to this day. Though, you will noticed it is starting to age.
The electronics dealers along the Akiba side streets are a great place to get off-generation parts on the cheap. For example, last-generation RAM upgrades for your machine, at prices pretty decently discounted from newegg. But I certainly found the rest of Akiba more dedicated to anime/manga/jpop idols at this point than the electronics-focus that we (I'm also a child of the 80s/90s) had been promised.
My impression of Akiba?
Interesting no doubt and you are right in a sense that they are probably closest to the "electronic-focus Japan" that we imagined but it was still filled with the same Chinese, Korean or Taiwanese branded stuff. My point is, gone are the domination of Japanese branded electronics (with maybe the exception of Sony) in these sort of places in Japan.
Akihabara is now the mecca of a small sub-culture of Japan. Most people here never go there but its influence is felt. I think most people here view it like Hot Topic at your local mall although maybe slightly more legit than that because it has roots in a very old tradition of hardware engineering.
Most foreigners don't know Akiba's backstreets (just visiting Japan), don't know anyone who knows the backstreets who can guide them (again, just visiting Japan), can't ask for directions (don't know Japanese), and can't look up stuff on their phone (expensive roaming data plans).
I did some research before going, and was able to find Super Potato[0], which sells used video games. Since it has a site, it's obviously not that "small-time", but locating the physical location was a pain in the ass. And this is despite knowing Japanese and having a printed out map on hand.
p/s: I'm probably not your typical "foreigner" since my heritage is Asian, I speak passable Japanese and I had one of those pocket mobile wifi thingamajig (GlobalAdvanceComm) so that I could use Google Maps to find my way around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)
20 years of no growth buried them under a mountain of debt, crippling the domestic market which had been a big part of their rise (c.f. china).
[1] It's an expression.
I don't think a lagging economy explains why Sony and most Japaense tech giant missed the web/mobile boat. They missed that boat, because they missed that boat. The US economy is in its own "lost decade" but Apple, Google, and Microsoft are doing quite well.
You're thinking in overly short time horizons. Major economic impact takes time to reverberate. Where was Sony in '95? On top. US Stagnation started in '08 give or take, so it really hasn't been that long. A lot of California's current success (in the web and elsewhere) can be traced back to the economic policies of the 90's and the easy money of Y2K. Where do you think the angel money came from? What would happen if there weren't small innovators available everywhere for google et al to purchase to keep their growth up?
When I was in Osaka, I stayed at a backpackers and I met a few young Japanese locals. Between my extremely poor and limited Japanese and their broken English, we were somewhat able to maintain a conversation and I mentioned the same thing to them.
Since it was only a subset of 5 or so people, I wouldn't count it as the general consensus of the Japanese people but they were very aware of how stagnant the big Japanese tech giants (and the country's economy) have become and how Japan is already lagging being China and Korea.
What I did find interesting is that these young blokes blame the government rather than the company themselves.
And people are already talking about the 「失われた30年] - lost 3 decades - as a very real possibility.
There are 2 reasons for this:
1. Flip phones are more compact, which is valued by the Japanese.
2. Unlike English, the traditional keypad is perfect for inputting Japanese text. In fact, touchscreen smartphone Japanese keyboards essentially mimic this setup[0].
About the software, it was barebone compared to iPhone apps, but you could run an app for three days without crashing or dropping a single call. The scrutinity towards quality was equivalent to home appliances' level. The iPhone brought the expectations of reliability close to Windows PCs.
1 is important because as we all know, if you are a good programmer, it's not because you are _good_ it's because you spend your spare time catching up on other facets and honing your skills. When there isn't time for that, what do you expect to happen?
2 is equally important simply because Japan is stuck in their own land of tech help. I think things are much better now because of Google Translate and such, but most Japanese programmers have basically been isolated from us.
3 is the biggest one. Despite Ruby got invented there, most programmers there do not know it. There are no Japanese Operating Systems. There is no Japanese business software market. Most Japanese companies have absolutely _terrible_ sites from last decade. [as a source http://www.economist.com/node/18958643]
So, what's to be done about it? Well, luckily Japan has insanely high internet speeds, and everything is moving to virtualization everywhere else. So, at the end of the day, there is a big chance that everything could shift in Japan at a much, much higher rate than in America. However, this will take a number of consulting companies pushing pretty pro American attitudes towards business culture as well as programming, which simply isn't going to fly all that well there.
Personally, I think Japan needs a much higher number of startups, and they need to basically do a startup chile thing for web startups. They need them badly, they need a majority of the existing work force radically retrained, and the people coming into the work force need to be pushed in very different directions compared to the usual.
Japan has the might, they have the know how. The main problems are simply that they can't keep up with the rate of development and change that other companies can handle, and the only way that's going to change is if these companies start isolating portions of themselves like startups.
My personal idea, which I would be very happy to see go into use, would be to start holding out of work 'bounties'. Coolest Erlang program developed this month gets $2000! Best new language gets $5000! That pushes people to become better, share knowledge, and find other smart people to get ahead and get the money, which would hopefully lead to those groups of people doing startups together after finding a possible 'founder'.
Also: there is no FSF/EFF in Japan. And because of the max 1% of the budge the military gets they don't even have the intelligence companies or the drive for them as we do.
p.s. I can't read Japanese, so everything I know is hearsay.
Oh, and I'm usually one of the first to go home.. We work in a massive open desk environment so i'm pretty sure of that!
Note that these aren't primarily software companies. So although some of your points about software in Japan are true, they aren't very relevant for the trend in question.
> The main problems are simply that they can't keep up with the rate of development and change that other companies can handle
Having worked in Japan for several years, I heartily (or sadly?) agree with this. In some ways, Japanese megacorps still work like American corporations used to 50 years ago: life employment, seniority system, women have little chance of career development, etc.
That said, web companies are arguably on the rise in Japan. Cf. Rakuten, Gree, Cookpad.
There is a real opportunity now and for the next few years to incorporate great software into electronic products. iOS & Android are doing it with smart phones and tablets. But, it's a good time now to go back and rethink a lot of other electronics and see how software interfaces can make them better. What would an iMicrowave look like? Android Intercom? Refrigerator RT? Car Stereo. Washing Machine. etc. etc. What better way to differentiate your televisions in 2013 then giving them the best software?
Japanese companies were once at the forefront here - great products at great prices with an eye for new paradigms (eg walkman). They still have the brand names.
I was in Japan for 2 years, btw.
It's also worth remembering the social model of low risk, high gain and high risk, low gain companies (i.e. the big ones you've heard of vs. lots of small fry you haven't unless you have some focus on the country). With Japan now coming onto a "lost quarter century" the first model has been smashed and that perhaps has something to do with these giants losing their mojo.
The other issue which you bring up about startups is related to why small fry almost never make it big; I don't know too much about that, but it's a general issue that goes beyond high tech or this sort of high tech. Perhaps surprising given how leveraged writing software and running Internet services is....
There's been a push by Hiroshi Mikitani, co-founder and CEO of Rakuten, a Japanese Amazon equivalent, for "Englishnization" (No, there's no mistake in the spelling. Mikitani came up with it, which itself seems to be a sign of impending failure)[0] - having all business within the company, even between Japanese people, conducted in English.
I don't have any inside info, but it seems that things have not been going well. Most employees still speak in Japanese on a day-to-day basis (except for in meetings), and they're studying just enough to get the score on the TOEIC that they need for their position at Rakuten.
There's a difference between, say, spelling "tumbler" as "Tumblr" and coming up with a new word that sounds weird to native English-speaking ears. Apparently one of Mikitani's longtime native speaking employees, Kyle Yee, told him that it sounded weird, but Mikitani went ahead with it anyway[0]:
> "That word 'Englishnization' -- Mickey invented it," Yee says with a smile. "At first I wanted to say that the letter 'n' was a mistake. But Mickey said it was the word he chose as he wants everyone to always remember it. One day he'd like Oxford to put it into the dictionary.
This sort of insistence that they're right when it comes to English even though they're clearly not, seems to be a pattern, as it's also something I came across in a book about working in a Japan conglomerate[1]. The author, a native English speaker working at Mitsubishi, told his superiors that they had made some mistakes in an English-language document. Their response was to suggest that he had lived in Japan so long that he'd forgotten English!
0: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/09/features/man...
1: http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Eyed-Salaryman-World-Traveller-Mi...
That is, assuming you didn't shoot with your iPhone.