In High-Tech Japan, the Fax Machines Roll On
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
wired land-line telephony in the US vs. mobile in Africa
personal checks in the US vs. EFTs in the EU & cell credit in Africa
NAT vs. ipv6
automobiles in the US vs. effective public transitwith fax in Japan, yeah there's the fax machines, but we're really talking about a fairly minimal dollar amount vs. a scanner and email, maybe $130 dollars (in a very rich country). And for the receiving parties there's probably no additional cost since they already can receive email. But I bet they're prevented from handling scanned documents due to established business procedures (read, established social ceremony)...
One thing that's striking to most Westerners if they ever have a chance to visit a working office environment in a modern 1st world Asian nation is the tremendous amount of physical paper that gets pushed around. The amount of clutter in a Japanese office is simply mind boggling to the average Westerner [1]. In this milieu, a fax is just yet another piece of paper among thousands. There's no pressure to eliminate yet another source of office clutter. The concept of Japanese minimalism simply doesn't apply.
It seems contradictory, but hey, that's Asia.
Why? I mean, what cultural precedent causes this?
http://serendipityproject.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/dec-11-20...
hell, if you can organize and run a major international military offensive and an empire in a paper-based office, why would you ever need to move on?
Couple this with the fact that Japan was rebuilt after WWII in the model of the 1950's US Military, which I have to imagine was centered around forms and paperwork.
One final anecdote -- when doing business in Japan, I have personally known customers who showed up to meetings with a binder containing copies of literally every white paper and presentation I had ever given to them over a 2-3 year period. Even in the pre-Web 2.0 days, this drilled into me the importance of forethought and consistency in business, since you could find yourself confronted at any moment with your own evidence.
Oh and the rules for business trips, allowances, relocation coverage and all that, don't get me started on them.
It's a good experience though, makes me all the more motivated to have my own startup soon, instead of going nuts in big organisations like these.
The US is a completely mobile nation, and it also has land lines. There are more smart phones in the US than any other country (China will or has passed that, depending on whose stats you go by), and around 200 million cell phones. The penetration rate of both are radically higher than any country in Africa.
Anecdotes like "A decade ago, Tamagoya tried to shift to online sales of its bento lunches, but business suffered" suggest to me that a digital interface to faxes using tablets (for writing) might be quite popular in Japan among those who do want to move away from faxes. Just because the person you're communicating with needs faxes so they get warm, fuzzy feelings while ordering their lunch doesn't mean your own business efficiency has to suffer as well.
0: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/15/3628376/japan-digital-con...
That's found in the last paragraph of the article.
The Japanese mindset loves technology and innovation, but only if it fits into the established scheme of things. Disruptive innovation -- or, indeed, ANY kind of disruption -- is anathema.
For example, the iPhone could not have been developed in Japan. It was too much of a break from the past. If left to themselves, the Japanese might have got there in the end, but only through a decades long process of incremental steps.
Text Messages: One of the worst, and still the most popular IM systems.
In fact, the use of email on phones has resulted in people continuing to use their carrier's email service instead of migrating towards Gmail and other device-agnostic services that also have a lot more features.
Not sure how to interpret this ....
SMS works fine on all Japanese cellphones, between carriers, and even to other countries (I've texted to someone in Korea, though only ascii was really reliable... CJK characters sometimes worked, but sometimes got trashed).
Because of the encoding used (some variant of ISO-2022-JP with custom code points for emoji), and probably some additional metadata, the maximum length of messages is reduced; for instance, on my phone, it's 100 ascii chars, or 50 CJK characters or emoji.
However, Japanese can be very dense, much denser than English on a character-count level, depending on which words you use, so the smaller character limit isn't always a horrible limitation.
The main issue is that things like verb conjugations and polite forms can realllly bloat things up, increasing word lengths dramatically. So there's constant pressure when using SMS in Japanese to (1) use very informal language, (2) be grammatically incorrect, and (3) use emoji for everything...
But hey, texting is generally between friends anyway, so the above aren't such a problem, and indeed, probably add to the sense of informality, which can be a good thing.
To allow customers to communicate via text with friends with other carriers, Japanese carriers adopted email on their phones and the Japanese customers became more familiar with email instead of SMS for text.
In my experience the provider-based email addresses seem to be used mostly as a way to confirm other service's accounts, and that sort of thing.
(An article with numbers supporting this: http://www.startup-dating.com/2013/02/smartphone-penetration...)
I find it interesting that the Japanese feel there is a need to fax during a natural disaster. However, after reading the article and seeing how useful the they still find the fax machine, maybe it is important to be able to fax during a natural disaster.
Fax is older than the telephone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax
Up until the mid 2000s, we still had a fax machine in our office. By that time, because our fax number was listed, we received about 10 spam messages a day – some of them were complete product catalogs that took 30-40 pages. It cost us hundreds of dollars a month in toner and paper.
In 2008, we switched to fax software, which cut costs dramatically, but we still had to pay for the dedicated fax line. We shut it down in 2011, because no relevant faxes had come in for over a year.
e-mail to fax gateways still are very popular in b2b solutions.
not all technology moves on in parallel.
If you have a smartphone, it already has. You can get around with no problem if you have Google Maps.
We've managed to survive mostly fax free at our startup and at home — but we own faxes in both places.
But my sense is, until there's something "ten times better" for the aging demographic who loves to fax, it ain't gonna change for the population at large (and it is, uh, large). Tablets (and the ability to write by hand) are one piece of the equation, but the paper-trail piece is harder.
I suspect the Japanese situation has more to do with their alphabet than anything else.
http://edinburghnapiernews.com/2011/01/26/%E2%80%98japan-hig...
(There was a third I had, but can't seem to find it at the moment)
In NYTimes, the fax machines roll on too.
In fact a great majority of companies in the developed world have fax. Not every company is a SV startup.
Alas, the impression left by that article of the Bento lunch company is that they are printing 30,000 faxes a day to paper. It is hard to see that as being economic, but if it is true, then an electronic fax server system should be a great startup in Japan.