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Comment by raamdev | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo's prevalence in Japan surprised me the most.

Living in Japan, it's not that surprising. Until a few years ago Yahoo had far superior services in Japan for things such as transit directions. I remember 5 years ago trying to get around Tokyo using Google Maps with no success, but the Yahoo counterpart worked perfectly despite being harder for me to use since the UI was in Japanese only. These days, Google has equal or better services (although Yahoo still has some services Google does not provide such as an auction house). But inertia keeps people on Yahoo and Yahoo Japan is still very good, also they have close deals with Softbank (mobile phone carrier) which helps them keeping people on their sites.

I wonder how Google missed that market - is that something Yahoo does better? That is, does Yahoo have better regional offices to take the local market? I know Google often drags their feet about going international with some products.

Yahoo came into Japan by selling part of them to Softbank (Son Masayoshi). This led them to be a separate entity to Yahoo Global. E.g. if you try to find a job in Yahoo Global you will not find jobs listed in Japan and vice versa.

Google came in thinking that they can implement US/Western practices which allowed them to be successful overseas. This unfortunately does not work.

Japan's market is very unique and very self sustaining. Due to the population and the way the people behave. For example Yahoo Auctions is still the number 1 auction website in the world whereas Ebay has never penetrated the market. And Ebay also has moved into the form of a marketplace over the last few years. Yahoo Auctions has largely not changed over the years.

Yahoo! Japan is it's own company that only focuses on the Japanese market. As far as I know Google does not have a setup like this. Yahoo! Japan is owned mostly by Softbank and Yahoo! (see other comment).

Wasn't Yahoo! Japan also a large ISP or major ISP partner? Concerning a canceled move many years ago, my limited searching found Yahoo branded internet was very prevalent and a darn good deal.

There is a brief explanation of the reasons behind that (with links to further information) in the article:

> Yahoo! succeeds in Japan and Taiwan through its nearly two-decade-old partnership with Japanese SoftBank and its 2007 purchase of Wretch, a Taiwanese social networking site.

That makes it sound 50/50, but it's more diluted than that - Yahoo Inc. only owns 35.15% of Yahoo Japan. Softbank owns a little more - 35.86%. The rest is owned by much smaller shareholders.

See the bottom table in http://ir.yahoo.co.jp/en/holder/status.html

SBBM is Softbank as well, so Softbank actually owns over 42% of Yahoo! Japan. In practice it's really Softbank's internet content and portal service in Japan that also leverages Yahoo! Inc. technology as needed as well as their brand.

I didn't see Taiwan on the map by the way, but yeah it's a joke amongst my Taiwanese friends that you're not a true Taiwanese unless your browser homepage is http://tw.yahoo.com/

Yahoo! JAPAN uses Google for search instead of Bing, as a result Google has the largest slice of the search market in Japan.

Japan is life support for brands thought long dead in the 90s. Excite still has a presence there and, until recently, so did InfoSeek.

I think it's more that the country is so self sustaining that it does not feel it requires to change. As well as the people being quite inflexible.

Which is why Japan is now behind Korea in electronics.

It's funny how Yahoo Maps use HERE Maps with minimal coverage of Japan

Living in Japan I can say that Yahoo Maps is number 1 in detail. Although Google Maps is catching up in terms of service and information now. And I also believe there is a market shift amongst younger people from Yahoo Japan.

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