Same word. Different places? Different meanings
sivers.org
sivers.org
Also, I am completely not buying that story about somebody refusing a dented shipping container just because it's dented. Think about it for a second: if somebody offered you a shipping container full of goods, and said giant metal box looked like it had fallen from a crane, would you buy it? Hell no, at least not without inspecting every piece inside for damage and a hefty discount for my troubles.
I think the author only refers to the former, but the latter means exactly the same as American English.
I am not buying this piece either and because I am born and brought up in India , I know better how quality is defined in India and it's different from what author is trying to justify.
Supposedly, in the course of cleaning her new home, she pulled the piano away from the wall and was shocked to find that that part of it meant to sit flush with the wall looked completely different (different wood, say) than the rest of it. To her, the piano should be viewable from any angle and any direction, no matter how it was intended to be installed in the home. To the American manufacturer, the appearance of the piano was of course highly significant -- but only the appearance of the parts you could see.
And you've just demonstrated that.
Sivers responds: Touché
Touché? What if I came to America and tried to start a...liquor store? Where you can buy a bottle of vodka at 90 percent off, compared to clubs? Totally novel, right? Unthinkable.
Obviously, if the Singapore retail experience described in this article is correct, any entrepreneur there is going to look for ways to change that. Besides, a huge amount of product from amazon is boring stuff like nappies and soap and ground coffee. People don't buy those things during a social event.
Most people buy at liquor stores to take to a social event. That reinforces the story's point, not contradicts it.
Liquor stores don't compete with clubs on price, they compete with each other and other sources of take-away alcohol.
The only way to do this would be to avoid being your culture centric and wherever you go start with respect for that culture and then open your eyes, ears and mind as the first step
During business visits to Europe, I have had Indian colleagues who cringed up their faces short of vomiting at the sight of a rare beef steak and have had European colleagues come and track down that 'cow on the road photo shoot' as their first biz agenda.
Now that is not the right start and it does not need a book to tell you that you have to respect others way of life.
Am I missing something? Was there anything more to this?
This is largely about the difference between the connotation and denotation of words.
Knowing different cultures are.. you know.. different is pretty pointless without being able to point to specific examples of just how alien they can be to one another.
I - for one - didn't know that quality in Korea meant "newness".
Yeah, me neither, and I'm Korean.
* Well, it can be a sound advice to say "when you want to sell a product in Korea, emphasize it's new." But that's just plain old marketing strategy and sounds boring. (When selling books to English users, play on cultural relativism?)
I actually asked a Korean man the same question maybe 20 years ago, and he told me that he thought quality product meant "well crafted." Maybe because he was americanized in some way by watching American movies, etc.?
Me neither. Japanese aesthetics has a distinct place for rough, imperfect items which are referred to with terms like shibui and wabi-sabi. Such items have flaws, often deliberately introduced, which give them "character" so may in some circumstances be preferred over the "perfect" item.
> I actually asked a Korean man the same question maybe 20 years ago, and he told me that he thought quality product meant "well crafted." Maybe because he was americanized in some way by watching American movies, etc.?
Occam's razor would suggest that he said that because that's what "quality" means, and the article was written by a blowhard.
"Newness" being an especially desirable trait in Korea is a separate trait (and interesting enough in itself).
So it's probably a revelation to most people and very relevant to all programmers.
If you go to: http://www.sachitgupta.me/
you'll find someone in marketing and generates leads. that's probably coincidental since most people on hacker news are in marketing.
I don't think you should be curious why this is #1.
"Quality" is one of those things like "value" that doesn't refer to a specific thing, but must always be reckoned against human desires. Like, gold doesn't have "intrinsic value". It has value to us because it's rare and shiny, and humans like shiny things. And it's the same thing with quality: things are quality because people like them and consider them useful, reliable, pretty, or whatever. So this article boils down to a bunch of broad cultural stereotypes (Koreans like new things, Japanese like refined things, etc.) without much meaning.
It's user-contributed reports about what it's like to live in cities and countries around the world. I'd love to hear some feedback if anyone else is interested in this sort of thing!
Right now if a user is registered and logged in when they post it shows "username's reflections" rather than "anonymous' reflections", but I suppose that's there's no signal just noise with that word, so I should probably remove it. Good call!
I change my mind every other day whether I should give up on trying to have a super bold design and just strip it down or if I should stick with the polarizing stuff haha. It's my first web design that I've tried to give a more unique look rather than a Google-esque function before form type treatment.
Look I'm not going to set a reminder to regularly check back what new stories you got -- do you really want only "once a year by chance" visitors? Get that subscription funnel going. And yeah don't try to get membership signups for just that one feature, not gonna happen. Might sign up and contribute even at my own leisure at some distant future date, but right now --- offer some feed or other to even keep us passive lurkers out there fed ;)
I'm still really, really bad at marketing. Do you know of any resources for learning best practices as far as subscriptions?
I too am a loser at marketing :P
Robert Pirsig wrote a whole book[1] about Quality: specifically the unique characteristic that it doesn't completely resides in an object itself, nor does it reside completely within the subject experiencing the thing.
The difficulties with books like this are 1> they age quickly 2> they are hard to generalise (books of the same length for the Netherlands and India will have wildly different levels of resolution) and of course the authors will be different.
This wood egg approach seems like a reasonable way to deal with the latter.
I've lived in five countries the only general statement I can make is that people are the same everywhere, and completely different as well.
wabi-sabi doesn't even really need to have anything to do with quality.
So while I would agree that there is high value placed on things being 'perfect', I would disagree that Japanese culture sees symmetry as the ultimate expression of perfection… I would say they see 'asymmetrical yet balanced' as perfection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yumi
Generalism may help paint ourselves into nice little circles for easy digestion by our brains but let's at least give it a fight :-)
Then that would be a fact, not a generalization.
How trivial can they get? One item came back with 'dirt on screen', with an arrow-sticker pointing at it. The tech here picked it up and touched the dirt with his finger... and it fell off. Nothing else was wrong with the unit. For this, the unit had a return-trip journey across an ocean...
> Each year we hire 3 researchers (at least one local and one foreigner who live in {country}), a native English-speaking in-country writer, and an editor, to bring you insights from multiple perspectives.
So I guess he edits the answers from the researchers (who don't seem to be co-authors, since there's only two authors on the books).
> How these books were made I wrote 200 questions to be asked of each country. I hired multiple researchers in each country to answer each question. One local, one foreigner, one other. I wanted the book to be more than one person’s point of view. I hired a writer to turn the multiple different answers into one combined answer, and add another layer of expertise. I hired an editor to proofread and improve the final text.`
Anyone who owns one care to share their thoughts?
But on the topic of different meanings, my favourite example is in Greek, you as "Τι κάνετε" "What are you doing" literally but it translates as "How are you?". These things go always translate directly, and if you are speaking with a nonnative it's likely that these things will occur.
This is one of the first things you figure out when venturing abroad.
Nothing beats a summer day in thongs.