
What happened to Japan's electronic giants? - davidroberts
http://bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21992700
======
josephlord
There is some truth in this article but it misses some of the really key
factors.

1) Value of the Yen. The Yen is seen as a safe haven and has been at almost
ridiculous levels (considering trade balances and government debt) at least
since late 2008. This is crippling exports (and/or profitability) in these
price sensitive markets (TV's, computers, phones) as even though much
production is abroad they still have massive cost bases in Japan.

2) Development of Korea. LG and especially Samsung took the place of the
aggressive upstarts driving down prices and then building up the quality as
Japan once did to the West in markets such as cars. It will be interesting to
see what China's development does to Korea in 15-20 years. So far the
aggressive pricing from Korea has kept Chinese TV brands from prominence but
that may not last.

3) As Japan prospered and incomes rose it became uneconomic to manufacture
commodity items there. Outsourcing and offshoring production damages the
feedback and development loop between production and design that enables
efficient optimum design of products. Also they narrowed the parts of the
supply chain that they supplied to focus on the high value ones that could
still be profitable but that costs control and foresight into important
developing areas. e.g. Samsung could develop LCD panels in exact form factors
to fit their devices and to use them as structural elements in TVs getting a
jump start on Sony. (Sharp had[has?] their own panels but the quality wasn't
uniformly high and they were overly dependent on their home TV market anyway).

4) There is very little profit in many electronics items. TVs especially are
not a source of profits (maybe Samsung makes some but it is hard to tell from
their annual reports). Aggressive and falling prices, unstable panel supplies
and the fact egos and ecosystems are on the line means that the once stable
profit source of CRT TVs has been replaced by an LCD bloodbath. Even in mobile
phones only Apple and Samsung are really making money (along with a number of
component suppliers getting their slices).

[Former Sony employee.]

~~~
wsc981
I think it's also an issue that many Asian companies haven't figured out how
to add value with software the way a company like Apple does. Apple can ask a
big premium on their tablet and phone devices based on the exclusivity and
capabilities of iOS. Certainly lots of innovations could still be achieved in
(e.g.) the television markets by creating great software for these products.
We still don't have really "smart" television sets.

This is the reason why I think the rumoured Apple television set will be a big
hit with very nice profits when it finally arrives.

The key is to differentiate with the competition and if you can't
differentiate on a hardware level, then you have to do it on a software level.

~~~
josephlord
> I think it's also an issue that many Asian companies haven't figured out how
> to add value with software the way a company like Apple does.

I think you can completely remove 'Asian' from that sentence. Few companies
ANYWHERE have figured out how to add value with software like Apple does.

I'm still highly sceptical of "smart" TV although I am a big believer in easy
UI and attractive content. My own long term view (since about 2002) has been
the TV control will move to a handheld touchscreen display (a tablet) removing
most or all of the UI from the main display.

I also think there are good reasons why Apple hasn't entered the market. It
will be hard, even for them to make money there. Also to deliver what is
accepted as a TV requires significant localisation to broadcast and cable
standards. Apple may be able to go with HDMI and internet connections only but
that isn't something that many other companies would get away with. I don't
think that they will make real money if they do come although they could still
hurt Samsung which might make it interesting to them.

~~~
Retric
There are three main phone/tablet OS's out there from Apple, Microsoft, and
Google which are all US companies. The real question though is why did Google
have to step in with Android vs Samsung / Sony / LG etc already having a high
quality OS? They had been making quality feature phones for a while, but
somehow never made the jump and said the hardware if fast enough for something
close to a desktop OS.

~~~
josephlord
I think Apple were exceptional with brilliant vision of how a smartphone
should work and the ability to develop from a clean slate without having to
support existing platforms before the initial launch. They also left out many
features competitors had which I think would have been harder to do with an
existing product line.

Google had by that point been sucking in huge volumes of software talent. Once
given the iPhone as a template they could develop quickly and then iterate
further improvements but they are also exception. They are also a software
company and critically a web services company rather than a broad electronics
company. They are far from infallible (GoogleTV).

Microsoft were years late to the party despite existing mobile OS. They are
also a massive (although fairly broad) software company. They also saw an
almost existential threat in iOS and Android devices. They still may fail to
reach a position of power in this market.

For a platform to reach the point of positive feedback between developer and
consumer feedback needs scale. It isn't surprising that the offer of
attractive, cost free platform with developer support was attractive and
competition (in the software space) killing. Unless you were confident that
you could win in the software space why wouldn't you take Android?

That only five platforms (Symbian and RIM being others) emerged is not
surprising, less may survive. Given that who would you expect to have the
scale, commitment and capability to develop the best mobile platforms?

------
speeder
We had some Brazillian electronics company also flopping last 10 years.

Reasons I indentified: Losing creators and get swamped by middle-manager
types... Too bad one of them don't even had a choice (the founder died, and
this resulted into them switching from the most inventive electronic toys I
ever saw, to low quality cheap DVD players, Karaoke machines and cheap Guitar
Hero rippoffs using their Karaoke tech)

Second: Neglecting software... This one is obvious that when I applied to
those companies as programmer, they wanted to pay me less than my rent was,
absurdly ridiculous (and they all have a very high programmer turnover rate)

Third: Excessive outsourcing and subsequent problems in managing quality. This
was particularly striking with one company, that fixed the first two issues
and licensed from China some products (developed in China, and not rip-offs)
that would have high demand here.

Indeed, that plan ALMOST worked, their products sold so much they frequently
had online store freezing by excessive visits, and their products were always
out of stock...

But then reports showed up of exploding chargers, screens with lots of dead
pixels, and so on... This went for about 6 months, with the demand still
outstripping the negative reports, but eventually it became clear they could
not find a outsourcer to do it properly, and they had divested themselves of
their factories many years ago, and had no know how anymore in manufacturing,
and did not even had sufficient knowledge to visit the outsourcers factory and
force them to fix their process.

They are bankrupt know, to much unhappiness of the costumers attracted in
their short lived renaissance.

~~~
da02
Pardon the tangent, but did you ever write/blog about those "inventive
electronic toys"? I am not speaking as a producer, but as a consumer and over-
grown child. Were they like robotic/Legos/construction kits like they had back
in the 80s/early-90s? Or something completely different?

------
eloisant
That's simple: they've always been very good at hardware but not that good at
software. It was fine in a time where software was just a minor part of
electronics, but today the software is the most important part, and the
hardware is just here to make sure the software can run flawlessly.

~~~
scholia
If the Japanese are bad at software, it's somewhat odd that Japanese
programmers wrote a huge proportion of the world's greatest video games....

They're also world leaders in software development for robotics.

Japan also developed 3G (UMTS), which is why Japanese phones no longer
dominate the Japanese market.

~~~
adventureloop
It is true that Japanese studio created some of the greatest games of all
time. But I have also heard reports that every game was rewritten from
scratch. The DIY concept was entirely alien.

Source: 84 Play Podcast interview with Gregg Tavares (I think, I cant relisten
to the podcast now). Linked if interested
[http://8-4.jp/blog/?p=1423&lang=en](http://8-4.jp/blog/?p=1423&lang=en)

~~~
vadman
I remember reading some article about Japanese gamedev years ago that said the
same thing. No OO, no standards, lots of repetition, &c.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
But why on Earth would you need skill and technique when you've got so many
overtime hours of good old Japanese _hard work_? /sarcasm

Idiots...

~~~
geon
That makes it very difficult to understand how other parts of Japanese culture
can be so focused on perfection. Even western programmers use he word "Zen" to
describe the simplicity and perfection of code that we strive for.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Well, some Western programmers use Zen.

------
cmsimike
Sony.. just ugh.

I couldn't tell you how big of a Sony fan I was - TVs, cd players, PS 1-3.

Then they removed my ability to run Linux on my PS3. They stopped caring about
giving the PS3 any new functionality that wasn't for plus members.

Blu-rays that I bought stopped working in that system, or took forever to load
because the blu-rays started downloading massive new commercials to play for
me before the movie started.

That was the breaking point for me.

What happened to Japan's electronic giants? I can't speak for all of them but
Sony started blatantly chasing money. I get that companies exist to make money
but, for crying out loud, don't make it so obvious that you're only out for
money.

~~~
josephlord
> What happened to Japan's electronic giants? I can't speak for all of them
> but Sony started blatantly chasing money. I get that companies exist to make
> money but, for crying out loud, don't make it so obvious that you're only
> out for money.

Have you seen the losses that Sony has made over the past decade? They are
pretty desperate and need to chase money. It isn't like they have massive
margins.

They main problem is that they are amateurs at chasing money compared to
companies like MS.

------
lifeisstillgood
I would suggest that a title change will say it all:

What happened to Japan's _electrical_ giants?

Hitachi's boss says it in the article

    
    
      "Digital technology changed everything," he says.
    
      "In the television industry it means that just one chip is 
      now needed to produce a large and high quality TV picture. 
      So now everybody can do it."
    

What they did was electrical engineering - but apart from washing machines,
everything consumer is on a chip. Hitachi has seen this and run, all the
others should be following suit, or trading on their names as brands for
Android phones.

~~~
Aardwolf
A vacuum cleaner on a chip? A microwave oven on a chip? A large LCD screen on
a chip?

I don't really get what you mean by "everything consumer is on a chip". Making
LCD screens is quite hardware-y and I thought quite difficult to do well too.

~~~
raverbashing
More or less this

Let's go back to the 80's. Electronic products had to be done with lots of
components. There were chips, but they did much less than what they do today.

Also, more mechanical parts (think VCR, Camcorder, etc)

So the real work was doing more with less components and good quality.

Today, with better chip technology and 'solidization' of technologies.
(magnetic tape to flash memory, crts to lcds) today you can realistically have
an LCD tv with only a couple of chips (apart from the power source, lcd panel
and some other components like speakers and maybe the tuning part). There's
nothing much to tweak. There's software, but that's increasingly commoditized
as well.

And the japanese apparently can't innovate software-wise.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
_And the japanese apparently can't innovate software-wise._

I am going to be nit-picky, and go for

... Large Japanese conglomerates with contractural and social commitments to
current and past employees, huge management layers ... apparently can't
innovate software-wise.

Ruby probably counts as a plus in the innovation side.

(Look I know it was nitpicky and you did mean that anyway, but this is HN, it
is late, so I apologise )

------
redcap
Article misses the fact that managers rather than creators took over the
electronics companies. Losing creativity meant losing an edge.

~~~
joelrunyon
There was an article I read a while back that pointed out that the exact same
thing happened with the American Auto industry before things started to go to
crap.

~~~
rmckayfleming
Would you happen to have a link to that? That sounds like an interesting read.

~~~
jseliger
Try _The Reckoning_ by David Halberstam: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Reckoning-
David-Halberstam/dp/0688...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Reckoning-David-
Halberstam/dp/0688048382) .

------
dankoss
I worked on a Hitachi based coal plant in college. The Japanese were the
originators of high precision engineering, and it shows. TI's OMAP program is
going the same route: pursuing long term, more stable business instead of
consumer facing chips. I suspect that wages in Korea are much lower, allowing
them to manufacture ripped off designs at a much lower price.

Sony's problem is that they're an engineering driven company in consumer
markets. While they often win the spec game, they aren't vertically integrated
enough to give the same consumer experience that Apple can. Ars has covered
many of their missteps in depth.

~~~
m_mueller
Actually I think Sony would have been (and in part still would _be_ )
perfectly vertically integrated. They were big in content, home electronics
and hand helds. In the beginning of the last decade they could have hardly
asked for a better position to completely dominate the electronics business,
the way Apple/Samsung do now - but it was all for nothing. Instead of
integrating everything, they just let their divisions keep doing their own
thing until it was too late.

~~~
ctdonath
They tried to "vertically integrate". Really hard. Thing is, they hung the
hardware on MemoryStick and the software on ATRAC. Oops.

------
mikecane
Minimal Mac just ran a picture yesterday that does indeed say it all:
[http://minimalmac.com/post/48088436702/yep-pretty-much-
sums-...](http://minimalmac.com/post/48088436702/yep-pretty-much-sums-it-up-
via-w-cie)

BTW, I kept looking at the first picture and wondering how many people were
employed making all those devices versus those now making the components for
the iPhone.

------
pornel
Interesting tidbit in the article is that majority of Sony's profit comes from
their _life insurance_ business:

<http://www.splatf.com/2011/11/sony-profits/>

------
davidroberts
I think they are failing because sometime in the mid-Nineties, in the effort
to compete with lean and hungry overseas companies, they lost their legendary
reputation for quality and customer service, as they tried to respond to
changing circumstances.

A couple of examples of my own:

Around 1996, I bought a cassette recorder made by Aiwa, which had been a
fairly upscale electronics brand. It looked nice from the outside, but when I
examined it closer after buying it, I realized it was a fairly crude, generic
cassette recorder of the time, made in China, probably the generic output from
a factory there that Aiwa had slapped their name onto.

It failed in less than a month. I brought it to the store for a replacement
and that one failed too within thirty days, exactly the same way the first one
did. Obviously, Aiwa had not done extensive testing on this model, and I think
probably didn't even design or supervise its manufacture.

In the early 2000s, I bought a Sony Palm OS PDA. It was very advanced and had
great features that I loved. But it failed in two weeks due to bad connection
to the lamp that lit the LED display. After a few minutes' search on the
Internet, I saw this was a well-known problem with this device, caused by a
design flaw.

I took it back to the store, and got a replacement that failed exactly the
same way in two weeks. The store wouldn't give me another, so I had to rely on
Sony's warranty service.

It was my worst-ever warranty experience. After a long conversation with
customer service reps in India, I was able to convince them it was actually
failing. They sent me a box to return it in. It took almost a month to come
back, only to fail with the same problem about three months later.

I went through the whole process again, waited another month. This time the
repaired (or replaced) device came back rattling around in a box with no
packing material. It too failed, several days after the one-year warranty
expired.

I think the decline of the Japaneses electronic giants has been caused by a
combination of several things. Japanese technology companies built their
reputations during the late Sixties and Seventies, at the start of the
Japanese economic boom, when they had a highly skilled workforce willing to
work at relatively low wages, compared to the US or Europe. They had already
sharpened their quality and innovative abilities in the intense domestic
Japanese market, which was extremely competitive and where the consumers were
very picky about quality. That market was protected, so there was almost no
competition from overseas.

When they moved into Western markets, they were the young, scrappy underdog
taking on dinosaur companies like RCA and Phillips, that could not respond
fast enough to compete effectively against them. They were also aided by the
low value of the yen relative to the dollar, which made their products a very
good value.

So all of these things have changed. Complaints of unfair trade eventually
forced Japan to open their domestic market to overseas competition. As the
article pointed out, now Japanese companies are the dinosaurs in their
domestic market, competing against Apple and Samsung. Meanwhile, the yen is
very high against foreign currencies, which hurts them badly in export
markets.

The Japanese labor market has also changed. Younger Japanese are much less
willing to work with the dedication their parents and grandparents had. Wages
have gone up, and are equal to or higher than those in the US and Europe, and
like those countries, they have tried to cut costs by shifting manufacturing
overseas, which has resulted in a decline in quality.

Also, the Japanese population is declining, with fewer and fewer young
workers, and those coming into the job market have been conditioned to expect
comfortable, high-paying, lifetime office jobs, not manufacturing jobs.

Meanwhile, the inefficiencies of the lifetime employment system in Japanese
companies have made it very difficult to adapt to changing circumstances by
laying off workers, even as that system is starting to break down.

It's like a perfect storm of bad news for Japanese companies, but in many ways
it is very similar to what happened to electronics giants in the US thirty
years earlier as they tried to defend against Japanese competition and
eventually failed.

~~~
adregan
> Younger Japanese are much less willing to work with the dedication their
> parents and grandparents had.

I have a few "salary man" friends in Japan, and they work really really hard.
Like "hard to imagine anyone working harder".

However, if my experience working in (non-tech) companies in Tokyo has taught
me anything, it's that people have to work so hard because of some startling
inefficiencies (and some serious peer pressure) and a great resistance to
integrating technology into the work flow (e.g. this is the first year I
received internet in the office).

This sounds hard to believe as Japan has produced some amazing technological
innovation, but there is a really strange mindset in the higher ups concerning
digital conveniences, and they appear to be influencing protocol. For example,
ATMs have working hours, and some are not available on weekends at all, and
others have higher fees the later in the evening it is (and this is a cash
dominate society).

~~~
gommm
Ah, a japanese friend of mine used to joke that it was little dwarves working
in the ATM that gave out the money. The extra fee in the evening was just
overtime pay :-)

~~~
LeonidasXIV
That's not entirely untrue, as you can indeed ring a bell and someone comes
from behind the ATM to help you. Why I was not allowed to withdraw money on
Sunday even if I did not need help is beyond me and so every monay I stood in
the queue before the ATMs of people who couldn't get their money on Sunday
either.

Also, I pay 0,68€ with debit or credit card in Europe whereas I had to lug
around coins and stuff in Japan. Very cash-centric.

~~~
georgemcbay
I've noticed that even in the USA, it is much more common for smaller "Mom &
Pop" shops and restaurants owned and operated by Asians (not just Japanese,
but Chinese, Filipinos, etc) to be cash-only, or if they do accept
debit/credit cards they have very high minimum purchase requirements.

I get the reasoning behind why they do this (to avoid the handling charge
overhead), but I've always wondered why the decision to do so seems to be far
more prevalent with some cultures than others and I've always wondered if it
is really a net negative for them as there are quite a few places I would
otherwise go to frequently but avoid (because I know that as someone who
prefers not to carry around a lot of cash that paying will be a bit of a pain
in the ass at those places). Presumably I'm not the only one who makes this
choice regularly.

------
continuations
Japan's electronic giants fell because there's no longer an electronic
industry. The computer industry has "annexed" the electronics industry and the
Japanese companies were never good at computers.

------
gcb0
It's the same economic shift we see since industrial revolution.

Nobody here remembers, but one Italy was the cheapest labor. Everyone produced
cheep stuff there. Then some companies started to produce quality product (and
win races with what was cheap cars) and to be proud of made in Italy (which
was a bad thing before). And when Italian design became expensive, markets
moved on.

I think there was another country in this step, but let's say cheap labor is
now in Japan. When it started, only college students would buy Japanese cars
(death traps) and Japanese stuff was deemed cheap. Come the same cycle.
Companies start to show pride and produce quality stuff. Now made in Japan is
expensive.

Market moves on to China... Kia is now the car of the new rich with bad taste.
But this will change soon (they are even trying to win prestigious rally in
Africa) and soon Chinese products are going to be expensive. And probably some
Latin or African country will be the next cheap labor.

~~~
rdouble
Kia is from Korea.

~~~
gcb0
You are correct. I think Korea is the country i couldn't remember before :)

And it's following the pattern alright. Kia, Hyundai, lg.

All companies that started with race-to-the-bottom products that are now
trying to be market leaders

------
Isamu
I was expecting at least a mention of Mecha-Godzilla. What happened to him was
the old Godzilla.

Sony was a really big inspiration to Steve Jobs, or at least Akio Morita was.
It has been very surprising to me to see Sony slip repeatedly. I think they
got caught up in just packing in features without a real vision to unify what
they were trying to accomplish.

~~~
Poyeyo
Sony is being killed by Sony's content division, that is, the movie studio and
the music label.

------
ropz
On a related but tangential theme, I once started an argument by claiming that
Japanese culture does not support the emergence of strong individuals.
Perhaps, in electronics as in software, it really does take someone with a
huge ego to send a product back to the development labs because 'the black is
not black enough'.

------
ekianjo
"Mr Nakanishi's strategy is working. Hitachi is back in profit. Hitachi trains
are the front-runner in the competition to replace all of the UK's fleet of
inter-city high-speed trains. "

Mouhahha. Strategy is a long term thing. You can't the effects just in a
couple of years. What a joke of an article.

------
DanBC
Japan suffered economic slump. Where people used to dump old electronics to
buy new versions (there's a Japanese word to describe the perfectly good trash
that people used to collect to furnish their homes) they had to stop because
they just couldn't afford to do that any longer.

------
InclinedPlane
In the '70s and '80s Japan was hungry, they wanted to leap up to being a
world-class country and a high-tech, first world economy. So they took risks
and let innovation rule. Then when the high-tech sector got big they tightened
up and reined in risk and creativity, causing them to miss out on several key
market turnovers in tech.

Look at the biggest smartphone manufacturers: samsung, apple, huawei, htc,
zte, LG. Mostly Chinese, Korean, and US companies. Only recently has Japan
seriously entered the touchscreen smartphone market competitively. Maybe if
Japanese company's get hungry enough to innovate they'll make a comeback.

------
Egregore
May be one reason is that they had a lot of cool only for Japan market
devices? It is more difficult to make different devices for different markets,
Apple on the other hand made one device for all the markets.

~~~
scholia
Sony Trinitron TV sets, PlayStations etc were cool everywhere. Nikon and Canon
cameras still are. It's just that the Japanese specialised in high quality
manufacturing, and the market went to China's low-wage manufacturing instead.

Foxconn basically uses humans as robots, and this is temporarily cheaper than
using real robots -- Japan's speciality.

~~~
macspoofing
>It's just that the Japanese specialised in high quality manufacturing, and
the market went to China's low-wage manufacturing instead.

Apple iPhones are largely assembled in China, and nobody would claim they are
low quality. Chinese manufacturing isn't low quality, unless that's what you
want to pay for.

Furthermore, I claim that in the last 10-15 years, the quality of Japanese
electronics actually declined.

~~~
dagw
The quality in the iPhone comes from great design and choice of materials.
There is nothing particularly good (or bad) about the quality of its
manufacturing. You'll also notice that non of the actually important
components like the CPU or the screen come from Chines companies (yet)

~~~
glhaynes
Not sure this is true. I'm no manufacturing expert, but I've heard a million
stories about how intensely involved Apple is in their manufacturers'
processes. c.f. how the glass is fitted on iPhone 5s:
[http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/09/12/how-the-
iphone-5-is-...](http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/09/12/how-the-iphone-5-is-
made/)

------
lmm
This makes an amusing contrast with the frequent articles decrying the loss of
manufacturing here in the US/UK.

~~~
mindcrime
Interestingly enough, there is talk that manufacturing in the US is
rebounding... to the point that some people are referring to it as a boom. The
reasons why it's happening are varied, but it's an interesting phenomenon to
observe. I'll be interested to see if it holds up over time...

For more on this idea, see:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-
inso...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-insourcing-
boom/309166/)

[http://business.time.com/2013/03/28/is-the-u-s-
manufacturing...](http://business.time.com/2013/03/28/is-the-u-s-
manufacturing-renaissance-real/)

------
dharma1
Often wondered this too. Japanese hardware is still good, but difficult to
compete on price compared to Korean/Chinese.

They have great developers, and have had for a long time, but it feels like
the corporate structures themselves are too rigid to allow innovation to
surface.

You know these companies are doing something wrong when hobbyists have to
reverse-engineer their firmware to get the functionality they want and need
(I'm looking at you Canon and Panasonic). Sony is not much better, the user
interfaces of their hardware feel 10 years old and the recently opened "app
store" for their cameras is a joke, with no SDK or 3rd party apps available.
As they focus away from TV's to cameras and sensors, that's something they
should definitely fix if they want to succeed.

The best thing these consumer electronics companies could do is open source
parts of the firmware/software and engage more with consumers who are taking a
more active role in developing products these days.

------
adregan
Though, Abe, the current Prime Minister of Japan a very conservative fellow,
he surprised (at least) me the other day by announcing that he's interested in
creating a culture of entrepreneurs and startups.

The most shocking quote in a recent piece in the WSJ[1] might be Abe,
referring to Rakuten.com's Mikitani, saying "I ask Mr. Mikitani to not be
afraid of being labeled a trouble maker and to speak his mind to his heart's
content." You really can stir up some trouble in Japan by suggesting changes
to the status quo (something foreigners do with regularity), so it's very
interesting to see a guy like Abe say this. Maybe I misjudged the guy.

I think Japan needs to move away from the big electronics companies and focus
on creating an environment more conducive to creating young interesting
companies.

1:
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732434580457842...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324345804578424333742053290.html)

------
programminggeek
Um, maybe they are failing because modern electronics are more about software
than hardware. If devices are becoming very small PC's with ARM processors,
then of course software companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft will do
well.

Companies like Sony have hardware DNA, not software DNA.

------
VLM
A conflicting opinion: The market used to be narrow where being Japanese made
actually mattered. Now flood that market with absolute cheap garbage from
China and it bifurcates into mostly purchasing cheap garbage and "everything
else is better but costs twice as much and it doesn't matter who makes it as
long as its not China".

What I'm getting at is the fight shifted from Japan vs the world to China vs
the world.

~~~
r00fus
All my nail clippers are japanese make. They're truly amazing compared to the
crap that floods the aisles of your average US retail store.

------
anizan
Sony has been plagued with inability to deal with technology which disrupts
their business model in any way.

Network walkman which didn't support mp3 on purpose(would cannibalize media
division) was so technologically stupid and ever since then they have lost the
plot

------
yekko
It's simple, they didn't let their developers run free and are paid too
little. You have to pay the creators of wealth in order to get wealth in
return.

