

Japan's preference for hardware over software is fading - ab9
http://www.economist.com/node/18958643

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flocial
I agree that the software industry in Japan is deficient for lack of a better
word in both quantity and quality. Mainly it's the result of a short-sighted
bureaucracy running industry and education. Aside from the language barrier,
which is formidable but manageable, Japan had all the ingredients needed to
foster a thriving software industry (mainly a talented workforce schooled in
science and a hardware manufacturing industry that could supply any and all
the parts, at least in the 80s and early 90s).

The cultural obsession with making "stuff" or "monozukuri" is more a romantic
notion nurtured by the economic slump as America made a massive comeback
dominating every part of the IT field from hardware to software. Craftsman are
highly regarded in Japan but great programmers see themselves as part of this
tradition and peers regard them as such. It completely ignores the fact that
the video-gaming industry and even anime is "soft" driven and a significant
part of Japanese contemporary culture.

On the policy side there's just not enough support for entrepreneurship in
general and more so for IT. Many of the first movers in the Japanese IT bubble
crossed over into establishment quite quickly and the Livedoor scandal just
provides government with a massive excuse to stay conservative. The fact that
both Livedoor, Rakuten and SoftBank made hostile bids for media companies at
one point probably did some damage as well in terms of turning traditional
media against them.

Labor laws make it highly prohibitive to fire full-time workers and social
benefits still tend to accrue to people who don't change companies. Of course,
times are changing but policy still prevails. For any software startup in
Japan hiring someone is hard because good people are conditioned to seek
stability and hiring someone is risky for the startup because they are dealing
with less talented people with the same employment guarantees. Although the IT
industry in Japan mirrors general global trends to a degree, so there are more
career changes, people are very risk averse and probably less mobile than a
comparative sample from the states.

Also corporations tend to foster a false sense of homogenity which usually
results in long hours and minimal incentives for performance. I've seen so
many exceptional people, especially programmers, clash and ultimately burn
against corporate culture. The rest go on leave for clinical depression.

In terms of education, the curriculum just plain sucks for science in general
and for sciences more students flock to traditional engineering fields where
the get to learn FORTRAN or COBOL and maybe play with R. Professors in Japan,
even in the sciences, rarely lift a finger and many are completely inept with
computers. Of course, younger professors aren't but with Japanese demographics
they'll struggle to find tenure. Not to mention undergraduates don't study
much compared to other countries since the entrance exam is the main event.

In terms of culture and language, Japanese allows for so much vagueness that I
think it creates a serious barrier to clear and logical thinking needed for
not only programming but interface design. People avoid debates of any kind
and when they do occur, they quickly get emotionally heated. Also, a lot
decisions for even the interface gets run by the committee or are consensus-
based and that's not a good thing in general for design of any kind as you
need a grand architect who knows what they're doing and can move with
conviction.

I really can't do this topic justice unless I go and write a book so I don't
think a short article by The Economist can address it either. Japan has a lot
to offer too but those are my impressions on what's holding them back.

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lesterbuck
I giggled when I realized that the author of this piece was in a hurry, and
almost certainly thinks that Heroku is a Japanese company.

"Marc Benioff, the boss of Salesforce.com, a large 'cloud computing' firm in
Silicon Valley, sees opportunities everywhere in Japan. Over the past year the
company paid $212m for Heroku, which develops web services based on Ruby, and
acquired stakes in Synergy Marketing, Uhuru and Netyear, three business-
software firms."

With a name like Heroku, news that Matz is joining Heroku, and Heroku doing
Ruby in the cloud, it is an easy mistake on deadline to conclude that Heroku
is a Japanese company. The other three companies mentioned are all actually
Japanese companies.

~~~
jamesteow
Well that and the language (like their database offerings) and overall visual
design of Heroku imply that it's a Japanese company.

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psykotic
Really? Suppose you went to a website for a similar kind of company but with a
prominent Wild West theme, sheriff stars for buttons and products called Lasso
and Six-Shooter. If I had to guess, I'd say that company was anything but
American. Heroku's website oozes fanboy kitsch in much the same way. The
difference is that a lot more technologists are Japanophiles than wannabe
cowboys, so we don't notice as much and just lap that shit up.

~~~
jamesteow
Yeah you make a point. Same could be said about Outback Steakhouse.

~~~
psykotic
On that note, I remember going to Black Angus Steakhouse when the first
restaurant in Korea opened at Gangnam-yeok, Seoul. The greeters at the door
wore cowboy-style outfits with handkerchiefs around their necks and enormous
hats that almost swallowed them up. As customers entered, they would sing out
an awkwardly pronounced "Howdy, partner!" in unison. Then, rather
incongruously, they would bow in the customary Korean fashion.

Now, I haven't ever been to a Black Angus in the US, but I'm guessing they
don't ham it up there nearly as much. :)

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kristopher
There are many interesting aspects about the Japanese arena.

One of the most unforgiving is that users do not understand that their phones
are connected to vast networks or that navigation system in their car is
powered by a computer with memory, et cetera.

When I first moved to Japan I asked normal people on the street to tell me
what they found interesting about their phones -- I was shocked to learn that
many Japanese women and men told me that they believed the popular website
Mixi was just a screen (画面) that displays when the press buttons! (In
Japanese: ミクシーはあたしの携帯に入っている画面だよ！とよく言われた)

One of the other aspects of software vs. hardware is that hardware is
relatively easier to debug than most software environments. You will find that
easy to debug environments like consoles have many software developers. This
is important because the Japanese are very risk-adverse. Making claims on
others and keeping everyone/everything in check is a big part of life in
Japan.

Finally, programming is considered more of an engineer's profession than a
creative profession. Engineering is seen as directly applying nature's laws
into practice and as such, the approach is one of: "if you want to say build a
bridge then you may choose from these designs that we already know are best"

Programming in Japan follows this cookie-cutter model and although there are
very bright, creative engineers and programmers in Japan, the schooling system
is very rigid.

~~~
flocial
I totally agree with you. Another thing reading your comment is that lots of
people don't own computers and only use the Internet through phones. This
really screws kids out of a chance to mess around with computers. I know a lot
people still get their first computers in college, especially women.

~~~
bitwize
That was largely true in the West also until very very recently. One thing
that's problematic is that although more people have access to a computer
these days, they are treated as access points for MySpace, Facebook, Word and
games more than anything else.

When I was growing up a computer was something you programmed just like a
television set was something you watched. This was a psychological result of
the fact that most machines of the day (including PCs) booted into BASIC if
deprived of alternatives. When schools taught computer skills they included
some elementary programming (usually in BASIC) in the curriculum. Not so today
when majoring in Word and Excel is a perfectly viable academic career path.

So we're screwing our kids out of a chance to mess around with computers also
and while the number of people actually using PCs has gone up, they're
psychologically more distant from programming than ever it seems, and I'm
treated more and more like a superintelligent space alien when I mention I'm a
programmer.

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forgottenpaswrd
Putting software patents number as synonymous with innovation is not right.

Business-Software patents number are symptoms of protectionism and central
planning in the process of innovation(you pay the state, they give you
monopolies over ideas).

Business and software patents make the big guys the masters and the rest
slaves, when everything is becoming patented, from windows to clicks adding
"on web applications" or "in mobile" to the super old idea.

In any case, it will be the quality, not the quantity what matters.

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smackay
As far as I recall, Japan's Fifth Generation program,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer>, which had the West
running around in a panic, was primarily software driven. It was seen as an
attempt the break the European and American dominance of software and
microprocessors but was unsuccessful. It is interesting that many of the
companies mentioned in the article are small rather than the usual set of
behemoths. Perhaps this time with the disruption in Japanese society with
life-time employment at large corporations no longer a sure thing and with the
rise of China that there is enough fear/desire in Japan to make it work.

~~~
bane
Thanks for this. I had never heard of this, but it's yet another fascinating
footnote in the parallel history of Japanese consumer electronics. The amount
of money invested is simply staggering...well over a billion dollars in 2010
money.

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w1ntermute
One of the things that really shocked me is how everyone still carries around
electronic dictionaries when their cell phones should be able to fulfill that
capability. The idea of one-function hardware is still deeply ingrained in the
Japanese psyche in a way that it hasn't been for years in the West. As an
American I always find it preferable to consolidate all my devices into one
(which has turned out to be the cell phone), but the Japanese still like to
carry around separate devices for each task.

~~~
regomodo
As much as i'd like to have a universal device sometimes a well-crafted, well-
designed, dedicated device is hard to give up once you are used to it.

Would you rather use a TI-calc emulator on android or the actual device?

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w1ntermute
The emulator, hands down. And that's being a long-time TI calculator user.

~~~
starwed
I am probably two orders of magnitude faster[1] on a real TI than on an
emulator. The muscle memory there is deep, and doesn't translate to my phone
at all.

[1]no, really

~~~
w1ntermute
Well, if I am doing anything serious, I use Mathematica or MATLAB, so I
haven't had to do anything besides basic arithmetic on my phone.

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bane
Studying the history of Japan's consumer electronics industry is absolutely
fascinating. It's an equivalent, but absolutely evolutionary different path.

The different approaches to similar problems, how different factors have put
different evolutionary pressures on the industry (e.g. language) is endlessly
interesting.

Better yet, now with South Korea a major electronics player, and India and
China up and coming very quickly....I have a feeling it'll be possible for a
serious study of the history of consumer electronics to be a valid academic
area of study.

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Gring
This reminds me of the article "Why Japan didn’t create the iPod", which adds
lots of details to the same issue: [http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-
japan-didnt-create-th...](http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-
create-the-ipod/)

Notably, the "appliance mindset" (people own many devices which are not
interacting), average japanese people not owning a PC in 2001, the popularity
of gaming consoles and mobile phones.

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yuhong
Anyone remember the non IBM PC compatible NEC PC-98?

~~~
bitwize
Ah, yes. Japan's idiosyncratic, parallel personal computer industry. My how
times have changed. Strangely enough, these days when shopping in Nipponbashi
I saw Dells everywhere. But outside of Dell and Apple, the big computer
vendors are still Japanese or at least Asian. Also, the DIY computer market is
big, and largely targeted at the same audience (gamers), but the marketing
strategy is different. Since Western style FPS games are unpopular in Japan,
video card and motherboard manufacturers use marketing campaigns tied in with
home-grown MMORPGs like _Final Fantasy XIV_ and the like.

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solusglobus
It is inevitable that hardware development cost is much higher compared to
software especially at chip-level, in which the fabrication cost is getting
higher and higher as the process node shrinks. Even the EDA tools used to
design and develop the chip already cost a bomb. So, it is not surprising that
the electronics firms struggle to reach 5% profit margin...

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nadam
The hard line between hardware and software is also fading in my opinion. I
mean hardware is mostly also software in a sense. The difference between
'hardware' and 'software' is smaller nowadays than the difference between
'business software' and 'low-level software' I think.

~~~
ovi256
>I mean hardware is mostly also software in a sense

Sure, in a theoretical sense, hardware is software frozen in silicon,
sometimes even analog silicon. However, the economics of software and hardware
businesses couldn't be more different, and that's the point of the article.

Furthermore, low-level software is probably to be tied to the hardware biz
from an economics standpoint.

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4J7z0Fgt63dTZbs
hm...

