
Why is Japan using cassette tapes and faxes? - jsnathan
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34667380
======
voidz
The older I get, the more sympathy I have for companies that that stuck with
older but working systems that don't come with a mouse and monitor.

Sometimes I feel like we're building a prison for ourselves the way things are
headed in the digital world. Where I live, some schools require kids aged 5 to
own iPads so they can do homework. It as fun when it was optional, but I
really don't want to continue digitizing and feeding the machine my own kids.

I worry about this every day, so my first reaction and general feeling with
this article was, _cool_. Reminds me of walkmans and roll skates. I'm old
fashined and have no problem admitting it. I also don't think everyone should
feel the same way, it's just how I see things.

~~~
stevetrewick
I'm the opposite. As a callow youth I favoured functional brutalism in UI.
After a lifetime of interacting with actual users, a bunch of HCI classes and
having watched those kinds of legacy systems become productivity vampires in
too many settings I have no sympathy with my former viewpoint.

~~~
laumars
It's a common misconception that newer systems bring productivity
improvements, but that's not always the case in reality. While there are
undoubtedly occasions when newer systems do bring vast improvements, there are
also occasions when newer systems are just trying to reinvent the wheel and
ultimately end up little better - or sometimes even worse - than the old
system (and that's before you factor in training your staff to use the new
systems). There are also occasions when the newer system is trying to change a
process in ways that meet modern fashions yet fail to meet a company's core
business requirements. Both of the last two points are things I've
unfortunately seen a few times in previous jobs.

There are generally three points that need to be considered before upgrading
an older system:

1\. Is the older system still fulfilling the needs? (often jobs change over
time and some systems are rigid thus require users to perform additional steps
in the modern era to continue to make use of the older system).

2\. Is support still available for the older system (eg if it breaks, is
hardware available to replace it? Are engineers still available to maintain
it? etc)

3\. Will the new proposed system fix the aforementioned issues?

Often you'll find that the first two points are still or that the 3rd point
isn't true. Sadly it's all too common that the reason someone pushes to
upgrade older systems is either down to agism ("it's old. Old is bad!") or
because someone needs to justify their own job / bulk out their CV ("I was
responsible for migrating Company xyz from product a to product b.").

With the greatest of respect to yourself, as you get older I think you too
will start to notice just how often upgrades go wrong and how some businesses
would have been better off sticking with the old system. So there does need to
be a carefully considered pragmatism with regards to just how robust some
older systems can be and whether the upgrade is actually offering any benefit
or whether the older system is genuinely just bad / no longer fulfilling the
job requirements.

~~~
mrob
I once worked as a telephone switchboard operator. I used a text user
interface based system, with a monochrome green CRT and a high quality
keyboard with dedicated keys for all the interface functions. The 80x24 text
was clear and easy to read. Everything was extremely fast and reliable, with
no perceptible interface pauses ever.

I later briefly worked there again after they had "upgraded" to a modern
system. This ran a GUI on Windows on commodity hardware. The text was smaller
and harder to read (on an early LCD monitor). Not all functions had keyboard
shortcuts, and the keyboard itself felt worse. The interface noticeably paused
sometimes.

The new system was an obvious downgrade, and the build quality of the old one
was high enough that I'd expect it to have at least another 10 years of life.
I can only guess that management saw the green CRT, assumed it was
unacceptably primitive, and didn't bother asking the people who actually used
it.

~~~
zdw
Similarly, when Bank ATM's switched from character only green screens with
buttons on the side as the interface to full color "GUI" ones with
touchscreens, the delays and speed at which you could run the interface went
down dramatically, which was quite frustrating if you were used to the old
system.

Thankfully, the newer touchscreen interfaces are much faster than before - the
delays between selections went down.

The touchscreens still stink from a UI perspective - too many elements too
close to each other, where inadvertent touches can result in unwanted
behavior.

~~~
fluxquanta
ATM software is an example of something that really is becoming needlessly
over-engineered.

For example, a week or so ago I encountered an ATM that prompted me for my
e-mail address to e-mail a receipt (or, as smaller, secondary options, buttons
for printing a receipt or declining a receipt all together). It really rubbed
me the wrong way. Who is trying to collect my e-mail address? How are they
storing it? What else will they use it for? Why is this the default option?

------
WBrentWilliams
I'll leave the article as-is. This isn't the first article to grace HN that
stated that Japanese companies tend to be slow adopters. What I want to know
is why the highlight on human traffic signalers as an indicator of how
"backwards" the culture is technologically.

It seems to me that if the goal is not just public safety, but to put a human
face on law enforcement, a human traffic signal is exactly what is required.
True, a robot can do the job, but a robot would be ineffective at the task of
humanizing the reasons behind the laws and in providing assistance to people
who need it.

~~~
digi_owl
That "traffic light" seems to actually be a watchman for a building site. Thus
he is there to either stop people or trucks are needed.

And frankly i would prefer that over automated lights, as the person could
compensate for elderly or kids (or other less perfect events).

Its not like they have some lone officer sanding in the middle of the most
busy intersection of Tokyo, now it is?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibuya#Shibuya_Crossing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibuya#Shibuya_Crossing)

Frankly i don't see how an article of this "quality" made it onto BBC.

------
drderidder
The article is somewhat misleading. Keeping up with software evolution is
something large North American companies struggle with as well, and while
Japanese companies may be slower to adopt some software trends that are
commonplace here, Japan lags in very few areas technologically - and leads in
a lot of others. Every time I visit I'm blown away by the innovative
application of technology. There are electronically controlled traffic lights
aplenty in Japan, ubiquitous high speed internet, and all the accoutrements of
modern electronic communication in greater abundance and density than most of
North America. The "human powered traffic lights" the writer alludes to are
just safety officers who assist traffic and pedestrians at some crossings
where construction is underway, usually _in addition to_ to the usual traffic
signals; an example of the emphasis on service and attention to detail sorely
lacking on this side of the pond. If faxes are still in use it's a result of
the fact that practically everybody had one in their house long before most
North Americans had ever used one. Having been so widely adopted, it's not too
surprising that their use has continued for longer. I think the author went a
bit hyperbolic in an effort to make a headline out of something which is
actually not that big of a deal, although there are likely just as many if not
more opportunities for software modernization in Japan as there are elsewhere.

~~~
digi_owl
I wonder how much the fax thing has to do with their writing system as well.

~~~
deciplex
Not a whit.

------
jefurii
James Fallows of The Atlantic wrote a lot about Japan in the 1990s, and he had
this great observation.

In Japan you drive to the station and sit in the car while several people fill
your tank, wash your windows, and do other busywork. It seems like a huge
waste and makes gas cost more.

We know how to do things better and more efficiently in the US. But in the US
those same young people are sitting at home unemployed.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
There was some story about the Japanese diplomat to the US before the war, was
driving in the hills around San Francisco. He came upon two guys building a
road: one in a truck dumping rock, one with a bulldozer. In Japan, that would
have been 50 people with baskets and donkeys moving gravel.

He wrote a description back to his bosses, saying something like "It would be
suicide to challenge the US industrial machine". Too bad they didn't listen.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Admiral Yamamoto
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto))
who was educated in the US, was against Japan declaring war with the USA for
similar reasons. He had seen enough of our industrial production to realize we
could build ships and planes faster than the Japanese could. His statement, "I
can run wild for six months but after that I have no expectation of success."
was predicated on this.

------
osullivj
I experienced this myself when I built a new browser based single dealer
channel for the interest rate trading business of a large UK bank in 2008-10.
Part of the motivation of single dealer channels is to get wholesale bank
clients off the people intensive voice & email channels (phone calls to highly
paid sales people) and on to self service electronic channels. For instance,
for an index tracking block trade, we'd want to deter them from emailing a
sales person a spreadsheet, and encourage them to upload via a browser for
automated processing. The resistance to changing entrenched manual workflow
among Japanese clients was phenomenal, and far greater than in London or New
York.

------
adrianN
Using old software is not uncommon in many large companies. Not everyone is
Google or Microsoft, and at the forefront of technical innovation. Change is
expensive in large companies and the value proposition from new software is
often vague and hard to quantize in dollars. New software means training
people, changing processes to accommodate the new tech and, last but not
least, paying money for the software itself. For the management, this is
usually seen as a huge cost with little tangible benefit.

~~~
digi_owl
Cobol and mainframes anyone?

------
MichaelMoser123
I wonder if that's the norm rather than a Japanese peculiarity.

it's a bit like that in Germany too - mostly small and middle sized companies
are dominating, and people don't like to upgrade that much over there. The end
of support for Windows XP last year used to be a major shocker, so the issue
got some media coverage and reports were generally speaking of the danger to
smaller firms [1]. Still nowadays only 17% of all installations are running XP
(down from 26-30% last year). [2]

[1] [http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/windows-xp-eingestellter-
suppo...](http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/windows-xp-eingestellter-support-
gefaehrdet-unternehmen.769.de.html?dram:article_id=282369)

[2]
[http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_presse/archive/2015/04/...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_presse/archive/2015/04/08/windows-
xp-ein-jahr-nach-support-ende-deutlich-weniger-nutzer-aber-risiken-
bleiben.aspx)

~~~
digi_owl
Yeah, reading about the dominance of the smaller companies instantly brought
to mind Germany. Then again the two nations have seemed quite similar for some
time.

------
hcarvalhoalves
Japan is a place where the future arrived first so now they're stuck with a
lot of legacy from the 80/90's "future".

------
jccalhoun
The fax machine's popularity seems to be an evergreen story for slow news
days. I remembered a story about it that mentioned that restaurants in japan
still took a lot of orders through fax and in looking for it found lots of
articles: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-
fa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fax-machine-
is-anything-but-a-relic.html) (the one I was looking for from 2013) another
from 2012: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-
japan-f...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-japan-fax-
machines-find-a-final-place-to-thrive/2012/06/07/gJQAshFPMV_story.html) and
the bbc itself wrote another one in 2012 as well
[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19045837](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19045837)

------
Mimick
Japanese people's culture is "If it's working like that, keep it like that".

I once had to make a Japanese website for a cars wholesale company that ship
cars for different countries on the world and they used to do a lot of work
manually on their old website wanted to update it because they lost contact
with the old developer (used to HTML the website).

He was like no-no for everything that will cost money (themes, plugins...), I
didn't felt comfortable dealing with him since he said no for a $50
translation plugin and he wanted translation on his website (he will get
transitioned text himself somehow, don't like this step step things...) and
I'm sure I will charge him more than $50 to write a translation plugin (since
I won't put it on an online store).

------
agentultra
I think this article might be over-stating the lack of technological adoption
at Japanese companies to the point of characterizing the nation as some
backwards Kafka-esque nightmare.

I was just at the Openstack Tokyo Design Summit where there were plenty of
Japanese companies sharing their stories of adopting and contributing to
Openstack technologies: NTT DoCoMo, NEC, Fujitsu, Yahoo Japan, and others.
These are not small companies and many of them are building critical public
infrastructure on Openstack.

You can still buy cassette tapes in corner stores in Canada and there are many
industries here where people still use fax machines (ie: lawyers, realtors,
contractors). I don't think Japan is unique in this regard.

------
A010
This is an example of many other Asia countries as well, even if the host
country is "hi-tech" but the excuse is always be "our company isn't hi-tech".
If you're not working in trending industries, eg. e-commerce, mobile, finance,
banking, etc., you'd expect to be stuck with 10yo technology.

I was using a HP Gen 3 server to query DNS to get here to input this comment.

~~~
johan_larson
It's not just Asia. Here in Canada I recently had to make some changes to my
cell phone plan, and I watched the clerk struggle to use a system that was
running on Windows XP.

I've also watched bank clerks using systems that were obviously running on
3278 simulators.

Most businesses are no more high tech and up to date than they have to be.

~~~
noir_lord
Couple of smaller local banks here in the UK are using kit I recognise from
the 90's.

Co-incidentally the other bank I use with state of the art kit (relatively at
least) is worse in every other way.

I don't much care what kit they use as long as they get the important stuff
right.

------
melling
HN user patio11 got mentioned.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11)

------
stevetrewick
tl;dr: Super conservative business culture, arguably not news but :

 _> "Japanese companies generally lag foreign companies by roughly five-to-10
years in adoption of modern IT practices, particularly those specific to the
software industry," says Patrick McKenzie, boss of Starfighter, a software
company with operations in Tokyo and Chicago._

Didn't know it was quite that much lag.

~~~
erispoe
How much is that technology lag, and Japan's conservative take on things in
general, responsible for the economic morass they've been in for more than a
decade now?

~~~
digi_owl
Or how about the other way round, given the economic morass they try to get as
much bang out of each buck spent as they can?

After all, the reason for said morass was the private debt accrued during the
80s.

------
ksec
I actually quite like Fax as an idea, Put in the number, and send it over. The
problem is Fax is too slow.

Over the years I have been trying, testing and implementing a paperless
office. But Not in a tech industry, and you can imagine how hard that is.

Yes we even tried iPad or tablet rather, it didn't work as well. There is
digital whiteboard, I dont have the budget to test those out. But I guess it
still wont replace stickers and massive whiteboard.

You still draw and sketch or design on a piece of scrap paper. I haven't try
the iPad Pro ( its not out yet ), but i am not convinced this will improve my
work flow either.

Then I start to question the notion of paperless. And it turns out may be
getting rid of paper isn't the solution at all. Pen and Paper is the possibly
the easiest form of recording down information. The problem with paper is how
we find and file these information later. ( And its environmental issues. )

------
itazula
Fax machines -- They are single-function machines, and they are easy to use.
No viruses or malware. Reminds me of the calculator I sometimes use ...

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Fax machines were invented before the telephone. Before the telegraph! They
were originally a needle on a wax engraving for the send side; a pen on paper
on the receive side. They scanned the wax cylinder, and a dot-skip-dot pattern
on the receive side rendered the message. And all this was done in China.

Why? Because the character set in Eastern languages was far too large to fit
into something like Morse Code. There was no real alternative.

I wonder if fax persists today for some similar reason?

~~~
silveira
Interesting hypothesis. I found little reference to fax being used in China
early, only this [http://mentalfloss.com/article/33586/idea-fax-machine-has-
be...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/33586/idea-fax-machine-has-been-
around-170-years).

~~~
contingencies
I ran a hotel reservation network here in China about 7 years ago. We signed
over 3000 contracts nearly exclusively by fax (I think one or two were email).
All of our rates updates from partner hotels were faxed in. I built an
Asterix/Hylafax based solution with a custom workqueue that worked brilliantly
and XMPP IM'd employees to let them know how their fax send was progressing.

------
jimpick
One overlooked reason is that it's just plain harder to build searchable
indexable clean databases with the writing system (kanji, hiragana, katakani,
romaji and English all in use simultaneously). Manual methods often work
better.

------
fit2rule
Old computers never die. Their users do. This is something that the Japanese
culture seems to really understand.

It doesn't matter if its fashionable, fast, or efficient. If it _works_ ,
_use_ it.

------
lefstathiou
I am very fascinated and curious as to what Japan did / does to mitigate the
formation of business conglomerates. I am skeptical but open minded to the
fact that this could just be cultural - many US laws and tax policies
encourage scale. Googling around now but if anyone has thoughts or a book
recommendation please let me know.

~~~
icebraining
But has Japan mitigated it? The statistic quoted is that 99.7% of companies
are SMEs.

But in the US, 98.2% of companies have less than 100 people (ie, they're
SMEs): [http://www.census.gov/econ/susb/](http://www.census.gov/econ/susb/)

So, that statistic might not be telling you what you think it's telling you.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
And 100% of the 150 companies in my local rural village chamber of commerce
are guys with a truck and a ladder. In the US, private enterprise is alive and
well.

------
bovermyer
Japan's big problem here is that they don't see a need for a car when a horse
works just fine.

And if that's the world they want to live in, that's fine - no judgment here.

I, however, choose to live with and embrace a culture of advancement and
change. That requires living in the USA. Maybe in Europe.

~~~
purpled_haze
Cars are much safer than horses: [http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-
free/pdf?res=990DE0DC1E...](http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-
free/pdf?res=990DE0DC1E39E633A25752C0A9659C946596D6CF)

And they produce more jobs, from all of the people needed to create the
plastics, glass, metal, to the engines, etc. and the oil companies, quicky-
marts, etc.

However, horses are more environmentally friendly, as long as you don't mind
their feces, urine, and gas.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Horses will get you home automatically if you're drunk, sick or injured.

------
gerbilly
I prefer the security of sending a fax over sending an email.

To eavesdrop on a fax transmission would require you to eavesdrop on a
telephone line just at the right time.

It's a point to point communication over a private line, as opposed to email
that travels over public trunks, and past At&T 'closets' full of FBI/NSA
equipment.

So for sending sensitive documents like passports etc, I'd much rather scan
and fax than send an email.

(Now of course, the first thing the office worker does on receiving my fax is
surely to scan and email it to some other coworker, but that is beyond my
control.)

------
unsignedint
Well, it's a country with the chronic debate of whether résumé should be
handwritten or printed. (Yes, really.)

For the worse or the better, it's the country where the posture of commitment
counts. There are so many people who take printed out material "cold" or sign
of slack, for example.

I can certainly relate to this article when a fairly recent project I worked
involved passing around bug report as spreadsheet file instead of a bug
tracking system...

------
reacweb
fax is still very useful in France if you want to quickly solve an issue with
a bank. Most of the banks do not accept documents send by mails, they ask to
use post mail. If we insist a bit, they often accept to use fax. My ISP (Free
is the best ISP in France) provides a fax number to send and receive pdf
documents. It is not as handy as a mail, but it is a lot faster than post
mail.

~~~
digi_owl
I wonder how much that has to do with law rather than tech.

Meaning that a faxed document holds more power in court.

------
rwmj
The analysis seems flawed. If "10 year old software" works, why upgrade it? If
SMEs are conservative about software practices, the solution would be
education of business owners, not trying to create more massive companies.

------
bramstolk
Because they lack young people?

If the ageing workforce just keeps doing its thing, without a your person
showing them the new stuff, the new stuff does not happen.

Simple demographics.

