Blaming all ills of any Japanese industry on the keiretsu is in vogue for decades, but at best, keiretsu is a symptom, not a cause, of the underlying risk-averse culture. Keiretsu, even when they were toxically anti-competitive, did not go out of their ways to crush would-be global startups in Japan; keiretsu, by the author's own argument, didn't care about the global software-only market, thus would not kill those startups. The true culprit, the risk-averse culture -- while with own merits -- did not mesh well with the more fluid flat culture of software development.
It was not an accident that software did well in the most hippy region in the US, San Francisco. On the contrary, hardware development, due to much more constraints from the laws of physics and economics, has been done well in Japan et al as careful top-down planning is the edge, not individual-level agility.*
I am a little surprised that the author, who is active in Japan, is off the mark. I regularly talk to many engineers/entrepreneurs in the region, and the cause-and-effect are quite easy to see and are unanimously agreed upon. Kudos to people there who are trying to change the software development culture for the better.
* Elon's ventures seem to challenge this conventional dichotomy as he attempts to bring both agility and top-down leadership into his firms. More power to him.
As a software engineer currently working in Japan, I fully agree with your comment.
But I think it is not just the risk aversion, Japan is a very rigid country with an strong emphasis on following the hierarchy and rules, no matter how ridiculous they are, but introspection and critical thinking are not appreciated. This works well for industrial environments, but not for software development.
I think there is a bias for perfectionism. This can be a good point and a bad point.
I remember being a junior engineer and spending time to really make my software good and my first review had a comment that I spent too much time adding "bells and whistles" (which was only partially true). So it gets drilled out of you in US software.
I agree with you. As my first boss taught me, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
But after 6 years living here, I find the image of the Japanese as perfectionists to be a myth. Sure, the old sushi master that has dedicated his life to the craft might a perfectionist; most other people are not. Take a look a the average Japanese city with its ugly buildings, chaotic street layout, and insane cabling. Or the average office or shop, with a mess of boxes and piles of documents everywhere. Or the countryside (where I live) and the abysmal state of most roads and infrastructure. Those are not the signs of a perfectionist society.
I agree, the myth and mystery around "perfect Japan" which is funny because the west also loves its "wabi-sabi" and "ikigai" among other things. Japan in up on such a pedestal for some people, especially through the narrow lens of being a tourist or a consumer of their goods/services/media.
Heck, A LOT of things that have that desirable "made in Japan" sticker are made by abused migrant workers with very little protection and pay. They aren't even made by the "mythological perfect and careful Japanese hands."
Note: been here 15 years and I have many friends in the manufacturing industry
>Heck, A LOT of things that have that desirable "made in Japan" sticker are made by abused migrant workers with very little protection and pay. They aren't even made by the "mythological perfect and careful Japanese hands."
Same with made in Germany and the US. Actually, Made in Germany is worse.
Every consumer electronic I have labeled Made in Germany is absolutely crap. The Bosch stove has the sealing gasket wrongly mounted, the Siemens vacuum cleaner is poorly designed and built, so is the Fujitsu laptop I just sold which felt like bottom of the barrel e-waste.
Electronics from Xiaomi, Huawei, etc feels way better built and better designed than stuff labeled made in Germany.
I would go for Electrolux from second hand store, at least 15 years old. So far in my life I only bought one hoover. Still going strong after 30 years, just a new bag and filter now and then. And I had to replace the power contact once.
Warranty is still the legally required minimum of 2 years for Miele. You have no guarantee it will last longer than that. If Miele had so much confidence in their products lasting longer they'd offer longer warranties like Samsung does on their SSDs of 5 years or so.
The concept of "Miele lasts forever" is as outdated as the "German cars last forever". It used to be true in the past but we can't be coasting on that trope today.
sabi-sabi is more of a niche practice in Japan, that's overplayed by westerners for western audiences.
More like finding a handful of people in the whole of US history making paintings by sticking pasta onto a canvas, and presenting it as some huge cultural thing.
>Take a look a the average Japanese city with its ugly buildings, chaotic street layout, and insane cabling. Or the average office or shop, with a mess of boxes and piles of documents everywhere.
They are perfectionist, just not anal about it. Their perfectionism is not about tidy small shops.
And compared to the average US city, the average Japanese city is a masterpiece, including the modern buildings and streets.
Again, they are not perfectionist, that is a myth.
Second, I don't know how the average US city is, because I have never been to the US, but I think that you really overestimate how the average Japanese city looks like. People who have never lived here think that all of Japan is like the cool neighbourhoods of Tokyo, but that could not be further from the truth.
The average Japanese city suffers from serious urban sprawl, most are just a bunch of big box stores interconnected by stroads, and little houses scattered everywhere without any kind of planning. There are plenty of old, decaying buildings everywhere and streets in pretty bad condition.
Look, I live in Misawa, Aomori. Please take a look around on Google Street View, and then tell me how much of a masterpiece it is: https://maps.app.goo.gl/d5DDV3PT6MiSNYPYA
>Look, I live in Misawa, Aomori. Please take a look around on Google Street View, and then tell me how much of a masterpiece it is: https://maps.app.goo.gl/d5DDV3PT6MiSNYPYA
Compared to the average equivalent US city (all around, but especially in places like Mississipi, South Dakota, Alabama, the Appallachia, etc) this looks like Paris. Much less (essentially non comparatively) homicide, violent crime, or junkies there either.
Maybe perfectionist is the wrong word for it, but me, as a European I do feel there is some kind of (obsessive?) attention for details and (at least desire) for order in Japan cities that you don't see/feel in other places. This is my impression after 2 weeks around Japan, both cities and some country side.
There is an obsession for rules, procedures and order when it comes to people's behavior, but not the physical order of the city itself. Zoning laws and construction regulations are extremely lax, and that results in chaotic cities.
For example, the city where I live is full of farms and orchards in the center of the city itself (totally open to the street because Japanese people don't like fences), and half the streets are unpaved. That is unthinkable in my home country.
>For example, the city where I live is full of farms and orchards in the center of the city itself (totally open to the street because Japanese people don't like fences), and half the streets are unpaved. That is unthinkable in my home country.
Perhaps that home country could take a lesson or two and relax, instead of suffocating everything with rules and zoning then?
Cant reply, but how can japan cities have sprawl? They are usually one bay between mountains and the sea. Where do you sprawl in the us-sense from there?
First of all, half the population live in either the Greater Tokyo Area, or the Keihanshin area (Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe). Those areas are very dense.
Second, it is true that they don't have much usable land (but they still have some big flat areas), but outside of the aforementioned big cities, instead of building vertically, everybody wants to have their own house. The result is sprawling cities made of a combination of little houses and narrow streets cramped together, and big box stores connected by stroads.
I agree in substance. I see adherence of hierarchy as a facet of risk aversion. One doesn't wish to stand out too much but stand comfortably behind the veil of rules and orders.
To me, a simpler reason is the Japanese language has 140million speakers vs English At 1.4 billion.
You can argue that they've succeeded in other areas in the past like TVs and cars but software and apps imo are much harder to communicate usage and much harder to localize.
It's not just localization, it's close zero conscience of the world outside of Japan by most people in it. That is not to say people in the USA have more consciousness of the outside world. It's that they don't need it by luck that English works with 1.4 billion people
South Korea has a market of 51 million and an equally horrendous English language fluency and continues to retain Japanese style corporate law and norms, yet does comparatively better in tech entrepreneurship than Japan.
The big difference is capital markets, as SK along with other Asian countries became more attractive for Japanese capital than Japan during the 2000s.
> South Korea has a market of 51 million and an equally horrendous English language fluency
This shows that even on HN, all you have to do is sound confident.
Anyone who has spent a lot of time residing in both countries could tell you this is not true. English proficiency levels are significantly higher in Korea, to the extent that this difference has a societal and business impact on each country.
I have spent a lot of time in Japan and some time in SK and I cautiously disagree.
In both countries I found English levels to vary widely based on which industry and location you were in. I think Korean society in general has higher English skills among younger people especially due to the number of Koreans that have spent significant time in the US. But among IT industries and top graduates I'm not sure there's a big difference.
Among the IT industry there's definitely a noticeable difference, e.g. when you compare IT teams at their big local companies (not local branches of US companies), same goes for non-IT teams. A significantly higher percentage of Chaebeol subsidiary employees are able to conduct productive business in English than at Zaibatsus.
Of course this difference disappears at the top 1% level, but this holds pretty much anywhere in the world. China might be an exception because it's so big, not sure, but elsewhere you're not going to be at the forefront of things if you can't participate in the international community.
Yeah it’s extremely rare to see the typical employee at a major Japanese firm’s office in Japan with passable verbal english skills. So rare they practically don’t exist outside of foreign companies and upper management of Japanese companies and their consultants/‘advisors’/etc…
And this isn’t limited to IT, it’s pretty much the case in most departments.
Decent written English skills are not as rare though.
Exactly this. At their Korean equivalent its the norm that to get a promotion above a certain (middle management-ish) level, there's a hard requirement to get a certain grade on an English speaking test. This is taken seriously to the extent that some people who particularly struggle with English will take a several-month sabbatical just to get up to that level. I've never seen this kind of thing at Japanese companies except for very limited cases where the job inherently required near-daily communication with foreign businesses, definitely not as an org-wide policy. Sure, such English tests are always gamed and not super reflective of actual proficiency, but they're still indicative.
I can recommend reading about Chaebol in this context. [1]
Basically conglomerates grew so big through foreign investments that they control large parts of the legislative and executive body. The families regularly get threatened by some aspiring/greedy politicians, then they threaten to fire a lot of people, and then they get spoken free.
I'd argue that this was the inspiration for the Mr.Robot series (apart from enron group), as it's portraying a similar disfunct democracy that's effectively owned by oligarchs or is effectively an oligopol.
I agree with you. Samsung is probably their only global software exporter. Their other top companies are exclusively local: Naver, Kakao, Daum. Pretty much no one outside of SK (or Japan) knows of them.
I will say they come out with some dank video games like Lineage, Guild Wars, MapleStory, Black Desert Online, PUBG
Line is the biggest messaging (and taxi, and many other things) app in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand.
The software Samsung puts on their phones may just be a layer on top of Android but is still very influential by being run on billions of end-user devices.
The country's definitely low on internationally impactful SaaS, though they do exist e.g. Sendbird and Moloco.
Line was previously owned by Naver, but is now Japanese-owned. I believe it was actually developed in Japan - it happened as a reaction to communication problems during the 2011 earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster. It's an absolutely excellent app, no ads or anything, only pure communication with everything you would want for that purpose.
LY Corp is owned 50/50 by Naver and Softbank. It started as a reskin of Naver Talk, and the product development has effectively been done in Korea throughout the years. They've intentionally marketed it as being a Japanese app/company to assauge the Japanese government, as unlike in the West, East-Asian governments understand that an app that the entire nation has come to rely is a critical piece of infra that needs to be in national hands. But this has not reflected the reality.
This strategy of pretending to be a Japanese app has worked for a decade but now seems to be coming to an end, with the JP government looking to force Softbank to somehow broker a deal with Naver to reduce their share to less than 50%.
This is completely false. Line has been developed almost entirely in japan after the first couple years. The japanese team at this point is a couple orders of magnitude larger than the korean one, and most of the development is decided in japan.
These people aren't being hired to pick their nose [1]. Nor is it like the US where they only place such adverts to justify H1Bs.
There has been an entire scandal about Line's data having been hosted in Korea all this time for more than a decade, after which the servers finally got moved to Japan. You're hardly going to place all physical servers in country A and then do all backend and infra development in country B.
No, the difference is cultural. Japanese people are very capable, but the flipside of that is they don't need tools to get stuff done. This is why their software sucks fucking donkey arse balls, and I say that as a Japanese myself.
To put this in a more relatable way: Most people will invent apple peelers to peel apples, and make better peelers to make peeling easier. Some will just be lazy bastards and eat the apple skin and all. Japanese peel the apple with just an ordinary kitchen knife, their cutlery technology thus never advances beyond kitchen knife because "Why?".
Japanese simply cannot grasp the appreciation of good tools made for purpose because they can do everything with their bare hands, they can't understand WTF good software is because they don't need it and don't use it.
The syntax may be eyebleedingly awful but damn if it doesn't actually keep working. Justfiles aren't even parallisable, but make had that baked in decades ago.
And no matter how much vi(m) might be a plugin-bloated mess that never really gelled for me, it also never lagged out or randomly failed to do things like autocomplete or formatter running to nearly the extent VS Code does daily. And it didn't use half my CPU just sitting there.
Autotools, now, that's some real self-flagrllation.
What an excellently worded comment and great analogy. I've witnessed so many similar things in Japan.
It isn't until very recently that new houses in Japan were built with insulation. Why? Wearing a bunch of layers, slippers, sitting in front of a kerosene heater or under a kotatsu... It works, so why fix it? Maybe it's a lack of creativity, critical thinking, or suppliers.. but it doesn't matter. If it kinda works, don't fix it.
Which is interesting, because hundred of "keep warm in your house" little junky products have come out in the past decade like USB warmers and whatnot.
And yeah, there are some arguments (other than the status quo) against insulated houses: more cost, when houses are seen as a one-type-thing and not a long-term investment. No basements for a furnace for central heating. Earthquake standards. But really, it's mostly just the same "Why" from your comment.
Huh? Is this comment meant to be parody? Japan’s full of gadgets to help with everyday tasks, including vegetable peelers. Just visit Daiso or Loft or similar and look around a bit.
Or look around your typical supermarket. Instant noddles, pre-made curry mixes, pre-cut meat and vegetables, instant miso soup, precooked side dishes and so on. It’s not like this stuff cannot be prepared at home. It sells well because it’s convenient.
Apple peelers are more artistic license than not to prove the point, but there are other real examples.
The chief example are mobile phones, the poster child of Galapagos Syndrome[1]. Once Japan figured out mobile phones they stopped moving. They kept reiterating and ended up with the craziest mobile phones known to man, but they got 1HKO'd in broad daylight by the invention of the smartphone and haven't been relevant since.
Another is the Mitsubishi Regional Jet. With expertise building licensed F-15s and the pride of restarting Japanese domestic aviation manufacturing since the YS-11, they built one of the best regional jets ever and failed to sell a single one because they couldn't figure out how to document how the thing was made and thus the required certifications from the FAA and other authorities.
Both examples are of Japan simply not understanding what a good purpose made tool is, because they don't need to. Why would anyone want a smartphone? Why do we need to explain how this jetliner is made? Of course they realize why once they're crashed in the dirt, but by then it's way too late.
While not immune (eg: the ancient state of US banking), the rest of the world and the United States in particular on the other hand respect good products that shake the markets, people and companies who don't (eg: Boeing and Intel for recent examples) are tarred and feathered for their insolence.
I think these are good examples of Japanese corporate culture being quite insular, often not just of the world outside Japan, but often of the world outside the same company. Product design often stumbles because it focuses on the needs of the company not the customers (not a uniquely Japanese problem; cough Google).
It’s not a problem of people not appreciating good products - e.g. smart phones rapidly displaced the old “garakei” feature phones in Japan. Japanese consumers clearly appreciated them, just like they clearly appreciate fruit peelers..
Rather the mobile makers that reached market dominance became complacent. They failed to innovate, failed to expand overseas and were disrupted by innovative products.
>It’s not a problem of people not appreciating good products - e.g. smart phones rapidly displaced the old “garakei” feature phones in Japan. Japanese consumers clearly appreciated them, just like they clearly appreciate fruit peelers..
The problem is they need a Steve Jobs selling them on iPhones more than anyone else on the planet, and they almost never get their own "Steve Jobs" especially these days.
For a software example, consider LINE: The most popular instant messaging platform in Japan. It's owned and operated by a Japanese company today (LY Corporation, or the LINE Yahoo Corporation), but LINE is originally a South Korean piece of software engineering by Naver. Japan couldn't make their own product because "Why?", email and texting are fine they say; South Korea had to show them why.
A particularly egregious example is Toshiba putting the inventor of NAND flash (Fujio Masuoka) out to dry and claiming the technology was invented by Intel, because they so utterly hated the idea of creating an entire new market and needing to answer "Why?" when hard drives and floppies and tapes were just fine.
Japanese people are too capable for their own good, arguably they are so capable they are incapable.
Incidentally, Japan is still trying to make the metaverse and NFTs a thing. That should tell you all you need to know about how stagnant the Japanese can be once they're satisfied.
Toshiba fumbled the initial opportunity with NAND memory but went on to became a major player. The modern Kioxia is one of the largest makers in the world and a direct spin-off of Toshiba’s memory division.
They were motivated to claim that Masuoka was not the inventor of NAND because they would have owed him millions in inventors rights on the patents. Masuoka eventually sued and settled out of court.
Line wasn’t particularly innovative. It’s basically a WhatsApp clone. It was mostly developed in Japan, by a team of mostly Japanese engineers, working at the subsidiary of a Korean company. It succeeded because of good timing and execution, not because it was innovative.
The Mitsubishi Jet project had many problems. It was massively overtime and budget. Its design didn’t match the needs of foreign carriers. They didn’t have the right team in place to navigate the certification process. Seriously read the Japanese wiki page on it. It’s a good summary of where the project went wrong.
I don’t see how any of this supports the conclusion that Japanese people are “too capable for their own good” and “so capable they are incapable”, or “incapable of recognising good tools”.
There’s plenty of counter examples where Japanese companies have been innovative and pivoted. Look at Kodak vs Fuji Film.
Kodak invented much of the underlying technology for digital cameras but failed to capitalise. Instead their business was disrupted by Japanese digital camera makers, eventually driving Kodak to bankruptcy. Meanwhile Fuji Film saw the writing on the wall and successfully pivoted.
I don't agree with this, I have researched English proficiency across the world and South Korea consistently ranks quite a bit higher than Japan. Here is one example:
I also regularly talk with many people from both Japan and South Korea (being that I learn the languages), with those people having wildly varying degrees of English literacy... but in talking to all of them, the one consistent thing everyone has agreed on is that Koreans by-and-large definitely speak better English than Japanese.
My sense (as a Japanese expat) is that the smaller and closer to China the country is, the more serious people there are thinking about moving out of the country as a risk management, encouraging them to learn English harder. Another good example is Taiwan. It has a lot of good English speakers in its highly-educated cohort.
Japanese people aren't that serious about moving out (at least my generation. Your people look a bit different though.)
That breaks down as soon as you leave Asia. In Europe, most people attribute it to whether the country prefers subs v dubs. SK and Taiwan use subtitles for foreign media so they hear English language. In Japan, it's more common to dub.
This is mirrored in Europe where countries using subs (Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, etc) have better English language skills than dub countries (France, Germany, Spain).
Yeah. Horrendous Japanese English has to do with what I'd describe the "software" approach. Japanese English textbooks is written like a programmer's manual that grant readers a means to generate or analyze English scripts in certain punctual grammatical ways. IIUC, most other Asian nations including SK don't take this approach at all, and their English proficiency is massively higher.
I'm not sure if any other countries than Japan do that, but I smell something similar might be going on in public education in rural China; it's a somewhat usable alternative where immersive training is not available.
> The true culprit, the risk-averse culture -- while with own merits -- did not mesh well with the more fluid flat culture of software development.
Not even that. It's just about financing.
Japan's domestic capital markets collapsed due to the Asset Bust in the early 1990s, the Asian Financial Crisis in the late 1990s, and the Great Recession in 2008-12, and domestic asset managers turbocharged the "Flying Geese" development model in order to make themselves whole.
There's no reason for an Asset Manager at SoftBank, Nomura, or MUFG to invest in a Japanese startup when a South Korean, Chinese, Indian, or Singaporean startup can command outsized returns in an IPO or Acquisition.
Japanese asset managers play a major role in Tech VC/PE in Asia, but they prefer to invest abroad.
Look at the outsized returns from Alibaba (SoftBank), Flipkart (SoftBank), and Grab (MUFG) compared to anything that came out of Japan in the last 30 years.
> but at best, keiretsu is a symptom
South Korea and China both use the same corporate model that Keiretsus use, as much of the reform era leadership in both SK and China studied in Japan, and both countries got significant technical and economic advising from Japan via the "Flying Geese" model
Software tends to create winner takes it all markets, which means if you're a small fish wanting to get bigger you either need to create your own market, or get enough money to win over the other players.
Keiretsu not caring about a market forces new comers to go for the blue ocean strategy, as they won't get investments for fighting in the more crowded markets.
As the keiretsu also hold the capital, they also shape markets and should totally be blamed for what happens there.
To compare to the US, Microsoft wouldn't be there if IBM didn't invest in it. Apple also benefited from Xerox and got saved by Microsoft etc.. That's the kind of dynamic the Japanese market only saw in cars and customer electronics manufacturing.
I think if you work in an analysis of the exception to the rule - the success of Japan's outsize piece of the gaming industry - you'll have something really, really compelling.
I do not know if the Japanese gaming industry is an exception rather than of the rule. I see the game studios as part of the larger entertainment segment in Japan -- anime studios, music studios -- where it is actually very top-down vision driven by strong hands-on head figures like Hideo Kojima or Hayao Miyazaki. AAA titles (of games or motion pictures) have very different production, finance, and life cycles from typical dozen-person-developed consumer apps.
An illuminating question is, is Japan a leader in boutique shop games?
I think that's a misconception. AFAIK, the size of game development teams in Japan is generally smaller than that of Western teams, on average. Particularly in the industry's heyday of the 90s-early 2000s, teams were small enough that employees would be asked to wear many hats. For example, Tetsuya Nomura was famously hired by Square to be a creature artist, and found himself contributing in so many areas that he was eventually asked to direct. This includes on games like Final Fantasy VII, which at the time of release was one of the most expensive games ever produced.
Maybe it's a matter of Japanese firms becoming rigid and hierarchical at a faster rate in their lifecycle than Western firms do.
Japan is not leading the video games industry anymore for a long time now. They still have a good chunk because of strong long lived IPs but it's heydays are in the past
Japanese AAAs seem to be heading into the same slump as Western AAAs which is going to be more of a problem for them, since Japan has fewer indie and AA developers than the West, while Chinese competition is also growing, but I would neither say things have been this way for a long time, nor that Japan isn't still punching above its weight in video game sales and influence.
> but I would neither say things have been this way for a long time
What do you mean? It's fairly clear that most of the innovation in Japan was in the 80s and 90s. Since then, there's hardly any outstanding titles coming from Japan. Every year at the TGS it's just remakes and sequels or prequels. A sign of a dying industry.
> still punching above its weight
I'd call that inertia. But you already see that signs of decay: Final Fantasy is selling less and less, Capcom relies way too much on Monster Hunter for their own good, Konami is mostly dead (selling remakes contracted to third party studios), SEGA may be the most successful but that's mostly thanks to Atlus at this stage. Even Sony has hardly anything to show in their first party line-up. It's getting depressing.
Sequels aren't a problem if they're continuously improving on their predecessors. Setting aside Atlus which you already mentioned, and stale N+1 sequels, we've got: Square Enix with Octopath Traveler and Dragon Quest Builders recently (which improved with their respective sequels), From Software with Sekiro and Elden Ring, and Nintendo with Breath of the Wild (and its improved sequel).
However, I think in the main you're right (the industry is slowly dying), I just don't think it's as manifest (or irreversible) yet. I do think if Nintendo and Game Freak prevail against Palworld, things will get bleaker for Japanese development, though.
My feeling is that postwar Japan was a chaotic time and empowered a lot of crazy risk taking individuals along with the old zaibatsu who became keiretsu. As the Shouwa era progressed Japanese society became more risk averse and that most of Japanese industry now succeeds on the creative seeds of Postwar Japan and the rigidity born through the structure that came after.
It’s well documented how lenient the U.S. was with enforcing international law on Japans high ranking military and political leaders. The U.S. covered it up and whitewashed Hirohito’s role in WW2. It’s why Japan still has never apologized or even admitted to genociding Chinese and enslaving and raping Korea.
Open up a Japanese textbook on the early 20th century and you will find a glowing portrayal of an Imperial Japanese Empire.
I'm not talking about Hirohito, Yasukuni, the failure at regulating the zaibatsu, the occupation, or Japanese conservatism at all. I'm very familiar with Japanese history. I'm specifically talking about IT corporate culture in Japan. Not sure why you're bringing politics into this.
>It was not an accident that software did well in the most hippy region in the US, San Francisco. On the contrary, hardware development, due to much more constraints from the laws of physics and economics, has been done well in Japan et al as careful top-down planning is the edge, not individual-level agility.
So, Japan could be doing software like many think it should be done: as an well designed engineering practice.
> It was not an accident that software did well in the most hippy region in the US, San Francisco.
But it didn't. It did well in Palo Alto. It only moved into San Francisco when Palo Alto decided it was full, but the software industry continued growing anyway. San Francisco succeeded in software because it was near Palo Alto.
Games. Sony, Nintendo, are we really saying the country that makes PlayStation and Nintendo's is 'bad' at software?
And, Didn't someone in Japan make the Ruby language?
I didn't quite find it. How are they categorizing Japanese software as 'bad' compared to any other country? Was it just because US Silicon Valley has had a few bigger startups in general? Is that really a good benchmark?
I propose Japanese ATMs as a example of truly awful software. Most ATMs in Europe or the US have software that is merely bad, the Japanese ones are in another level.
I just booked a trip to Japan. Every single website was pretty bad, from airliners to bullet trains and hotels. They all look like something out of 2005 and have confusing flows.
He makes a lot of people mad but that doesn’t make him an idiot. It just makes him genuine. Everybody else who looks polished is hiding secrets behind excellent PR.
I agree that making a lot of people mad doesn't necessarily mean someone is an idiot. At the time time, making a lot of people mad does not necessarily mean someone is genuine.
For example, someone who manipulates a lot of people with misinformation might manifest anger in many. In that hypothetical scenario, I wouldn't think that the anger is because the target's an honest, forthright, genuine straight-shooter.
Furthermore, most people are genuinely kind and compassionate towards others. For those people, mass anger is not their genuine goal, or a likely consequence of them being genuine.
I don't know what you'd call firing the entire supercharger team because the head of the department pushed back on layoffs as anything other than idiotic.
No, I'd say they're running interference for Musk. It's one anonymous source claiming that the media was wrong, and many other fired sources that were willing to step up and say their entire department was axed. Why would I trust an anonymous source?
It was not an accident that software did well in the most hippy region in the US, San Francisco. On the contrary, hardware development, due to much more constraints from the laws of physics and economics, has been done well in Japan et al as careful top-down planning is the edge, not individual-level agility.*
I am a little surprised that the author, who is active in Japan, is off the mark. I regularly talk to many engineers/entrepreneurs in the region, and the cause-and-effect are quite easy to see and are unanimously agreed upon. Kudos to people there who are trying to change the software development culture for the better.
* Elon's ventures seem to challenge this conventional dichotomy as he attempts to bring both agility and top-down leadership into his firms. More power to him.