[HN Gopher] A mistake that killed Japan's software industry? (2023)
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A mistake that killed Japan's software industry? (2023)
Author : ayoisaiah
Score : 64 points
Date : 2024-11-07 16:08 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.disruptingjapan.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.disruptingjapan.com)
| Circlecrypto2 wrote:
| This is actually really interesting history, but I wonder about
| apps like Line, which the Japanese still prefer. It's not a great
| app, but it's a user app, not a corporate one.
| zdw wrote:
| Interestingly, Line originally was developed by Naver which is
| a South Korean company, although it's gone through several
| changes of corporate control since.
| yongjik wrote:
| It's jointly owned by Naver and Softbank. A few months ago,
| there was a public outcry in Korea when the Japanese
| government threatened to twist Naver's arm to give up its
| share of Line, and South Korea's inexplicably pro-Japanese
| government stayed mum. With both governments enjoying abysmal
| public support, I have no idea how it will eventually be
| settled.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| s.korea is pro japan.
|
| =. better than china.
| timoth3y wrote:
| Line was actually a Korean startup. There days, it's not a
| great app, but strong network effects keep it dominant here in
| Japan.
| rwmj wrote:
| Really? I use Line all the time including for sending text,
| video, and making audio and video calls, and it works great.
| Never had issues with it.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| This Line? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details/%EB%9
| D%BC%EC%9D%B...
|
| From the reviews, it looks like the unhappy path wasn't
| well tested.
| ilamont wrote:
| Also used widely in Taiwan.
| stevecalifornia wrote:
| TLAI: The podcast episode you were reading discusses several
| reasons why Japan has historically struggled with software
| quality:
|
| Economic Structure: Japan's economic structure, influenced by
| zaibatsu (large industrial conglomerates) and keiretsu (business
| groups), focused more on hardware and manufacturing rather than
| software development.
|
| Political Decisions: Post-WWII political decisions prioritized
| rebuilding Japan's industrial base, which led to a strong
| emphasis on hardware and less on software innovation.
|
| Cultural Factors: There was a cultural preference for hardware,
| and software was often seen as secondary. This mindset
| contributed to a lack of investment and innovation in the
| software sector.
|
| Education and Training: Historically, there was less emphasis on
| software engineering education and training, leading to a
| shortage of skilled software developers.
|
| Despite these challenges, the podcast expresses optimism about
| the future of Japanese software, highlighting recent positive
| changes and the potential for innovation.
| Sakos wrote:
| We see similar factors in Germany, which I find interesting. To
| the point where Volkswagen is investing billions into Rivian to
| save their software side. I've never heard anything good from
| developers I know who worked at VW or any other German
| manufacturer.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Having worked at a number of hardware manufacturers, a lot of
| them really don't understand software at all. They look at
| software as if it were just another line item on the BOM: 12
| qty 6-32 screw, 2 qty rubber gasket, 1 qty plastic case... OH
| AND 1 qty "firmware software thinggy," that we add to the
| product at station 244 on the assembly line. Go make some
| software that meets the requirements and spoon it into the
| product so we can ship. No thought about longevity, updates,
| security threats, intercompatibility with other devices and
| standards, UX, accessibility, the software ecosystem,
| nothing... Software is just another part number that's
| supplied by a supplier and bolted onto the "real" physical
| product.
|
| So it's no surprise when software companies come in and eat
| this mentality for lunch when they decide to come up with a
| competing hardware product.
| simne wrote:
| Your comment wonder me. As I hear from CS community like a
| mirror words - because semiconductor manufacturing is
| prohibitively expensive, cs becomes too abstract.
|
| But my own exp, mostly confirm your words, even when I sure
| see just my side of whole picture and I'm attracting to
| explain my exp as regional specific (I'm in Ukraine,
| exUSSR, and people here conservative and share old USSR
| habits).
| Animats wrote:
| We're back to keiretsu. They're called Amazon, Apple, Facebook,
| Google, Amazon, and Netflix. Each has its own closed world, moat,
| and small vendors subservient to it.
| echelon wrote:
| Netflix doesn't belong on that list. They're tiny in
| comparison. YouTube is bigger than Netflix.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Citation needed; Netflix has a ~$350 billion market cap [0].
| Google has one of $2.227 trillion [1], and 10.25% of its
| revenue is attributed to Youtube revenue. Since I haven't
| found a quick reference to youtube's net worth, let's assume
| it's 10.25% of $2.227T, which is ~$222 billion, making YT
| smaller than Netflix.
|
| [0] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nflx/market-cap/ [1]
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/marketcap/ [2]
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/289659/youtube-share-
| of-...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Regardless of numbers, Netflix is nowhere near as
| influential as the others. It's just a website that plays
| videos, and one can easily live life without it.
|
| The other big companies are much harder to avoid, they're
| basically infrastructure.
| ghaff wrote:
| If Netflix closed up shop tomorrow, there'd be a long a
| thread here, lots of headlines, and lots of whining, but
| at this point there are a ton of other streaming services
| and most of us would shrug and move on. Netflix has been
| on my bubble for a good couple of years and has only
| marginally kept my monthly subscription.
|
| In fact, I'm still somewhat angry at Netflix for wiping
| out disc rental and then killing their own DVD by mail
| which was a good source of reliable one+ year old movies.
| wenc wrote:
| In the market cap website, the other companies are in the
| Top 7.
|
| Netflix is 27.
| lebuffon wrote:
| I read this book a long time ago. It provided some insights on
| the role of Japan's difficulty with foreign languages in the
| 1980s and the desire to create AI translation. The "Fifth
| Generation project" was a massive government and big-business
| joint venture that amounted to almost nothing.
|
| The author explores why with some surprises along the way. I
| would say it is like the "Mythical Man Month" from the Japanese
| side of computing.
|
| The book also opened my eyes to the difficulty of mastering
| Japanese.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial-
| Intelligence/dp/019504939X
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Your link is broken, please fix it for me to check out :)
| Minor49er wrote:
| Just remove the space from the URL
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| > _First, as the cold war heated up in the 40s and 50s, America's
| idealistic vision for a democratic and progressive Japan took a
| back seat to the more practical and pressing need to develop
| Japan into a bulwark against Communism._
|
| Funny how protecting the ideals of progressive democracy from
| Communism so often involved suppressing those ideals ourselves.
| Beat the Commies to the punch, I guess.
| quanto wrote:
| 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.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Less power to Elon, who seems to be an idiot who has to be kept
| away from the dangerous stuff.
| octopoc wrote:
| 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.
| MrLeap wrote:
| 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.
| alexander2002 wrote:
| That is an very good observation.
| renewiltord wrote:
| LLM level response. I don't think we need this opinion shared
| every single time.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > 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.
|
| There's no reason for an Asset Manager at SoftBank 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.
|
| 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.
| miki123211 wrote:
| There's one more aspect to this that wasn't mentioned at all in
| the article.
|
| In Japan, home computers never really made sense until it was
| far, far too late.
|
| In the west, you'd buy a PC (or a home computer) to play games,
| edit documents or manage your business. The latter two were
| pretty much impossible in Japan, as the computers of that era
| couldn't handle the complexities of the Japanese language and
| character set. Gaming was all that remained, and if you only
| wanted gaming, you could just as well get a NES (known in Japan
| as Famicom), which was much better suited for the purpose.
|
| Computers eventually caught up, but some of the cultural impact
| remained, still making them less popular than in the west.
|
| This is one of the reasons why Japanese were so good at consumer
| electronics, they just needed that electronics a lot more than we
| did, and the devices needed a lot more features, as "just plug it
| into a computer to do the complicated stuff" wasn't really an
| option there.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't know exactly the reasons but Japanese software is
| basically embarrassing. I was talking to a good friend of mine
| last month who is a very good photographer about how you
| basically don't have GPS or a ton of other features in the main
| cameras from Japan--so both of us increasingly just use iPhones
| unless we really need to use big bodies and lenses.
|
| Sure, some of it is that iPhones (Pixels) do a good enough job
| for a lot of us. But it's also that the gap has closed so much
| and a lot of it is about software.
|
| Go to events in Japan and a lot of the design of posters and so
| forth just looks seriously bad to US (and presumably European)
| eyes.
|
| And even in the large systems space, when I was an IT industry
| analyst, there was just a lot of quirky Japanese tech stuff
| that was out of step with the world as a whole.
|
| I don't have a coherent theory for it all but Japan just fell
| out of alignment with mainstream patterns especially in the 90s
| or so.
| quanto wrote:
| I don't follow your argument. PCs weren't popular because they
| couldn't handle the Japanese language encoding, but somehow,
| consumer electronics were popular because they could handle the
| complex tasks with the language?
|
| JIS C 6226, the encoding for the Japanese language, was made in
| the 70s. While later than the US, I would not call it late.
| skissane wrote:
| > In the west, you'd buy a PC (or a home computer) to play
| games, edit documents or manage your business. The latter two
| were pretty much impossible in Japan, as the computers of that
| era couldn't handle the complexities of the Japanese language
| and character set.
|
| NEC sold a Kanji board for their Z80-based PC8801 mk II
| (released 1983). The original 1979 PC8801 didn't have an
| official Kanji board from NEC, but one was available for it
| from a third party vendor. With a Kanji board, you could do
| Japanese word processing. I believe the same was true of many
| other 8-bit vendors.
|
| Inevitably the greater complexity of Kanji required more
| advanced hardware, so Kanji-capable machines usable for
| business and education were initially more expensive than
| games-only machines that lacked it. But in 1990 IBM released
| DOS/V, which demonstrated that standard PC hardware had become
| powerful enough to support Kanji without needing any
| specialised hardware. And even before that, I believe already
| by the late 1980s many machines (such as NEC PC-9800s) were
| coming with Kanji support as a standard feature rather than an
| optional add-on card.
| downrightmike wrote:
| That powerful IBM system was unique to other systems being
| brought into Japan, in that IBM started up that business just
| before the rule that required a Japanese partner. So it
| didn't really get shared like other technologies that lead to
| most other Japanese tech giants.
| bartread wrote:
| There was this entire Japanese subculture of
| microcomputers/home computers/PCs. Machines like NEC PCs you
| mentioned, proprietary models from Fujitsu and others, the
| many incarnations of MSX (which I think might have started
| out as a Microsoft initiative?), and of course the nowadays
| legendary Sharp X68000, that were marketed and sold in Japan
| but not necessarily well known - or even available - outside
| of east and south-east Asia (though I think MSX also got some
| traction in South America).
| delichon wrote:
| Ruby is not awful, it's closer to insanely great Japanese
| software. Open source may be something of an antidote to
| keiretsu.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I don't buy the Keiretsu argument.
|
| South Korea and China both adopted the Keiretsu model for
| conglomerates due to Japan's Flying Geese doctrine, yet both
| still have fairly robust software scenes.
|
| If I were a betting man, my hunch would be the collapse of
| domestic financing during the Asian Financial Crisis and Great
| Financial Crisis.
|
| Japanese asset managers who concentrated on tech like SoftBank
| and MUFG had better options in Asia (South Korea, China, India)
| or in North America (USA) to invest in with better returns
| compared to Japan.
|
| This is why SoftBank has always been a prominent checkwriter in
| those markets.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Video games are technically software and we all know the Japanese
| are highly skilled in making them, with few glitches to none
| glitches, etc.
|
| My view is different: software is a response to a need. And the
| Japanese have found ways to solve many of their problems without
| software. They are OK using a fax and it works excellently for
| them.
|
| Sometimes software is a solution to a trust problem, or a
| reliability problem, or a synchronization problem. The Japanese
| are trustworthy, reliable and punctual in general and do not have
| those problems.
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