5 ms·
There should be companion pieces: "Why China didn't create the iPod" and "Why Europe (Germany, Finland, Sweden, etc.) didn't create the iPod". Japan and these p
by Jun8 17y ago
There should be companion pieces: "Why China didn't create the iPod" and "Why Europe (Germany, Finland, Sweden, etc.) didn't create the iPod". Japan and these places are all very tech-savy but their cultures are very different than that in the US, you can almost think of it as different solutions to the same equation.
Simplifying and summing up, I think the arguments go like this:
* In Japan, the conformity culture, bureaucracy in big companies, and lack of foreign brain power and venture capital is the problem (The Economist was saying that Japan has the lowest foreign technical investment in developed countries).
* In China, the lack of entrenched copyright culture is the problem, in fact, taking a product and hacking to add new features is prized. Also, good product design design and customer feedback is unknown.
* Europe does have excellent designers; however, it lacks a start-up worshiping culture, in fact they're given the cold shoulder in government-heavy countries like France. Their modus operandi is to proceed by government-funded huge projects, e.g. Galileo, Airbus. And the foreign brain power is there, too.
So, you see, it's not Japan's fault: US has a unique combination of cultural and other factors that produces things like the iPod. I don't think this is unrepeatable, though.
- swernli 17y agoI agree with points in general, but for one detail: > Europe does have excellent designers; however, it lacks a start-up worshipping culture... So? The iPod wasn't made by a start-up. The technology wasn't built from an acquisition of a start-up. I dare say it had absolutely nothing to do with start-up. Yes, Apple came from a start-up. But to my mind, the distance between Apple the start-up from a garage and Apple that envisioned the iPod and DRMed iTunes is sufficient to stop assuming only a start-up could've made the iPod. Big companies make things too.
- knweiss 17y ago"Why Germany didn't create the iPod?" is a very good question I've been asking myself, too. Remember that MP3 was even development by Germans (Fraunhofer Institut). But it required an US company to start the digital revolution... I still remember the end of the 90s when I was standing at the Schneider CeBIT booth talking to the booth personnel about their new niche product: One of the world's first MP3 players (I think it even had a parallel port). Shown in a corner of the booth and nobody was taking notice of the technology - even the Schneider people didn't seem to be interested. I talked to them about the huge potential of this technology and made them aware of the fact the MP3 encoding was about to take off at the universities (everybody in the CS department started ripping&encoding their CD collections). But they simply didn't see it, they didn't believe that MP3 (that they) could change the world with such a product. What a wasted opportunity!