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Most important takeaway for me is: "The hype around the iPad in Tokyo highlights what has become a sobering reality for a country once considered the technologi

by Jun8 16y ago

Most important takeaway for me is: "The hype around the iPad in Tokyo highlights what has become a sobering reality for a country once considered the technological trend-setter; Japan now frequently looks overseas for innovation." Anyone has a theory as to why this happened? Japan seemed unstoppable so recently? Yes, their economy is in a recession for years but it seems such things have little effect on the American innovation engine (in fact innovation benefits when economic hardship acts as natural selection effects).

ecq 16y ago
One word. Innovation.
potatolicious 16y ago
It's really an isolated Apple thing I suspect - it's not as if Japan has suddenly gravitated towards American or European products in a bigger way than before. Asian tech cycles run a lot faster - in my experience people are willing to sink a lot more disposable income into gadgetry. My fashionable relatives in Taiwan routinely sink contract-free prices once or twice a year into phones just to stay on the bleeding edge - and these aren't tech geeks either. It's no wonder that a culture/economy that treats technology as a fashion statement would gravitate towards stylish devices. Apple out-styled the likes of Sony, that's all.
- Jun8 16y ago
  That's a valid point but I don't think the answer is as simple as that. About 2 months ago HN had a submission about why Japan didn't invent the iPad (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197702 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197702). To me many of the points made in that post (totally different innovation cultures) sound like a better explanation.
  - joubert 16y ago
    iPad wasn't invented by a country
    - _delirium 16y ago
      Apple, at least, seems to play up the iPad as an American device pretty heavily--- lots of "Designed by Apple in California" on packaging. Of course, there are marketing reasons for that.
      - joubert 16y ago
        They don't say designed in America.
redcap 16y ago
Japanese companies are very good with hardware, but the innovations these days are more often than not in software - which they are explicitly not good at.
- redcap 16y ago
  I'm getting marked down for no reason woot. I guess because I didn't really extrapolate? Fact is, software really hasn't spread as far here as you might think. Case in point: my home university in Australia was doing online class enrollment at least as far back as 2003 if not earlier. The year I spent at a so-called prestigious "national" university in Japan in 2004-5 you had to do a whole lot of enrolling by paper. There was also a whole lot of staff shuffling paper around in the international student office. Getting student cards (and presumably licenses) was a manual process - you had to get a photographed portrait done which was then glued onto the student card, as opposed to using a digital camera. In all my view of Japanese industry is that the big exporters are good at doing high-technology, but the rest of the Japanese economy lags a fair bit. There's also a cultural atmostphere that disencourages innovation - not many young people are doing startups. Another anecdotal point is that the primary interface for many years to the Internet was the mobile phone - not a PC. These mobile phones often tended to be loaded with features but not pretty easy to use - indicative of not much effort put into the software front.
elblanco 16y ago
Japan's efforts in hi-tech have always been different than other places, transport engineering, robotics, electronics, etc. Basically "stuff" but not software. I think it could be successfully argued that Japan is miles ahead of the West in certain areas like robotics or mobile digital television transmission. Software on the other hand has long been the Achilles heal of the Japanese technology industry. I read a great article one time on why that is (sorry I couldn't find the link to it, but this is somewhat along the same line http://gizmodo.com/5069366/why-zen-software-design-does-not-come-from-japan http://gizmodo.com/5069366/why-zen-software-design-does-not-... ) that attributes it to generally historic reasons. Principally that the Japanese language was hard to build into cheap computers early in the electronics boom and the result is that efforts (both engineering and in terms of cultural assimilation) simply went into other areas. Instead of PCs, people had fancy cell phones. Instead of people going into software and interface engineering, they went into analog and digital circuit designs. You could commonly get a cell phone in Japan that could take photos and videos, pay for a soda, access the Internet had ring tones (both for you and for the caller), could play games and mp3s long before you could get the equivalent in the U.S. Which sounds great on a pure features list, but the software on the phones generally stank. While hardware engineering in Japan is generally more mature than the equivalent in the West, the opposite is true of software engineering. Part of this means that sub-areas of SE are also more mature, like interface design. However, in Japan, consumers are trained to buy off of bullet points, so even devices like the iPhone had trouble taking off ( http://www.teleread.com/2009/02/27/why-the-iphone-is-not-popular-in-japan/ http://www.teleread.com/2009/02/27/why-the-iphone-is-not-pop... ) simply because it lacks features most users want, despite the fact that accessing the features it does have is a better experience. It's an interesting Paradox because you would think the opposite would be true. The Japanese traditional aesthetic should drive people to clean and simple UIs , but a couple generations of consumers simply haven't been brought up in that environment. The effect of course is that a couple generations of developers haven't been raised in an environment where there was demand for good UI.

by Jun8 16y ago

ecq 16y ago

One word. Innovation.

potatolicious 16y ago

It's really an isolated Apple thing I suspect - it's not as if Japan has suddenly gravitated towards American or European products in a bigger way than before. Asian tech cycles run a lot faster - in my experience people are willing to sink a lot more disposable income into gadgetry. My fashionable relatives in Taiwan routinely sink contract-free prices once or twice a year into phones just to stay on the bleeding edge - and these aren't tech geeks either. It's no wonder that a culture/economy that treats technology as a fashion statement would gravitate towards stylish devices. Apple out-styled the likes of Sony, that's all.

Jun8 16y ago
That's a valid point but I don't think the answer is as simple as that. About 2 months ago HN had a submission about why Japan didn't invent the iPad (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197702 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197702). To me many of the points made in that post (totally different innovation cultures) sound like a better explanation.
- joubert 16y ago
  iPad wasn't invented by a country
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Apple, at least, seems to play up the iPad as an American device pretty heavily--- lots of "Designed by Apple in California" on packaging. Of course, there are marketing reasons for that.
    - joubert 16y ago
      They don't say designed in America.

redcap 16y ago

Japanese companies are very good with hardware, but the innovations these days are more often than not in software - which they are explicitly not good at.

redcap 16y ago
I'm getting marked down for no reason woot. I guess because I didn't really extrapolate? Fact is, software really hasn't spread as far here as you might think. Case in point: my home university in Australia was doing online class enrollment at least as far back as 2003 if not earlier. The year I spent at a so-called prestigious "national" university in Japan in 2004-5 you had to do a whole lot of enrolling by paper. There was also a whole lot of staff shuffling paper around in the international student office. Getting student cards (and presumably licenses) was a manual process - you had to get a photographed portrait done which was then glued onto the student card, as opposed to using a digital camera. In all my view of Japanese industry is that the big exporters are good at doing high-technology, but the rest of the Japanese economy lags a fair bit. There's also a cultural atmostphere that disencourages innovation - not many young people are doing startups. Another anecdotal point is that the primary interface for many years to the Internet was the mobile phone - not a PC. These mobile phones often tended to be loaded with features but not pretty easy to use - indicative of not much effort put into the software front.

elblanco 16y ago

Japan's efforts in hi-tech have always been different than other places, transport engineering, robotics, electronics, etc. Basically "stuff" but not software. I think it could be successfully argued that Japan is miles ahead of the West in certain areas like robotics or mobile digital television transmission. Software on the other hand has long been the Achilles heal of the Japanese technology industry. I read a great article one time on why that is (sorry I couldn't find the link to it, but this is somewhat along the same line http://gizmodo.com/5069366/why-zen-software-design-does-not-come-from-japan http://gizmodo.com/5069366/why-zen-software-design-does-not-... ) that attributes it to generally historic reasons. Principally that the Japanese language was hard to build into cheap computers early in the electronics boom and the result is that efforts (both engineering and in terms of cultural assimilation) simply went into other areas. Instead of PCs, people had fancy cell phones. Instead of people going into software and interface engineering, they went into analog and digital circuit designs. You could commonly get a cell phone in Japan that could take photos and videos, pay for a soda, access the Internet had ring tones (both for you and for the caller), could play games and mp3s long before you could get the equivalent in the U.S. Which sounds great on a pure features list, but the software on the phones generally stank. While hardware engineering in Japan is generally more mature than the equivalent in the West, the opposite is true of software engineering. Part of this means that sub-areas of SE are also more mature, like interface design. However, in Japan, consumers are trained to buy off of bullet points, so even devices like the iPhone had trouble taking off ( http://www.teleread.com/2009/02/27/why-the-iphone-is-not-popular-in-japan/ http://www.teleread.com/2009/02/27/why-the-iphone-is-not-pop... ) simply because it lacks features most users want, despite the fact that accessing the features it does have is a better experience. It's an interesting Paradox because you would think the opposite would be true. The Japanese traditional aesthetic should drive people to clean and simple UIs , but a couple generations of consumers simply haven't been brought up in that environment. The effect of course is that a couple generations of developers haven't been raised in an environment where there was demand for good UI.