3 ms·

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.