Japan's efforts in hi-tech have always been different than other places, transport engineering, robotics, electronics, etc. Basically "stuff" but not software.

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.