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I think Japan's products often miss the bigger picture. They often excel at one specific problem, but lack cohesive strategy to tie back into the whole ecosyste
by dmak 5y ago
I think Japan's products often miss the bigger picture. They often excel at one specific problem, but lack cohesive strategy to tie back into the whole ecosystem. In this post, there was discussion about SD cards and music hence why they needed some kind of PC connectivity. I view that as a symptom of the lack of a bigger strategy. Apple came out with iTunes that was one answer to the music industries problem, and that allowed them to eventually iterate into the iPod with less need to support alternative ways for PC connectivity such as the SD card.
- jesterson 5y agoThat's a result of mindset and approach. Japanese can't focus on 2 or more problems, neither they can assess influence of one issue against another and see an ecosystem. It's neither good nor bad - it did allowed them to extremely excel in transportation for example, but terribly fail in any IT related matters simply because this approach won't work in IT.
- pezezin 5y agoTrue that, I live in Japan and notice it almost daily. Sometimes it can make meetings extremely frustrating, as in we have three problems, you propose a single solution that can fix all of them at the same time, and they don't like it, they prefer a single solution for each problem, which of course you have to apply serially because as you said they can't focus on several problems at the same time. I wonder how much kanji is to be blamed for this mindset. I mean if you need a different character for every single word, maybe it's easy to extrapolate that idea to other aspects of life.
- jesterson 5y agoNot sure if kanji are to blame - chinese use same alphabet but their way of thinking is totally different. I'd suggest the root cause is in arguably failing japanese education system. It makes them very rigid in the way they see the world and make decisions. It's same reason why they adore Excel so much, btw.
- pezezin 5y agoHoly shit Excel! Don't get me started on that... I would like to know who are the idiots at my company that decided that making complex forms with pictures and shit in Excel is a good idea. Like they don't know Word exists for a reason?
- numpad0 5y agoYeah sort of lacking the concept of hierarchy and/or recursion. “We need Z to do Y to do X” - no no the operand can’t be a pointer to executable address. That’ll fault.