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A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?
- deterministic 4y agoThe Japanese games software companies seems to be doing just fine.
- sposeray 4y ago[dead]
- 082349872349872 4y agoAn anecdote from the period described: I was working on a product which had hit an unknown bug on the japanese localised Windows, so our partner sent an engineer with a bunch of install disks to visit me. One of the first things he said was: look, this is the difference between the US and JP — you have three computers on your desk (he was counting the ICE), but I have to share "my" computer with two other developers. At the time, I took it for self-deprecating exaggeration. After reading this article, I fear he had probably just been making a factual observation.
- auvi 4y agojust wondering, what is an "ICE"?
- mshroyer 4y agoThe abbreviation I know is "in-circuit emulator", but wouldn't know if that's what they were referring to
- 082349872349872 4y agothis. (but of course I almost never powered it up without thinking of Gibson's "black ice"; cf Burning Chrome) incidentally, Burning Chrome's description of how Automatic Jack lost his arm, over Kyiv, was coincidentally prescient...
- numpad0 4y agoAnd they usually looks and works like a Borg tentacles and assimilated production hardware, despite the "emulator" nomenclature, apparently by tradition from very early days of microprocessors when ICEs actually were alternate implementations for chips it emulates
- akkto 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-circuit_emulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-circuit_emulation
- makeitdouble 4y agoMilage vary, my own anecdote: until we got Macs (OSX) as dev machines, every companies I worked for in Japan allowed us to buy two individual machines: the standard Windows one (just like every other employee) and a linux "server" for our dev needs we'd ssh into.
- 082349872349872 4y agothis was windows 3.0, so linux might have been contemporaneous, but just barely (WP tells me 1991 ~= Linux 0.01). https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_3.0A https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_3.0A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Chronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Chronology
- tyiz 4y agoWhat a wall of text. Please add a TL;DR
- bramblerose 4y agoIt's a transcription of a podcast, not an article on itself.
- signa11 4y agotoo-long don't-read
- poglet 4y agoNeed some type of system to summarise it.
- sschueller 4y agoI believe you can copy pate the article to ChatGPT and ask it to summarize.
- ijoijiuiuni 4y ago[dead]
- VMG 4y agoI had to split it up into three pieces but it worked > me: can you summarize all the information I gave in three sentences > ChatGPT: Japanese software is known to be of poor quality, but there are historical and cultural reasons for this. The zaibatsu and keiretsu systems that dominated the Japanese economy in the past prioritized hardware innovation over software development, leading to a lack of respect for software developers. In recent years, the emergence of cloud computing and the smartphone market have allowed Japanese software developers to become more influential and respected, and the industry is slowly improving.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoIn the 80's, the old entrenched conglomerates decided it'd be easier and more profitable to expand their hardware divisions than invest in a new unproven software market.
- keep3490 4y ago[dead]
- Firmwarrior 4y agoThanks for this. I'm probably going to have to move back to Japan soon, since the wife is from there and can't handle living in the USA Rather than take an 80% pay cut to partake in the salaryman lifestyle, I'm going to have to start some sort of business. This podcast should have some relevant info, haha
- suction 4y agoCould you elaborate a little on why she can’t handle living in the US?
- Firmwarrior 4y agoah, she just doesn't like the way things work here, and she's scared to learn to drive The service in the SF Bay Area is really amazingly dismal. It's embarrassing every day to be an American living here. People at restaurants, stores, etc are all angry and stressed out. I'm hoping I can convince her to move somewhere else in the USA with me, since it'll be a lot easier to find some remote work in my same time zone
- midoridensha 4y agoSomewhere else will still require driving for every little thing, because that's how America is. If you want to live a car-free lifestyle, America is simply impossible outside of Manhattan, NYC, but it's commonplace in any larger Japanese city. And Americans are all angry and stressed out everywhere else in America too. It became a really miserable place to live in my experience during the pandemic, so I was really glad to get out and move to Japan where everything is civilized and people know how to act in public.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoWell, we've had pretty decent luck with Utah, Florida, Texas, and other parts of the US lately when traveling. The service isn't on par with Japan, but they're nice at least. I'm hoping I can convince her to learn to drive.. Although if we move near my friends and family, I could just have one of my minions drive her around every day Hopefully I can work out a way to earn $8k a month or so doing something online. Then I could maintain residences in Tokyo and the non-HCOL part of the USA, and pop back and forth occasionally.
- rippercushions 4y agoI don't disagree with much of the story, but there are other factors too. A big one is that due to the complexity of the Japanese writing system, PCs never went mainstream: the older generations survived with handwriting, faxes and dedicated word processors, and the newer ones jumped right to mobile phones, meaning the PC hacking generation of the 70s and 80s that kicked off the dot-com boom was much smaller than in the West. Plus you had the usual Galapagos problem of Japanese computers being incompatible with the rest of the world (MSX, PC-98, DOS/V etc). I'm also much less optimistic than the author about the future of the Japanese software industry. Mobile dev in particular is massive across Asia and Japan has no competitive advantage over (say) China, Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia etc here.
- spullara 4y agoThere is a good reason though that the most common communication mechanism in China is talking rather than typing.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoI'm not so sure. Have you watched them type on computers and phones? It's a bit more complicated because you need an IME, sure, but it doesn't seem to make that much of a difference. I guess it's tempting to draw that conclusion, but I think it's much more related to culture. Even among European countries, and within countries but between age groups, the usage of voice vs text is pretty different.
- mchaver 4y agoWhat is your source or personal experience for that? I don't think the typing system has any correlation. In fact you can actually type pretty fast with modern keyboard software, there are lots of shortcuts. I type in Chinese with friends and family everyday and so do my kids. Hardly anyone uses voice messages. I find leaving voice messages on messaging systems more popular with Spanish speakers than Chinese speakers, and Spanish is one of the easy languages to write for native speakers.
- 4y ago
- idiocratic 4y agoSo many parallels with the Italian software industry. Plagued by low pay, clerical work and system integrators monopolising the entire industry for decades. I also see cloud computing and Silicon Valley glamour as the turning point for the industry.
- dchftcs 4y agoStart reading from "How this mess started". You're welcome.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- post-it 4y ago> If you want details and debate about exactly how Japanese software falls short, or if you just in the mood for some good old-fashioned venting about being forced to use it, check out Reddit or maybe Hacker News. Anyone have some good links to examples?
- mihaaly 4y agoFor those reading comments first the story starts in the third paragraph. It could only me but the way it is written obstructs the consumption of the content. Two long paragraph went on before started to talk about the actual topic, after elaborating about how much the author worked and work on it and what is not going to talk about in a stage entertainer kind of inflated manner (the comment "I am not going to waste your time" is ironic then). It kind of derails the focus from the content in my opinion. Edit: the story is pretty interesting btw.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 71bw 4y agoYou will consume ze article and leave positive feedback...
- fexecve 4y agoI disagree with everything in this article post-2000. There were no "software gatekeepers" preventing Japanese software from flourishing on the PC or Mac. I'm not sure what the author is talking about there. So there's still the unexplained question of why Japanese software is still bad, in 2023. And I think the answer is the language barrier. Windows and Mac dominate the world's computer systems, and the development tools for those environments are English-centric. The translations are lacking or no existent. The struggle of a Japanese developer to make an app is greater than that of a primarily English-speaking developer. Also, outside of USA/China/India, software developers are still not given much respect or seen as equal to say, mechanical engineers or electrical engineers. So there's little reason for Japanese students to major in software.
- squaresmile 4y ago> The translations are lacking or no existent I wonder if the Windows/C#/VS ecosystem translations are actually decent leading to Japanese developers not being forced to learn English? From what I have seen, Windows and Visual Studio have usable Japanese translations and documentation. I have seen code from Japanese devs that if the original writer had had better grasp of English, they probably would not have made the mistake by understanding the English and argument names. This also means that outside of the MS ecosystem, it's a huge language barrier to overcome. It's probably not the main factor but just some foods for thoughts.
- nindalf 4y ago> The struggle of a Japanese developer to make an app is greater than that of a primarily English-speaking developer. And yet somehow, Chinese developers manage just fine?
- langitbiru 4y agoI think the population factor plays here.
- noobermin 4y agoThe only difference I see is the Chinese market is large enough that you don't need to appeal globally.
- Cloudef 4y agoThe japanese way of working doesn't work for software industry. Everything is so slow and there's too many different organizations cooking the same soup. Japanese way of working works best for things that already have been designed for you and just needs building. The only exception would be video games, but it seems game development is heavily followed and developed by a single company, compared to typical corporate / business software.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- PsycheOS 4y agoThe Japan method of working is also light and fast. It depends on industries and also particular companies. Japanese love kata - kata is pattern so there is no reason they cannot use state of art of select from a variety of design or development patterns. And they do.
- braingenious 4y ago> Shakespeare only wrote 37 plays, Orson Wells only made 64 films, Mozart wrote 68 symphonies, but Disrupting Japan? Well, as of today, Disrupting Japan has 200 episodes. This is the most alarmingly stupid bit of text I’ve seen on this website in years. It’s wildly disconcerting that there exists some sort of apparatus that allows people to buy top ranking on the front page with utter garbage that clearly has zero value. What’s the going rate?
- housingisaright 4y agoIsn’t it a joke?
- braingenious 4y agoIs it?
- Loocid 4y agoYes.
- asddubs 4y agoisn't it a joke?
- braingenious 4y agoIs it?
- asddubs 4y agoyes?
- braingenious 4y ago@dang I’d look into this. Edit: There are two accounts that are happy to publicly disagree with me within seconds of eachother, and three-six that are are happy to downvote privately within those same seconds. Maybe I’m magically guilty of having The Wrong Take or there are some people that will kneejerk use their network of accounts to downvote things that aren’t useful to their buddies.
- jimmcslim 4y agoAlthough the article is about the entire software industry of Japan, and not about the efforts of one individual, I feel like it does a great disservice to not mention Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka Matz, the inventor of Ruby? Since 1995. How many startups have been launched with that platform as their basis?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pvg 4y agoThis might be true but generally we don't count, say, Python- or semaphore- using startups as successes of the Dutch software industry, unless they are Dutch startups.
- G3rn0ti 4y agoAlso we should not forget the history of the MSX platform that is tied to the ASCII Corp. in Tokyo. It was an early 80s startup led by Kazuhiko Nishi who licensed MS Basic and introduced MS products to Japan for the first time. Later it became the de facto Basic standard for the MSX platform that kind of dominated personal computing in the 80s (similar to how Commodore and Spectrum dominated that market in Europe during the same time). There is this cute photo of Nishi-san posing next to the young Bill Gates: https://ozeidi.wordpress.com/2015/10/10/my-first-personal-computer-ax170/ https://ozeidi.wordpress.com/2015/10/10/my-first-personal-co... This gives a good overview on Ascii Corp: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Corporation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Corporation
- golemiprague 4y ago[dead]
- desi_ninja 4y agoDeveloping video games will come under software development and Japan has world class video game studios for decades now. Kojima Studios is in Japan
- mach1ne 4y agoMaybe in semantics but not in the intention of the article.
- Cyph0n 4y agoKojima Studios is not that impressive when it comes to volume. Better examples: * Nintendo first-party studios * Square Enix * From Software * Sega * Bandai Namco * Capcom Note: Sony/Playstation is a Japanese company, but most of its first-party studios are outside of Japan.
- metalcrow 4y agoFROM is a a great game company, but also a perfect example of what this post is talking about. Their code is REALLY bad. There was a cross game RCE they had to shut down all their servers for recently, the games are riddled with bugs, and the actual code structure itself (from reverse engineering) is spaghetti.
- yokoprime 4y agoExactly! Going back to the 80s, Nintendos developers made top notch software.
- bvanderveen 4y agoAll credibility lost here: > Cloud computing drastically reduced the capital and time required to start a startup. In the dot-com era a decade before, starting an internet startup required purchasing racks of servers and paying system administrators to keep them running, but suddenly fully configured, maintained, and secure serves could be had for a few cents per minute — pay as you go. > Suddenly Japan’s software developers didn’t need to explain their idea to a VC and convince them that it would sell. They could just build things and get people to start using them and start paying for them. And that’s just want they did. Your hosting cost, whether you're on bare metal or the most opinionated git-push-your-rails-app is a tiny line item on the P/L. Rarely have I seen an instance where the pay-off period for spending, say, a month of one engineer's time (for a nice round number, say, $10k) reducing the hosting expenses is less than a year (say, $1k/mo in hosting expenses). In just about every case you're better off spending that developer-month building a feature or delivering a contract. So yeah, maybe cloud computing saved you, at the outside, $10-20k server parts and a rack in a colo or whatever. TLDR with or without The Cloud, 2022 or 1999, your server costs are tiny in comparison to what you spent on payroll getting to market. Yeesh.
- noobermin 4y agoThe one thing I might add (don't know for sure, just guessing) is the cost of things might look different in Japan vs. here in the US. May be the cloud made a serious differential in the upfront cost as hardware is more expensive there, I don't know.
- astrange 4y agoBuying anything in Japan (even an MS Office license) is at least more likely to require going out drinking with salespeople rather than just visiting a website.
- habitue 4y agoIn pure dollars per minute, yes, but the primary benefit being alluded to here is a political one. A small team can use tiny discretionary funds and build a working prototype quickly. The same project is dead in the water if you have to go get buy in to allocate company compute, get multiple VP signoff on a project proposal, etc etc. Cloud computing turned asking permission into asking forgiveness, and that's a real benefit politically.
- noobermin 4y agoI know the author likely has more experience in Japan, but I don't understand this lust some developers in Japan have being like American start-up workers. There is a lot of money in it as an individual, but start-ups have sometimes been great but have also been terrible as well. I know I'm kicking against the goads here on HN by pointing that out, but an objective look at it shows it to be true. Just remind people that wework and Theranos existed, or point out the most important IT companies today started out as start-ups perhaps but are nothing like them now, and now look very much like the old guard they "disrupted." Start-up'ing at least from the outside just looks like an initial condition, a spawn point, but the final situation that is recognized as success is a large company with many admins and an HR dept, or being bought by one. That looks a lot like the keiretsu but without the commitment to workers, so really the worst of both worlds but the best for MBAs and HR people. I sympathize with the lack of respect software developers have there perhaps, that I understand.
- danjac 4y agoIs gaming not part of the software industry? What aspects of Japanese game development made it hugely successful compared to business and other software development?
- kryptiskt 4y agoYet Japan has had a flourishing video games industry since the 70s starting with arcade games. I would have liked the article to touch on such counterexamples and what is different in their case.
- noobermin 4y agoThis is a question mark for me. In nintendo in particular, many of the software engineers ended up being quite important in the company, although there were also game designers so may be the logic is different here?
- Barrin92 4y agoYou can successfuly export Japanese games, they're valued because they are different. You can't successfully export Japanese enterprise or user software because it really predominantly is designed for the Japanese market which is very unique. It's not even awful as the author claims, just different. People always create these complicated narratives for why non Anglosphere countries don't create many consumer or business facing software products and the answer is simply because they're at a comparitive disadvantage both in terms of culture and scale.
- Laremere 4y agoThe article/podcast mentions how quality hardware engineering was still valued, and used Nintendo as a specific example of success. Sony was mentioned as being outside the keiretsu system, and afaik Nintendo has never been involved with one either. This also correlates well with my personal knowledge of the industry. Japan has a great track record of game design, but they aren't exactly known for innovation in software specifically. Some examples: Teenagers from the UK where hired to write the code for Starfox, because they could and Nintendo's programmers couldn't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to4Ekb0kXiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to4Ekb0kXiE Xbox spearheaded the consoles in the online space, and Nintendo is still far behind. Japan runs circles around the rest of the world when it comes to making successful fighting games. Yet western modders are also known for coming in and fixing online play by adding network rollback.
- 4y ago
- tehnub 4y ago>I am not going to waste your time or mine cataloging and complaining about the many, many bad practices, user-hostile design decisions, mind-boggling complex workflows, and poor development process that afflict Japanese software. >If you want details and debate about exactly how Japanese software falls short, or if you just in the mood for some good old-fashioned venting about being forced to use it, check out Reddit or maybe Hacker News. This topic comes up pretty often there. >No, for the sake of this podcast I’m going to assume that we are all in agreement that on average, Japanese software. is just … awful. What are some examples of Japanese software? I'm not aware of any Japanese software I use besides a few random apps from the App Store, all of which seem fine to me. "Japanese Software is awful" is a common topic on Hacker News?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- courgette 4y agoI worked for a startup that was based on the fact ( amongst other ) that Sony was making a good hardware product, but terrible software for it. Mostly the UI, but also weird restrictions on the input / output while it was a 20k professional pieces of hardware in a highly normalized market. ( easy to see that Dolby was NOT restricting it for instance ) We had a good run. Thanks Sony. Detail : the setup of that industry made it that Sony and other HAD to let some api open for us insects. That was our opening.
- Klonoar 4y agoThere's a significant amount of JP software that you would not encounter if you don't live there. e.g, quite a number of banking apps
- makeitdouble 4y agoThe key part to me: > But the rest of the word was moving in a different direction. The rest of the world was moving away from dedicated hardware and towards innovative software running on standard hardware platforms. This piece is about Japan vs the world, but looking at countries other than the US I'm not sure this narrative works. For instance did the UK become a Software behemoth ? France ? Germany ? Brazil ? India ? Perhaps each country has their own failure story, but if we see the same result accross the board, are the individual specificities significant ? Most advanced country have seen a few successes and has a decently sized software development power, but not that much bigger than Japan, and certainly not to the scale of the US. The real story would be to me "the US ate everyone's lunch"
- Aeolun 4y agoAll the countries that see/saw software development as a trade instead of a highly paid white-collar position fell behind. It seems sort of consistent?
- 082349872349872 4y agoIn the 2020s I largely invoice in USD, despite being a european immigrant, because almost no one else pays. (even if there weren't a substantial rate difference: it is far less painful to stay awake until Pacific Time to coordinate with people who grok remote development than to attempt to deal with people in my time zone who do not)
- courgette 4y agoFrance had more than ok software company. Bull for instance. Ubisoft and a bazillion other video game company. Alcatel / Lucent / Thales for industrial stuff. For the deepness of my ass I would say failure was tree fold : - France like a good old top down approach. That … mostly don’t work for software. - France decided to listen to our American friends and sell the familly heirloom to the market. ( I’m bitter on this one ) - France like to do it the “right” way, and that is, of course, the French way. That lead us to build our own internet in the 80’s ( see : minitel ) ( see : point 1 )
- Guthur 4y agoNot a word on economic Armageddon that hit Japan's overly financialised economy at the end of the 80s. This economic malefactor is now hanging over many of the western countries, the UK potentially the next to collapse.
- Dalewyn 4y agoSpeaking as a Japanese-American, I personally think the biggest problem with Japanese programmers comes down to the Japanese being too crafty and elitist. What do I mean by this? Basically: If you're a wizard at peeling the skin off an apple with your knife you never need an apple peeler; consequently, you never get a good peeler industry going. Meanwhile, Americans manufacture the best apple peelers because they can't skin an apple with a knife to save their own lives. Likewise, Japan doesn't /need/ or /want/ the conveniences and luxuries afforded by genuinely good programming. Japanese can and will get by with the hard(er) way and won't care. Tools exist to address an inconvenience. Good tools exist to make a convenient inconvenience even more convenient. And good toolmakers exist to enable such better conveniences. None of this can exist if there aren't inconveniences in the first place. This also extends to the hardware side of things, too. Take flash memory, for example. Flash memory was invented in Japan by Toshiba, but nobody cared because Japan was too good. Meanwhile, Intel and the west seized upon the invention and made bank.[1] We all know where Toshiba is now. This I feel is why Japanese programmers continue to be utterly inept (most still can't produce unicode programs), and why the wider industry in Japan continues to be irrelevant on the world stage from a programming perspective. There is no Japanese equivalent to Microsoft or Google or Amazon because Japan's too good for that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujio_Masuoka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujio_Masuoka
- mostertoaster 4y agoI enjoyed reading this. Thank you. Specifically how you beautifully put “Japan is too good for that”, in a way that both compliments and criticizes at the same time.
- Insanity 4y agoThat is a really interesting perspective, thank you for sharing! The idea of Japanese people honing a skill/job to perfection is definitely a stereotype where I am from. Perhaps it might be a justified stereotype which ties into this. Definitely the apple peeler example rings true.
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
- timoth3y 4y agoHi. I'm Tim, the author. I'm delighted to see the interest in this subject on Hacker News and happy to answer any questions. To group and respond to a few common comments: > 1) Is this unique to Japan? Most other countries have not developed world-dominating software industries. That is true, but most other countries did not enter the PC era after spending several disrupting and dominating multiple global industries. So, expectations of Japan were much higher. > 2. Was cloud computing really that pivotal? Hell, yes! Being able to prototype and get a handful of paying beta customers for a few thousand dollars changed everything. It totally short-circuited the VC "experts" who would say "no one will ever pay for that".
- defrost 4y agoI'm as surprised as SovietSwag ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321796 ) to see no mention of Japan and Fifth Generation Computing in the 1980s. It was a big ambitious well backed plan to pursue the silly notion (as if!!) of massively parallel computing with unheard of numbers of cores to jump start AI networks etc. Are there any stories there on how that all fizzled out and came to naught back in the day?
- 082349872349872 4y ago(a) cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26953443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26953443 for one aspect. It didn't do much good to have massively parallelisable logic programs without any equally massively parallel hardware on which to run them. I ran jobs on top500 machines back then, and even there coordination overheads would kill anything too fine-grained. (b) it took a lot longer for Moore's law to end for traditional ISAs than we had been fearing, back in the 1980s. Like many things in tech, maybe Fifth Generation had just been Too Early.
- defrost 4y ago(a) is the nub of the question - the spiel from Japan at the time was that they had massively parallel hardware in the works that was on the cusp of delivery... At the time I was tinkering about with a bunch of transputer boards, modding Minux, thinking about capabilities, and mangling Occam (the language) into something less awful (IMHO). I was more curious about how this decade (roughly) long chapter in Japan's IT history didn't rate a mention in the authors article (aside from "Japan plowed ahead with hardware in the 80's" (IIRC) throw aways)
- sovietswag 4y agoI was surprised to see nothing about Japan’s funneling of money into 5GL programming language research (having to do with AI and ... IIRC Prolog). - https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1080343&seqNum=2 https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1080343&seq... - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_programming_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_programming... - https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/IVH_UqOGsew https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/IVH_UqOGsew I took a programming languages class with a cool professor that spent some time discussing the history with us.
- Reason077 4y agoVery interesting article, but I almost can’t listen to the podcast version because of the narrator’s over-dramatic voice. The way he puts extra tonal emphasis on every sentence sounds like he’s narrating a trailer for a 1990s action film!
- oli5679 4y agoThe first video game I played was Pokémon blue, created by a Japanese game studio, and the most recent was Elden Ring, created by another. Sony and Nintendo are two of the world’s biggest companies, and a key part of their business model is creating great games franchises, either in house or working with local studios. This is all driven by an ecosystem of great software companies, making the best games in the world (or at the least, outside of America).
- astrange 4y agoSony closed SCEJ/Japan Studio and moved PlayStation to the US branch, where it's now being run by people only interested in AAA games following the Hollywood movie + collectathon + puzzles where nearby NPCs yell the answer at you after 30 seconds formula. So I don't feel like they're demonstrating Japanese software quality at the moment. The Alpha series cameras are pretty nice, but not as much as they could be.
- bamboozled 4y agoOne of the key issues of Japanese software is that most companies don't rethink problems and processes to suit software, they try make software around an existing process. Most Japanese companies will just try to automate, or digitize some type of manual process and keep the people involved, I'd say just to hang onto jobs because firing people in Japan is pretty much impossible. Recently while visiting Japan, I tried to get a eSIM card through "Docomo" the national phone carrier via their "online shop". I know...but I had to use them for other obscure reasons. It was incredible to me how long it took to get the eSIM card. Days and days of problems, hours on the phone. I hit so, so many edge cases it was hard to believe. I actually felt depressed how bad the experience was. Everything was so obscure, and so so many things had to line up in their system. I actually debugged the software by talking to support people and gaining clues, I finally worked out how to hack the inputs to allow it to give me a eSIM. The problems were mostly that I had a middle name, which Japanese people apparently never have, say your name is "Ella Mary Smith" but your credit card is "Ella Smith", the "people" won't accept it and their web app does weird things, like removes the space between your first and middle name when you put both of them into the first name field. You some how have to work out through trial and error, the system / process / people don't care about spaces. The process involved many people "checking" my application and almost being able to arbitrarily deny the application. There was almost no actual automation, I think it would've just been way way easier to visit a store and let them fill out the forms how they wanted, however they've made this particular process "online only" and so you're stuck with probably one of the worst user experiences in the world. Anyway, each time I applied, I had to wait about 24 hours to be rejected and resubmit the application. Sometimes the application would blow up or the website would time out, error and I had to resubmit all documents again and do a silly online facial identification thing, I did about 12 times. I truly thought I was going to go insane. I didn't leave the hotel for 12 hours trying to hack this beast and workout what was wrong, then multiple day of rejections until I got the combination of inputs right. What was so striking to me was the way I, as a user had to invent my own solutions to allow the system to give me the eSIM. For example, I eventually worked out that I must have a credit card which includes a middle name, even though there is only a place for a first and last name when inputting the credit card. So I just lied and said my credit card actually is written as SMITH ELLAMARY (which it doesn't), and the "person" who was checking the application, believed this fairy tale and finally accepted the application. It was a classic example of so much software I've interacted with in Japan in recent times. It always has this kind of "best effort, just works, sort of works if you're a foreigner and you know how to work around the quirks" vibe to it that I don't really experience anywhere else.
- skissane 4y agoBit of history many people are not aware of - in the 1980s, Japan developed its own indigenous operating system, TRON. Towards the end of that decade, the Japanese government wanted to adopt it as a national standard. The US government started threatening trade sanctions, which gave Japan cold feet. (Some accused Microsoft of being behind it, although others insist that’s untrue.) How would have the Japanese software industry turned out without US threats, or if Japan had ignored them?
- PsycheOS 4y agoYep. It was to protect Microsoft and ultimately the deep state's surveillance capabilities.
- Tycho 4y agoThey must love how all the corporations are rushing to run their software on either Amazon, Google or Microsoft cloud.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago[flagged]
- rippercushions 4y agoJapan developed plenty of its own operating systems like MSX, PC-98 and DOS/V, none of which went anywhere (outside Japan, that is).
- slim 4y agoMSX was an architecture and had no operating system. it booted into Microsoft BASIC
- skissane 4y agoMSX ran the MSX-DOS operating system - which was developed by Tim Paterson under contract to Microsoft. It was a port of MS-DOS 1.x to the Z80. ASCII in Japan wrote the device drivers but the core OS was developed in Seattle. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX-DOS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX-DOS
- rramadass 4y agoIMO the Japanese failed at Software Development because they never thought of it as distinct/different from and more important than Hardware that is used to run it. It requires a certain degree of forward abstract thinking which they unfortunately missed. They then compounded this mistake by staying on it for decades. As an example, in the late 90's i was part of a group developing a Office Software Suite for a Japanese Company. The specification they gave us was very clearly done by some Hardware Engineer who had just learned OOD/OOP. All classes were named like hardware part nos. eg. MDK_C1001, MDK_C1002 etc. All methods were declared pure virtual in C++. We had to convince them to throw out their specifications, sit with us and re-design it together (and implemented using Visual C++/MFC framework).
- simonh 4y agoI think this is on the right track, Japan has a fantastic hardware oriented manufacturing culture, but this can be a serious impediment when it comes to approaching software development. One symptom is that software teams are seen as part of a product line team rather than having their own org. Famously this was a major issue at Nokia and Blackberry, who institutionally believed that their competitive edge was in the hardware. Device specifications would change late in the product development cycle due to constraints on manufacturing or cost targets, and the software devs would just have to work around it. Adopting software platform, like Symbian at Nokia, was primarily seen as a cost and resource saving move to speed up development using a generic solution.
- rramadass 4y agoRight; when you are good at one thing, you tend to look at everything else through that framework only. If you then have a strict Hierarchical Organization/Society (i.e. thou shalt not question) which enforces that thought pattern, you miss out on "the next big thing". The success of American Software Companies is a direct result of limited structure, controlled chaos, lots of money to experiment with and loose financial controls pioneered by DARPA and transplanted to Silicon Valley.
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- PsycheOS 4y agoWhat this comes down to is simply economics and incentives, and how those economics and incentives are changed within and from outside by other forces. That is it. even the concept of "Galapagos effect"is easily explained by government created market distortions. 1. Japan was a closed country for~250 years, until the US "Gunboats of democracy" opened up Japan under Commodore Perry threatening to flatten Japanese cities. Prior to that there was restricted trade/trading posts with the Dutch, Portuguese, and then Germans. 2. With the US military threats, Japan side the treaty with the US and realized pandora's box was open, they say the Western operations, war and colonies and said, time to get moving. Thus, German and Prussia in particular suited Japan well culturally and in many aspects - so this tight tie up, creating or promoting trading companies or families (Zaibatsu) & forming their own colonies, China, Taiwan, Korea, etc. 3. There are many other factors within the run up to WWII and after but Japan was a major innovator, especially after WWII as central control imploded - think Honda, Sony, etc. the issue is that as PCs came into play Japan was highly centralized again & there were numerous issues of lacking vc or risk capital, social risks, financial risk, labor mobility ,etc. And even today most software devs cannot hardcore sell - imagine 1970, 1980, 1990s. 4. The native ERP market was highly customized (mostly SAP) using SIer's and they wanted it specific to their unique workflows - the old 80% of what I want is not enough - funny enough that is a competitive advantage again. 5. At same time, most of foreign program work was either L10N or integration ,sintalls, support/maintenance for the foreign software vendor - Oracle, SAP, MSFT, etc. 6. Btw the time we got to 1990s, Japan had many innovations in software, BUT this ran into a wall - it had a horrible startup ecosystem and so it was occupied by ossified rent-seeking incumbents like Sony, who fought their own engineers. Sony was the original Apple, Akio Morita the original Steve Jobs, including taking the most important case, Sony vs Universal Studios to the US supreme court and winning. Ipod, imac, etc. are simply the 2.0 or 3.0 version of the sony innovation products. I have interviewed a dozen of these engineers and managers going back to 2006. And also other interviews state side of how products like Slingbox/Slingmedia were just sony products and so on. 7. At this point the social risk, the financial risk, the career risks and labor mobility of joining a startup or high grow firm in nascent industry are greatly reduced, more programming resources than ever, smart hard workers, it is just the opportunities -- opportunities that were artificially restricted by ossified rent seeking incumbents using regulator capture.
- sylware 4y agoI am sorry, but there is a hard truth to this, which is not specific to Japan: 99% of software development is high-school level, no more. The remaining 1%, it is usually scientists or mathematicians coding.
- dudeinjapan 4y agoTim Romero (author of linked podcast) misses the point. Paul Graham has a far better take on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html The problem isn't that Japanese companies "missed" the opportunity to do software at X point in time--the problem is that they are culturally Japanese. Japan is about consensus-based design, there is a high penalty for making mistakes, and individuality/creativity is not valued. 出る杭は打たれる - "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down". Certainly you can develop software this way, but the Silicon Valley model of rapid iteration, "if it doesn't work rewrite it", "move fast and break things", etc. gets you there sooner. But what about Matz and the Ruby core team, you say? Certainly they are a zany, free-thinking bunch. I attended Ruby Kaigi last year and noticed that most Ruby core team members are hired by domestic Japan-focused tech companies, think Cookpad, Tabelog, etc. They are kept for their HR value to attract tech recruits and allowed to spend all their time on whatever open source project they want. Meanwhile the peons work on the actual product. Source: I've worked in software in Japan for 15 years; 5 at a Japanese bank and 10 as a CTO of my own company. We run circles around our Japanese competitors.
- anuraaga 4y agoHi Johnny - considering there is no one answer here, no one, including you, is missing the point right? If weighting I'd generally put the largest on time-based rather than impact-based seniority, but it's just one of many factors and there isn't really a way to pick any one.
- Retric 4y agoYet, Japan had no issue building a wide range of popular console video games but had far less success in PC games. Language seems like a better explanation as US and Japan had quite different UI constraints in their native language.
- HideousKojima 4y agoJapanese game devs didn't put nearly as much effort into PC games as they did into console games, outside of some early exceptions like the MSX and the Sharp X68000. The main issue was that there really wasn't a domestic market for PC games in Japan, and Japanese game devs focused on serving the domestic market first. So you had half-assed efforts like a single outsourced developer "porting" Mega Man 1 and 3 to DOS (they weren't anything like the real MM 1 and 3). PC ports of most popular console games weren't common until the Xbox 360/PS3 era.
- johnwalkr 4y agoI worked in Japan for ten years in tech and these points jumped out at me: >Software development was an exercise in box checking. You implemented a feature once the customer had asked for it and the contracts had been signed. I recall a meeting where we were trying to set some requirements for a product based on what our potential customers would need. It was a requirement that all customers would need, not some unique thing that would probably change based on each customer. I understand pushing back against scope creep but as an analogy, we were building a PC designed to put our customer's peripherals inside. But we decided not to add a PCI slot even though the potential customers made PCI cards. By the end of the meeting it was agreed that since there was no signed-up customer yet, there could be no requirement. Our eventual customers of course needed that PCI slot to be added mid-design. In general it takes a lot of consensus building to add a requirement in the first place, and once it's there, it's seen as the exact and maximum. Going beyond is seen as only adding risk. It's very difficult to ask for effort to optimise something within a given constraint. There's good and bad things about this. >There was no real career path in software development. I mean, maybe you could move up into project management or over into sales, but if you were still actually writing code when you were 30, people kind of wondered what went wrong. It was common to interview senior software engineers with a good resume, but find out they were one of two types in the interview. Type 1: a middle manager that has done nothing in the last ten years aside from passing excel files back and forth between junior software engineers and other managers. Type 2: considers "software design" to be making block diagrams in Visio (or worse, drawing things in excel as if it were Visio), and considers writing software to be beneath him. This type usually plans to outsource the actual development work
- stefap2 4y agoChatgpt please tldr this article: This article describes how Japan's economy and the software industry evolved from the post-WWII years to the present day. It explains how the Zaibatsu, large corporate groups that dominated the economy before WWII, were dismantled by the American occupation forces and replaced by the Keiretsu, weaker but familiar forms of the Zaibatsu. It highlights how the Keiretsu focused on the domestic market, rather than expanding globally and developing a software industry, during the 1980s and 1990s. This had a negative impact on innovation and caused Japan to fall behind in software development. The article then goes on to explain how cloud computing and smartphones have enabled Japan's software developers to start their own companies, rather than working for large corporations, thus creating a more vibrant startup ecosystem. It also suggests that Japan's software industry still has a long way to go to catch up with other countries, but there are positive signs of progress in certain areas.
- brainzap 4y agoMy asian developers are drinkers and plagued by strong hierarchies.
- irrational 4y agoSpeaking of Japanese cloud computing, years before Amazon created AWS, Japan had the NTT cloud. We used it for about a decade. At first it was terrific, but near the end it was becoming unreliable. Our hypothesis is other cloud providers were siphoning off NTT’s best cloud engineers.
- HellDunkel 4y agoOk but what about Nintendo, Bandai Namco and all the other great games developers?
- gernb 4y agoIs Japan's software industry killed? If you're asking why they don't have a Google, Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook, could it just be because they speak a language that's only useful in Japan and not anywhere else in the entire world? If you're actually in Japan they have tons of apps, tons of software, tons of games, tons of many things "software". Certain things fit Japan better than others but for example Mercari (the ebay of Japan) is 1000x better than anything I've seen outside Japan. Japan's feature phones ran rings around the rest of the world's phones until iPhone. There are certainly other factors like possibly underpaying, not valuing experience, etc... but I think the basic premise of the piece is probably missing the forest for the trees.