3 ms·

>So it would be a mistake to read too much into this project being Japanese, As a Japanese(-American) I can tell you why this project failed and more broadly w

>So it would be a mistake to read too much into this project being Japanese, As a Japanese(-American) I can tell you why this project failed and more broadly why Japan's computer industry has failed outside of vidja gaemz (and that too is on its way out). So why did the Japanese fail? It's very simple: Lack of cooperation. The article describes the project "was a collaborative effort of the Japanese computer industry" but the results could not put any more mud on that thought. Japanese companies HATE cooperating, they will not create nor utilize common standards nor share knowledge with each other. Japanese companies will strive at every turn to create a captive market, hoping that once you've set foot in their little quagmire you will stay stuck with them. If you ever wondered why Canon camera lenses do not work on Nikon cameras and vice versa, why Kenwood microphones do not work with ICOM radios and vice versa, why Sony insisted on Memory Stick over SD card, why Toshiba threw out NAND flash technology, and so on then this is why. Try naming even a single international industrial standard to come out of Japan, you probably can't and I don't blame you. Sharing is not in Japan's DNA. Contrast the US computer industry where our companies besides Apple can and will cooperate to create and utilize common standards and push the market wider and forwards. PCI is a foremost example, but the very foundation of the industry is built on IBM PC-compatibles. All this means Japan will always be stuck with a bunch of small, individual pies nobody will care about, losing to the rest of the west who cooperate (and nowadays China who force entire industries at gunpoint) for a much bigger pie. You can't win when you're all trying to drag each other down in a zero sum game.

AlbertCory 2y ago
You might well be 100% right. I'd like to see the Japanese succeed, actually. However, it was simply not possible for anyone to succeed at AI in the early 80's. It took some Nobel-prize-winning software, a change of approach, and a massive increase in compute power to finally break through.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  The only thing we needed was the compute. Everything else had been discovered by the 80s.
  - philipkglass 2y ago
    I think that we also needed a much larger training corpus than was available in the 1980s. Back then the largest textual data sets were orders of magnitude smaller.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Using neural nets. The approach taken towards AI in the 80’s was much less compute intensive.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    Neural nets with hidden layers is literally older than the Apollo 11 landing. That doesn't make sense but it is.
    - adastra22 2y ago
      Read TFA. The Fifth Generation Project involved expert systems & prolog, not neural nets.
anon-3988 2y ago
What do you attribute this to?
- jdietrich 2y ago
  Japanese corporate culture has historically been defined by extreme loyalty - salarymen were recruited directly from university and were promised a job for life. Promotion was overwhelmingly from within and based substantially on seniority, with a steep power gradient. If you were trying to design a system to produce proprietary silos, you'd struggle to beat large Japanese corporations circa 1980.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    The lore I've heard is that hire-for-life system was supposed to create psychological safety as a response to excessive siloing habits exhibited by WWII veterans, after surviving in reverse order of their individual bus factors - e.g. skilled maintenance crews, medics, were more likely to be spared in last-ditch assaults, which happened a lot in the war. IMO, that after series of economic downturns and corporate restructurings during 80s-00s in turn created excessively risk-averse Japanese corporate culture; now that they can be fired, psychological safety was gone, and now maintaining hire-for-life eligibility was seen as crucial. It may have been implicitly reinterpreted as eliminating others is a must for survival. That's clearly one of major contributing factors to counter-productive behaviors causing stagnation of traditional Japanese tech companies; outright refusing sales, exports, opportunities, that may affect internal politics and justify job terminations. It sucks to watch a lot of cutting edge technologies slowly evaporating from such fear of terminations. Hopefully someone figures a way out.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      >Hopefully someone figures a way out. The only realistic solution I've seen so far is placing Japanese companies under foreign control. Kioxia is an absurd example. It went from being Toshiba's rejected-and-dejected NAND flash division to a world leading company literally overnight once it was bought out by an American investment firm (Bain Capital). On that note, Toshiba proper is in the process of getting bought out and chopped up by Japan Industrial Partners, which is really just a front for an American investment firm (Bain & Company) among others. Olympus also suffered the same fate several years ago. Another is Sharp, which managed to claw back from bankruptcy once China/Taiwan (Foxconn) bought them out. Yet another is Nissan, which became relevant on the world stage after getting effectively bought out by France (Renault, Carlos Ghosn). Nissan probably would have gone even bigger if Ghosn and Renault had succeeded in totally taking them over. Even 7/11 (Seven & i Holdings) which was a rare reverse success story of Japanese management bailing out a failing American business is now in dire straits and risking a hostile takeover from a Canadian business (Couche-Tard). Japan has the technology, engineers, and designers; what Japan doesn't have is an appropriate culture. It's frustrating watching as a Japanese-American.
adastra22 2y ago
> Japan's computer industry has failed outside of vidja gaemz Worth noting that the big video game companies in Japan—Nintendo, Sony, Square Soft, etc. are atypical Japanese companies too, run a bit differently than the others. Which is no doubt a big reason for their success.
dcrazy 2y ago
Sorry, but I am skeptical of your argument that Japanese companies are any less cooperative or more avaricious than companies from other countries. I am aware of several examples that directly contradict your argument: - JIS screwdrivers. - Really, JIS anything. - MSX computers. - FourThirds/MicroFourThirds. And there’s a practical reason for camera brands to have different mounts: different camera systems have different flange distances! You’ll even see multiple mounts within the same brand as the line evolves, as seen with the transition from Minolta/Sony A mount to E mount.
- numpad0 2y ago
  OT but flange focal distance is overmystified. It's just a mechanical interfacing spec. You can't drill a hole on the sensor and mount lens body on it, and lenses must be placed at exactly focal distance away for parallel beams to converge on film or farther for diverging beam(from non-infinitely-far objects), so body designers pass a distance measurement from film to a known feature(mounting ring top surface) to be able to design a lens barrel. That's the flange-focal distance, sort of a "design length of body" to subtract from your overall lens barrel length. It's actually possible to drill a hole on the PCB and woodscrewing lens directly on in cases with webcams and CCTV cameras, and in those cases the distance is 0.
  - avidiax 2y ago
    For the case of 35mm SLRs, Nikon/Canon/Pentax etc. all have 45mm flange distances, give or take a couple of millimeters. That's basically the minimum to have room to swing the mirror and for a couple of shutter curtains. So all of them having completely incompatible mounts is because they wanted to compete based on lock-in to a complete system, rather than compete for bodies and lenses separately. Even worse, the fact that their flange distances are all within a couple of mm makes passive adapters impossible, since just the bayonet part of the mount is longer than that.
    - hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
      The Pentax followed the distance of the M42, which was pretty much an open standard by then, and many manufacturers at the time released lenses in K bayonet. The other camera makers diverged from the standard.
Barrin92 2y ago
>and nowadays China who force entire industries at gunpoint China's software sector was arguably at its most innovative when it was in what can only be described a state of perpetual warfare. During the so called "QQ-360 wars" companies didn't just not cooperate, they pulled stuff like this: "Qihoo, in turn, updated its software to strip away access rights for key components of QQ, while essentially labeling the program spyware. (The jury's still out on whether Qihoo is right.) In response to Qihoo partially disabling QQ, Tencent then forced Chinese users to choose between using QQ or using 360--you can't use both. This is akin to Apple saying you can't view Google websites on your Mac because some Android phones have multitouch. To add PR-based insult to software-based injury, users of the older web-based QQ found their interface replaced with a letter about Qihoo's alleged misdeeds, creating the impression that Tencent had blocked Web QQ on all machines just to spite 360 users." The Chinese tech sector was full of mutual sabotage like this and while it was at times annoying for users, the absurd level of competition arguably benefited the ecosystem overall. I'd argue Japan if anything doesn't compete enough, there's often not strong enough of a focus on growth and clawing market share back. https://www.forbes.com/sites/china/2010/11/10/the-secret-winner-of-the-qq-360-war/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/china/2010/11/10/the-secret-win...
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  This reminds me of electronic payment systems like SUICA and ICOCA. Once upon a time: The Kanto region had SUICA which was introduced and pushed by JR East. The Kansai region had ICOCA which was introduced and pushed by JR West. Yes, the two JR companies are affiliated and work together...ish. No, the two payment systems are NOT compatible with each other. It's only since the last 10 years or so that SUICA and ICOCA coverage has overlapped enough that holding just one or the other has become practical; you needed both if you did any amount of travelling between the regions. Japan seriously hates cooperation.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    Or monopoly. Suica is a JR East product, so baked in interop across Japan would mean near total domination for small electronic payments by JRE. That's bad. Although, in hindsight, that wouldn't have been as terrible as it sounds. VISA payWave would have been even more DOA than it is today in Japan if it was done that way.
fomine3 2y ago
VHS, CD, DVD, Blu-ray, MIDI, JAMMA, SD card,
new299 2y ago
You mention SD Cards. The SD Card was developed by two Japanese companies (Panasonic and Toshiba) and Sandisk. VHS is another Japanese standard, adopted by multiple manufacturers. Then there's the MSX standard... Japanese industry is no doubt somewhat different and may have its issues. But I don't think it's as simple a picture as you paint... some external factor is often required to force large companies to cooperate. Those factors may be more common outside Japan, but I don't see that the fundamental issues are very different.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >The SD Card was developed by two Japanese companies (Panasonic and Toshiba) and Sandisk. Yes, but that is after Toshiba threw away NAND flash technology saying Intel invented it (yes, really...) and Sandisk went and picked up free real estate. Not to mention Panasonic and Toshiba basically got roped into marketing what was Euro-American tech: MMC, SD card's predecessor, was invented by Sandisk and Siemens. Sony meanwhile never got on board until the bitter end with MemoryStick. >VHS is another Japanese standard, adopted by multiple manufacturers. VHS is actually an exception and exemplifies what happens IF (and that's a big if) Japanese companies can be convinced to work together on something bigger than anything they could individually achieve. There are other examples like Nintendo and the wider Japanese video game industry sharing and protecting patents for each other, or Nissin (Cup Noodle!) giving away their trade secret to kickstart the instant noodle market and improve food supply in the immediate post-war era. Sadly, these things don't happen that often. >Then there's the MSX standard... That's actually a Microsoft invention which was co-marketed with ASCII Corp. If it wasn't obvious by now, what seemingly "Japanese" international standards we do get are usually not Japanese at all having leadership or core involvement from the rest of the west. eg: Blu-Ray involved Phillips and HD-DVD involved Warner Brothers, among others. This actually goes to a sibling comment[1] I made here, which is that stagnant or failing Japanese companies are very likely to explode into success if unshackled from Japanese culture. Japanese are amazing inventors and innovators, but Japanese are also horrible pioneers and trailblazers. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41876563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41876563

AlbertCory 2y ago

You might well be 100% right. I'd like to see the Japanese succeed, actually. However, it was simply not possible for anyone to succeed at AI in the early 80's. It took some Nobel-prize-winning software, a change of approach, and a massive increase in compute power to finally break through.

llm_trw 2y ago
The only thing we needed was the compute. Everything else had been discovered by the 80s.
- philipkglass 2y ago
  I think that we also needed a much larger training corpus than was available in the 1980s. Back then the largest textual data sets were orders of magnitude smaller.
adastra22 2y ago
Using neural nets. The approach taken towards AI in the 80’s was much less compute intensive.
- numpad0 2y ago
  Neural nets with hidden layers is literally older than the Apollo 11 landing. That doesn't make sense but it is.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Read TFA. The Fifth Generation Project involved expert systems & prolog, not neural nets.

anon-3988 2y ago

What do you attribute this to?

jdietrich 2y ago
Japanese corporate culture has historically been defined by extreme loyalty - salarymen were recruited directly from university and were promised a job for life. Promotion was overwhelmingly from within and based substantially on seniority, with a steep power gradient. If you were trying to design a system to produce proprietary silos, you'd struggle to beat large Japanese corporations circa 1980.
- numpad0 2y ago
  The lore I've heard is that hire-for-life system was supposed to create psychological safety as a response to excessive siloing habits exhibited by WWII veterans, after surviving in reverse order of their individual bus factors - e.g. skilled maintenance crews, medics, were more likely to be spared in last-ditch assaults, which happened a lot in the war. IMO, that after series of economic downturns and corporate restructurings during 80s-00s in turn created excessively risk-averse Japanese corporate culture; now that they can be fired, psychological safety was gone, and now maintaining hire-for-life eligibility was seen as crucial. It may have been implicitly reinterpreted as eliminating others is a must for survival. That's clearly one of major contributing factors to counter-productive behaviors causing stagnation of traditional Japanese tech companies; outright refusing sales, exports, opportunities, that may affect internal politics and justify job terminations. It sucks to watch a lot of cutting edge technologies slowly evaporating from such fear of terminations. Hopefully someone figures a way out.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >Hopefully someone figures a way out. The only realistic solution I've seen so far is placing Japanese companies under foreign control. Kioxia is an absurd example. It went from being Toshiba's rejected-and-dejected NAND flash division to a world leading company literally overnight once it was bought out by an American investment firm (Bain Capital). On that note, Toshiba proper is in the process of getting bought out and chopped up by Japan Industrial Partners, which is really just a front for an American investment firm (Bain & Company) among others. Olympus also suffered the same fate several years ago. Another is Sharp, which managed to claw back from bankruptcy once China/Taiwan (Foxconn) bought them out. Yet another is Nissan, which became relevant on the world stage after getting effectively bought out by France (Renault, Carlos Ghosn). Nissan probably would have gone even bigger if Ghosn and Renault had succeeded in totally taking them over. Even 7/11 (Seven & i Holdings) which was a rare reverse success story of Japanese management bailing out a failing American business is now in dire straits and risking a hostile takeover from a Canadian business (Couche-Tard). Japan has the technology, engineers, and designers; what Japan doesn't have is an appropriate culture. It's frustrating watching as a Japanese-American.

adastra22 2y ago

> Japan's computer industry has failed outside of vidja gaemz Worth noting that the big video game companies in Japan—Nintendo, Sony, Square Soft, etc. are atypical Japanese companies too, run a bit differently than the others. Which is no doubt a big reason for their success.

dcrazy 2y ago

Sorry, but I am skeptical of your argument that Japanese companies are any less cooperative or more avaricious than companies from other countries. I am aware of several examples that directly contradict your argument: - JIS screwdrivers. - Really, JIS anything. - MSX computers. - FourThirds/MicroFourThirds. And there’s a practical reason for camera brands to have different mounts: different camera systems have different flange distances! You’ll even see multiple mounts within the same brand as the line evolves, as seen with the transition from Minolta/Sony A mount to E mount.

numpad0 2y ago
OT but flange focal distance is overmystified. It's just a mechanical interfacing spec. You can't drill a hole on the sensor and mount lens body on it, and lenses must be placed at exactly focal distance away for parallel beams to converge on film or farther for diverging beam(from non-infinitely-far objects), so body designers pass a distance measurement from film to a known feature(mounting ring top surface) to be able to design a lens barrel. That's the flange-focal distance, sort of a "design length of body" to subtract from your overall lens barrel length. It's actually possible to drill a hole on the PCB and woodscrewing lens directly on in cases with webcams and CCTV cameras, and in those cases the distance is 0.
- avidiax 2y ago
  For the case of 35mm SLRs, Nikon/Canon/Pentax etc. all have 45mm flange distances, give or take a couple of millimeters. That's basically the minimum to have room to swing the mirror and for a couple of shutter curtains. So all of them having completely incompatible mounts is because they wanted to compete based on lock-in to a complete system, rather than compete for bodies and lenses separately. Even worse, the fact that their flange distances are all within a couple of mm makes passive adapters impossible, since just the bayonet part of the mount is longer than that.
  - hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
    The Pentax followed the distance of the M42, which was pretty much an open standard by then, and many manufacturers at the time released lenses in K bayonet. The other camera makers diverged from the standard.

Barrin92 2y ago

>and nowadays China who force entire industries at gunpoint China's software sector was arguably at its most innovative when it was in what can only be described a state of perpetual warfare. During the so called "QQ-360 wars" companies didn't just not cooperate, they pulled stuff like this: "Qihoo, in turn, updated its software to strip away access rights for key components of QQ, while essentially labeling the program spyware. (The jury's still out on whether Qihoo is right.) In response to Qihoo partially disabling QQ, Tencent then forced Chinese users to choose between using QQ or using 360--you can't use both. This is akin to Apple saying you can't view Google websites on your Mac because some Android phones have multitouch. To add PR-based insult to software-based injury, users of the older web-based QQ found their interface replaced with a letter about Qihoo's alleged misdeeds, creating the impression that Tencent had blocked Web QQ on all machines just to spite 360 users." The Chinese tech sector was full of mutual sabotage like this and while it was at times annoying for users, the absurd level of competition arguably benefited the ecosystem overall. I'd argue Japan if anything doesn't compete enough, there's often not strong enough of a focus on growth and clawing market share back. https://www.forbes.com/sites/china/2010/11/10/the-secret-winner-of-the-qq-360-war/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/china/2010/11/10/the-secret-win...

Dalewyn 2y ago
This reminds me of electronic payment systems like SUICA and ICOCA. Once upon a time: The Kanto region had SUICA which was introduced and pushed by JR East. The Kansai region had ICOCA which was introduced and pushed by JR West. Yes, the two JR companies are affiliated and work together...ish. No, the two payment systems are NOT compatible with each other. It's only since the last 10 years or so that SUICA and ICOCA coverage has overlapped enough that holding just one or the other has become practical; you needed both if you did any amount of travelling between the regions. Japan seriously hates cooperation.
- numpad0 2y ago
  Or monopoly. Suica is a JR East product, so baked in interop across Japan would mean near total domination for small electronic payments by JRE. That's bad. Although, in hindsight, that wouldn't have been as terrible as it sounds. VISA payWave would have been even more DOA than it is today in Japan if it was done that way.

fomine3 2y ago

VHS, CD, DVD, Blu-ray, MIDI, JAMMA, SD card,

new299 2y ago

You mention SD Cards. The SD Card was developed by two Japanese companies (Panasonic and Toshiba) and Sandisk. VHS is another Japanese standard, adopted by multiple manufacturers. Then there's the MSX standard... Japanese industry is no doubt somewhat different and may have its issues. But I don't think it's as simple a picture as you paint... some external factor is often required to force large companies to cooperate. Those factors may be more common outside Japan, but I don't see that the fundamental issues are very different.

Dalewyn 2y ago
>The SD Card was developed by two Japanese companies (Panasonic and Toshiba) and Sandisk. Yes, but that is after Toshiba threw away NAND flash technology saying Intel invented it (yes, really...) and Sandisk went and picked up free real estate. Not to mention Panasonic and Toshiba basically got roped into marketing what was Euro-American tech: MMC, SD card's predecessor, was invented by Sandisk and Siemens. Sony meanwhile never got on board until the bitter end with MemoryStick. >VHS is another Japanese standard, adopted by multiple manufacturers. VHS is actually an exception and exemplifies what happens IF (and that's a big if) Japanese companies can be convinced to work together on something bigger than anything they could individually achieve. There are other examples like Nintendo and the wider Japanese video game industry sharing and protecting patents for each other, or Nissin (Cup Noodle!) giving away their trade secret to kickstart the instant noodle market and improve food supply in the immediate post-war era. Sadly, these things don't happen that often. >Then there's the MSX standard... That's actually a Microsoft invention which was co-marketed with ASCII Corp. If it wasn't obvious by now, what seemingly "Japanese" international standards we do get are usually not Japanese at all having leadership or core involvement from the rest of the west. eg: Blu-Ray involved Phillips and HD-DVD involved Warner Brothers, among others. This actually goes to a sibling comment[1] I made here, which is that stagnant or failing Japanese companies are very likely to explode into success if unshackled from Japanese culture. Japanese are amazing inventors and innovators, but Japanese are also horrible pioneers and trailblazers. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41876563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41876563