15 ms·

A mistake that killed Japan's software industry? (2023)

275 points by ayoisaiah 2y ago

Circlecrypto2 2y ago
This is actually really interesting history, but I wonder about apps like Line, which the Japanese still prefer. It's not a great app, but it's a user app, not a corporate one.
- zdw 2y ago
  Interestingly, Line originally was developed by Naver which is a South Korean company, although it's gone through several changes of corporate control since.
  - yongjik 2y ago
    It's jointly owned by Naver and Softbank. A few months ago, there was a public outcry in Korea when the Japanese government threatened to twist Naver's arm to give up its share of Line, and South Korea's inexplicably pro-Japanese government stayed mum. With both governments enjoying abysmal public support, I have no idea how it will eventually be settled.
    - onetokeoverthe 2y ago
      s.korea is pro japan. =. better than china.
      - onetokeoverthe 2y ago
        So s korea should favor the country that boycotts them for random hurt feelings?
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      I wonder why Koreans care: they don't use LINE anyway, AFAIK. They all use KakaoTalk.
      - yongjik 2y ago
        Why wouldn't Koreans care? We're talking about 50% ownership of a messaging platform that's de facto standard in multiple Asian countries. Imagine the UK government trying to force Google to sell DeepMind.
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        >Why wouldn't Koreans care? Because they don't use it. >We're talking about 50% ownership of a messaging platform that's de facto standard in multiple Asian countries Yeah, except Korea. If they think it's so great, why aren't they using it themselves? It seems hypocritical. >Imagine the UK government trying to force Google to sell DeepMind. Does Google or anyone in the US actually use DeepMind? If so, that's a poor analogy.
- timoth3y 2y ago
  Line was actually a Korean startup. There days, it's not a great app, but strong network effects keep it dominant here in Japan.
  - rwmj 2y ago
    Really? I use Line all the time including for sending text, video, and making audio and video calls, and it works great. Never had issues with it.
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
      This Line? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details/%EB%9D%BC%EC%9D%B8_LINE?id=jp.naver.line.android&hl=en-US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details/%EB%9D%BC%EC%9D%B... From the reviews, it looks like the unhappy path wasn’t well tested.
      - klausa 2y ago
        FWIW, this is on par with reviews for _anything_ in Japan. The fanciest and most recommended ramen shops don't crack 3.9 on local review sites, the mindset is completely different from "oh nothing went wrong, 5 stars I guess!".
        freddie_mercury 2y ago
        Ha, I'm reminded of reviews from Vietnam where you'd usually see restaurants get destroyed in reviews because they are 20 cents more expensive than some place else. Price was such a much bigger part of the review than other places I've lived.
        hnlmorg 2y ago
        I wasn’t looking at the stars. I was looking at all the reviews from different people saying the app locked them out of all their contacts.
      - rwmj 2y ago
        Yes that one. It works very effectively for me and I've not had any dropped calls, except for the obvious where we one of us loses network connectivity.
- ilamont 2y ago
  Also used widely in Taiwan.
  - tjpnz 2y ago
    And Thailand, apparently.
    - FMecha 2y ago
      It was also popular in Indonesia, but the userbase eventually moved to WhatsApp and Discord. People who run "official accounts" on LINE in Indonesia eventually moved to Twitter (the Indonesia-specific "base"/"menfess" accounts/culture were originally from similar LINE accounts allowing users to send anonymous messages so it can be relayed to many users, as well as from K-pop roleplaying on Twitter) and Instagram (for news, after LINE Today, their news aggregator, closed), too.
stevecalifornia 2y ago
[flagged]
- Sakos 2y ago
  We see similar factors in Germany, which I find interesting. To the point where Volkswagen is investing billions into Rivian to save their software side. I've never heard anything good from developers I know who worked at VW or any other German manufacturer.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Having worked at a number of hardware manufacturers, a lot of them really don't understand software at all. They look at software as if it were just another line item on the BOM: 12 qty 6-32 screw, 2 qty rubber gasket, 1 qty plastic case... OH AND 1 qty "firmware software thinggy," that we add to the product at station 244 on the assembly line. Go make some software that meets the requirements and spoon it into the product so we can ship. No thought about longevity, updates, security threats, intercompatibility with other devices and standards, UX, accessibility, the software ecosystem, nothing... Software is just another part number that's supplied by a supplier and bolted onto the "real" physical product. So it's no surprise when software companies come in and eat this mentality for lunch when they decide to come up with a competing hardware product.
    - simne 2y ago
      Your comment wonder me. As I hear from CS community like a mirror words - because semiconductor manufacturing is prohibitively expensive, cs becomes too abstract. But my own exp, mostly confirm your words, even when I sure see just my side of whole picture and I'm attracting to explain my exp as regional specific (I'm in Ukraine, exUSSR, and people here conservative and share old USSR habits).
Animats 2y ago
We're back to keiretsu. They're called Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Netflix. Each has its own closed world, moat, and small vendors subservient to it.
- echelon 2y ago
  Netflix doesn't belong on that list. They're tiny in comparison. YouTube is bigger than Netflix.
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Citation needed; Netflix has a ~$350 billion market cap [0]. Google has one of $2.227 trillion [1], and 10.25% of its revenue is attributed to Youtube revenue. Since I haven't found a quick reference to youtube's net worth, let's assume it's 10.25% of $2.227T, which is ~$222 billion, making YT smaller than Netflix. [0] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nflx/market-cap/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nflx/market-cap/ [1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/marketcap/ [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/289659/youtube-share-of-google-total-ad-revenues/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/289659/youtube-share-of-...
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      Regardless of numbers, Netflix is nowhere near as influential as the others. It’s just a website that plays videos, and one can easily live life without it. The other big companies are much harder to avoid, they’re basically infrastructure.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        If Netflix closed up shop tomorrow, there'd be a long a thread here, lots of headlines, and lots of whining, but at this point there are a ton of other streaming services and most of us would shrug and move on. Netflix has been on my bubble for a good couple of years and has only marginally kept my monthly subscription. In fact, I'm still somewhat angry at Netflix for wiping out disc rental and then killing their own DVD by mail which was a good source of reliable one+ year old movies.
lebuffon 2y ago
I read this book a long time ago. It provided some insights on the role of Japan's difficulty with foreign languages in the 1980s and the desire to create AI translation. The "Fifth Generation project" was a massive government and big-business joint venture that amounted to almost nothing. The author explores why with some surprises along the way. I would say it is like the "Mythical Man Month" from the Japanese side of computing. The book also opened my eyes to the difficulty of mastering Japanese. https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial- https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial- Intelligence/dp/019504939X
- lazyasciiart 2y ago
  Your link is broken, please fix it for me to check out :)
  - Minor49er 2y ago
    Just remove the space from the URL
    - Qwertious 2y ago
      The URL doesn't completely display itself on mobile, it gets cut off with an ellipsis added. Why not just edit the link to remove the space?
      - D-Coder 2y ago
        Here you go: https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/019504939X https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial-I...
      - Minor49er 2y ago
        I have not and am not seeing this problem, and I have been posting on mobile Alternatively, you could just search the name that was provided instead of demanding to be spoonfed
PhasmaFelis 2y ago
> First, as the cold war heated up in the 40s and 50s, America’s idealistic vision for a democratic and progressive Japan took a back seat to the more practical and pressing need to develop Japan into a bulwark against Communism. Funny how protecting the ideals of progressive democracy from Communism so often involved suppressing those ideals ourselves. Beat the Commies to the punch, I guess.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  Arguably it worked out pretty well for Japan, given where the rest of the post soviet countries are now.
  - pezezin 2y ago
    Like post-Soviet Estonia, which is way more advanced than Japan when it comes to digitalization?
    - jesterson 2y ago
      How do you measure "advanced"?
      - pezezin 2y ago
        For example, being able to do online administrative procedures by using digital signatures, instead of doing them on paper with personal stamps.
        jesterson 2y ago
        How "advanced" is that? Considering myself quite immersed in tech world, I would prefer paper to digital signatures and alike. Advanced doesn't mean putting tech everywhere regardless whether it improves life or not
        pezezin 2y ago
quanto 2y ago
Blaming all ills of any Japanese industry on the keiretsu is in vogue for decades, but at best, keiretsu is a symptom, not a cause, of the underlying risk-averse culture. Keiretsu, even when they were toxically anti-competitive, did not go out of their ways to crush would-be global startups in Japan; keiretsu, by the author's own argument, didn't care about the global software-only market, thus would not kill those startups. The true culprit, the risk-averse culture -- while with own merits -- did not mesh well with the more fluid flat culture of software development. It was not an accident that software did well in the most hippy region in the US, San Francisco. On the contrary, hardware development, due to much more constraints from the laws of physics and economics, has been done well in Japan et al as careful top-down planning is the edge, not individual-level agility.* I am a little surprised that the author, who is active in Japan, is off the mark. I regularly talk to many engineers/entrepreneurs in the region, and the cause-and-effect are quite easy to see and are unanimously agreed upon. Kudos to people there who are trying to change the software development culture for the better. * Elon's ventures seem to challenge this conventional dichotomy as he attempts to bring both agility and top-down leadership into his firms. More power to him.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - octopoc 2y ago
    He makes a lot of people mad but that doesn’t make him an idiot. It just makes him genuine. Everybody else who looks polished is hiding secrets behind excellent PR.
    - MrLeap 2y ago
      I agree that making a lot of people mad doesn't necessarily mean someone is an idiot. At the time time, making a lot of people mad does not necessarily mean someone is genuine. For example, someone who manipulates a lot of people with misinformation might manifest anger in many. In that hypothetical scenario, I wouldn't think that the anger is because the target's an honest, forthright, genuine straight-shooter. Furthermore, most people are genuinely kind and compassionate towards others. For those people, mass anger is not their genuine goal, or a likely consequence of them being genuine.
miki123211 2y ago
There's one more aspect to this that wasn't mentioned at all in the article. In Japan, home computers never really made sense until it was far, far too late. In the west, you'd buy a PC (or a home computer) to play games, edit documents or manage your business. The latter two were pretty much impossible in Japan, as the computers of that era couldn't handle the complexities of the Japanese language and character set. Gaming was all that remained, and if you only wanted gaming, you could just as well get a NES (known in Japan as Famicom), which was much better suited for the purpose. Computers eventually caught up, but some of the cultural impact remained, still making them less popular than in the west. This is one of the reasons why Japanese were so good at consumer electronics, they just needed that electronics a lot more than we did, and the devices needed a lot more features, as "just plug it into a computer to do the complicated stuff" wasn't really an option there.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I don't know exactly the reasons but Japanese software is basically embarrassing. I was talking to a good friend of mine last month who is a very good photographer about how you basically don't have GPS or a ton of other features in the main cameras from Japan--so both of us increasingly just use iPhones unless we really need to use big bodies and lenses. Sure, some of it is that iPhones (Pixels) do a good enough job for a lot of us. But it's also that the gap has closed so much and a lot of it is about software. Go to events in Japan and a lot of the design of posters and so forth just looks seriously bad to US (and presumably European) eyes. And even in the large systems space, when I was an IT industry analyst, there was just a lot of quirky Japanese tech stuff that was out of step with the world as a whole. I don't have a coherent theory for it all but Japan just fell out of alignment with mainstream patterns especially in the 90s or so.
  - pezezin 2y ago
    > Go to events in Japan and a lot of the design of posters and so forth just looks seriously bad to US (and presumably European) eyes. As an European living in Japan, I can confirm. Japanese advertisement and presentations look like a competition in who can cram the most text in epilepsy-inducing colors in a single page/poster. Bonus points for cramming both horizontal and vertical text in the same page. I don't know if they really like it, or if they just follow what everybody else does.
delichon 2y ago
Ruby is not awful, it's closer to insanely great. Open source may be something of an antidote to keiretsu.
- djmips 2y ago
  I truly believe that. Their close to the chest self-taught masters of programming did not scale well. They competed even within companies this way - every coder having to produce their own libraries. If they embraced open source earlier and in a big way they could have catapulted themselves to success but they also have a Not Invented Here attitude... The fact that I could code better than them (performance wise) was regarded as a marvel.
alephnerd 2y ago
I don't buy the Keiretsu argument. South Korea and China both adopted the Keiretsu model for conglomerates due to Japan's Flying Geese doctrine, yet both still have fairly robust software scenes. If I were a betting man, my hunch would be the collapse of domestic financing during the Asian Financial Crisis and Great Financial Crisis. Japanese asset managers who concentrated on tech like SoftBank, Nomura, and MUFG had better options in Asia (South Korea, China, India) or in North America (USA) to invest in with better returns compared to Japan. This is why SoftBank has always been a prominent checkwriter in those markets.
- creakingstairs 2y ago
  I mean it is _better_ than Japan, especially after 2015. But Korean software scene is still pretty bad. I still have nightmares about ActiveX/IE6 era. It's just comes down to whether the management sees software as a product or as cost centre. When it is seen as a cost centre, they tend to start a chain of sub-contracts which is never a good thing for software quality.
29athrowaway 2y ago
Video games are technically software and we all know the Japanese are highly skilled in making them, with few to none glitches, etc. My view is different: software is a response to a need. And the Japanese have found ways to solve many of their problems without software. They are OK using a fax and it works excellently for them. Sometimes software is a solution to a trust problem, or a reliability problem, or a synchronization problem. The Japanese are trustworthy, reliable and punctual in general and do not have those problems.
- lupire 2y ago
  A fax machine is not a seriously useful alternative to online information sharing, storage, and retrieval.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  > And the Japanese have found ways to solve many of their problems without software. If you consider ‘throwing bodies at’ a problem an acceptable solution, then yes, they’ve found something that works for them. Personally I can’t stand watching the nonsense Japanese people have to go through to get their boss to like them.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >They are OK using a fax and it works excellently for them. You obviously don't live in Japan. No one here uses faxes unless they're at work, doing business with old-fashioned companies. It's not much different than the USA, where fax machines are commonly used by lawyers and realtors.
araes 2y ago
Prior post with 393 comments by frellus on Jan 10, 2023 can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320669
guardiangod 2y ago
I am reminded of a revelation from a man who has seen it all From the creator of Windows' kernel: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-longhorn-david-culter-laments-the-worst-code-hes-ever-seen https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-longhor... >Cutler found what he terms "the worst code he has ever seen," some IME code developed in Japan. He states that the code had no regard for bugs and that it got to a point where they couldn't fix some of the overflow plugs. In the very same article he said: >However, progress on this project halted as Windows XP's security had gone from bad to worse. Cutler states that his team alone fixed over 5,000 bugs while turning over some of the system's code. His team fixed over 5000 mostly security bugs in Windows XP, and he still thinks it's still better than "some IME code developed in Japan". The mind boggles.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  Presumably he knows what he’s talking about? I think it’s not so much that the code doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. It’s that it’s an absolutely impenetrable mess. You’d never know if there were bugs unless your customer (or QA team) runs into them.
Prickle 2y ago
As a person working in Japan's programing industry, specifically with integrating machine tooling with a web UI; A lot of this sounds accurate. Though, I am not sure if any keiretsu had an influence on my current employer.
blueyes 2y ago
rule of thumb: questions in a headline precede articles without answers.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
treflop 2y ago
I think it's population decline. It's extremely severe in Japan. Percentage aged 15-64 is now nearing 1950 levels. And it's only going to get even worse. 12% are young kids today. In 1950, it was over 35%.
- Mashimo 2y ago
  Why do you think Japanese software is bad because of population decline?
  - treflop 2y ago
    Because innovation tends to come from younger people who have bright ideas, or want to make a name for themselves, or simply because they have free time. You also need other people to work with, so even if you have an idea, it’s much easier when there are a lot of people in the area with the right skill set. With a significant declining trend in population, especially in younger people, there just wouldn’t be as many opportunities. Japanese software is not the only place where we are seeing a decline in innovation. This is the country that that provided us a lot of modern electronics as well. 35% of people are now over 65 in Japan. A much larger percentage of the economy now has to be dedicated to taking care of the elderly. The percentage of elderly in 1950 was tiny.
kazinator 2y ago
> Japan simply missed the opportunity to develop a globally relevant PC software industry. The PC software industry was organized around American operating systems that couldn't even display Japanese text without having your path separating backslash turn into a yen symbol. Pretty much nobody outside of the USA or USA-based multinationals developed a globally relevant PC (no non-PC) software industry. There are only some rare exceptions to this like SAP (German). All the American software was developed for English speakers, with internationalization as an afterthought. Not for the global market at all. You could not take this approach in Japan, like oh, I'm gonna write a word processor for people here in Japan and then we will throw it over the wall to an i18n team to internationalize it and sell it everywhere else.
- potamic 2y ago
  China seems to have a decent software industry
  - Shank 2y ago
    China also has the 996 working system in many companies. Anecdotally from many Chinese friends studying in the US, they virtually all agree: they would prefer to work for an American company or even a Japanese company, but not a Chinese company, with a very short list of exceptions (e.g., miHoYo). I think China does get results with its businesses, but it's not as if that comes for free or at anywhere close to the same cost for people in the US.
lmm 2y ago
Was hoping this would be about Unicode and Han unification. Unicode is uniquely worse for Japanese than for any other real-life world language. You can't make an application that displays Japanese correctly using Unicode, unless you implement mumble mumble font selection mumble ranges vaporware, which no-one (except web browsers) actually does. Or you can sacrifice the ability to display Chinese correctly for the sake of displaying Japanese correctly, but no international software maker will do that. The result is that Japanese software mostly doesn't use Unicode (because it sees no benefit), and, more insidiously, the whole Unicode-first (and, increasingly, unicode-only) world of open-source libraries and languages is much less useful in Japan. So whether by accident or design, Japan is cut off from the global market, in both directions.
- Onavo 2y ago
  > Or you can sacrifice the ability to display Chinese correctly for the sake of displaying Japanese correctly, but no international software maker will do that. I am not a speaker of either but aren't kanji and written Chinese the same language? It's like French and English, you can use the same keyboard except for certain diacritics. What's so special about Japanese that it can't be displayed by Unicode? Unicode seems to work fine for Korean and Chinese, and Japanese is basically a hybrid of those two. If the Unicode standard has space for an ever-expanding list of emojis, they can fix their rendering issues with the Japanese language too.
  - hinoki 2y ago
    They were the same a long time ago, but there has been some drift. If you use the wrong typeface, it’s still intelligible but looks strange. Blog post I found with some examples: https://blog.skritter.com/2015/06/font-differences-between-japanese-and-chinese/ https://blog.skritter.com/2015/06/font-differences-between-j...
  - wffurr 2y ago
    Many Kanji and Chinese glyphs are distinct. There are also many variants of Chinese, among them simplified and traditional. They don't have distinct Unicode codepoints due to Han Unification which tried to cram them all into UTF-16. You have to know the intended locale or the text to disambiguate and select the correct glyphs.
timoth3y 2y ago
Hi, I'm the author and I'm delighted that people are still interested in this topic. There are a lot of great comments, but I'd like to collect and respond in bulk to the ones about keiretsu, since there are a lot of misunderstanding about them. 1) It's not the keiretsu, it's X. It's not just the existence of keiretsu in isolation. They keiretsu produced incredible innovations in the 60s and 70s. It was the combination of the keiretsu control and the shift to domestic markets (which the keiretsu also controlled) that killed the PC software industry in its infancy. 2) Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google are like keirestsu. They really are not. In fact, they operate on a radically different philosophy. Keiretsu would be willing to lose money (and a lot of it) in order to keep business in-house. Their supply chains were owned, integrated, and exclusive. Employees did not leave their keirestu group It fostered innovation as long as they were export facing, but it fell apart once they started to focus on the domestic market. Thank you again for reading. I'm happy to discuss.
- fallous 2y ago
  How much do you think the MITI Fifth Generation Initiative negatively impacted the Japanese software industry by side-tracking so many educational and corporate initiatives?
  - timoth3y 2y ago
    That's a great question. I think that program was a good example of a overall inward-facing industrial policy that dominated in Japan in the 1980s. I'm not sure how much that one program was at fault, but it a great example of many similar misguided policies of the era. When the feedback from the global markets was removed, most of this kind of planning just stopped working.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  The list of US firms are media companies and also the reason people choose their products is software. Why didn’t Sony, Nintendo and Sega become the biggest firms in Japan? They were well positioned to become its biggest media companies. Why is WhatsApp adopted widely without preloading but not LINE, which was way ahead of the curve in terms of media apps?
upfrog 2y ago
For an alternative take on this, here is Patrick McKenzie (patio11)'s take on some similar issues: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan... A lot of people in this thread have been mentioning the importance of risk tolerance in Japan's (lack of a) software industry. He gives some good examples of just how omnipresent that risk aversion can be; from getting funding, to renting an apartment, to finding a significant other, running a startup makes your life much more difficult in Japan than in eg the SF Bay. He also gives a bit more context on the matter of overall software quality, and I think that's an important point: writing assembly for small-scale electronics or cars or industrial machines is just as much "software" as writing a modern web app. Also, while I'm not universally endorsing Japanese web design; dense UIs for the win!
a1o 2y ago
> I have about 30 of these article in progress, and that’s far more than I’ll ever develop into podcasts. I’ve been thinking of starting a Substack newsletter to publish some of these in a much shorter form. Let me know what you think. Is that a good idea? No, If you do that you get the satisfaction from the shorter format and won't have fuel to get around to doing the podcasts of the same topic.
jankcorn 2y ago
I spent ~11 years in Japan, porting/building telecom protocol software and, more importantly, trying to build software development and business competence in our teams. Sadly, although I had a reasonable impact on individual software engineers technical ability, I was unable to find any path to leverage that into "software business building" expertise. Of course, the attribution of causes to this is highly subjective and I expect every person to come away from the elephant with a different interpretation. In my case, the very, very top down 'age hierarchy' culture was (and continues unabated) to crush any ideas and proposals that come up from younger and more competent engineers. In the last 30 years with Japan, I have met only a small handful of people that are willing to take input, let alone change direction, from someone younger than them. (a trivial example was a fellow company director of mine that was born 5 _days_ earlier than me. In 4 years working together, not once would he take anything I said seriously. Hmm...) Give the number of excellent Japanese software engineers that I know, the burden of this "culture" is (to me) quite tragic on its impact slowing down national progress in an important global field. If anyone as ideas how to get around this, I would love to know and learn.
- Gravityloss 2y ago
  I guess the solution would be to build a different company from the ground up and then shield against the common culture sneaking in. You would need to repeat it very often though. Or have a branch office of a non-japanese company. I live in a small country and there are foreign companies and while they have to adjust to local laws and have mostly local employees, they still are culturally different from each other. I wonder how GE with a strong central process and culture control is doing in Japan?
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    IBM does very well in Japan, or used to, so there might be something there.
- adev_ 2y ago
  Yes, exactly: That summarize it all. It is not only in software that Japan has currently difficulties. It is in any domain that requires to "move fast and break thing". Japan is excellent at incremental improvement (Kaizen) but absolutely terrible at managing disruptions. And the reasons are exactly the ones you point out: Excessively hierarchical management practices means that mid-management will kill any evolution that is seen as a risk to them.
hello_computer 2y ago
Japan makes beautiful things like Mario and Katamari Damacy and El Shaddai. America makes ugly things, like Facebook and Twitter and Android/iOS (Stallman is right). The SoCal money-machines make whorehouses and speakeasies look like social reform institutions. If only such a killer could make its way over here...
ekusiadadus 2y ago
Japanese game companies became successful because they owned the patents for gaming systems like Nintendo and PlayStation. However, even though Japan invented the Walkman and early mobile phones, they couldn't keep control of the smartphone market. This shows that having patents for gaming machines worked well, but patents for music players and phones didn't help Japan stay on top.
langsoul-com 2y ago
Blaming ills on keiretsu seems wrong when South Korea effectively had the same and they're way ahead in terms of hard ware and software innovation
personalityson 2y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320669 Highlights from the previous thread: "I experienced this working for the US arm of a Japanese company. To report a bug would cause the programmer to lose face, so we had to waste a lot of time going through all kinds of contortions to lead someone to the bug without calling it out. We wrote a lot of "feature requests" that were really bug reports." "In a Japanese company, people in general do not speak openly in meetings, because they are afraid of disrupting group harmony. Ideas need to be circulated in a series of one-on-one discussions--this is called "newashi" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi). This means that for a group of N people, it's N*(N-1)/2 private discussions that need to happen. And everyone needs to be in agreement and comfortable that the idea is "right", and that there is nothing the slightest bit off with it. Only after all these discussions have happened and everyone is fully bought-in, there is then a meeting to "rubber stamp" the idea." "While the risk-adverse and face-losing-adverse traits of the Japanese culture can explain the (in general) slow development and response of Japanese companies (not limited to software), they cannot explain the quirky, often ugly and not user friendly UI of Japanese software. Germans are a bit risk-adverse, too, though not comparable to Japanese, their software, especially enterprise software are showing the same rigid UI and in general difficulty to use. In fact, you can not use them without reading the manual or being trained and that is expected from the end users, too! In a stark contrast, user-oriented software today are very intuitive, offers pleasant onboarding thus every user can use them casually." "The same holds for Germany. Beside the "no pain no gain" attitude, the pursuit of "perfection" leads to weird outcomes. For example, the music band Kraftwerk dissolved because half of the members wanted to make sounds that looked "perfect" on an oscilloscope and not how good they sounded."
- rudolftheone 2y ago
  Is it really true that the Kraftwerk "dissolved"? (They do tours still in 2024) Also the claim the reason anyone left because half of the members wanted to make sounds that looked "perfect" on an oscilloscope and not how good they sounded - where can I see any confirmation of that?
hnaccountme 2y ago
I work for a fortune 500 Japanese tech company developing software. Its a cultural problem Japanese cant create software. There is no sense of "Hacking". For them everything has to be formalized with detailed processors, costing and KPIs. There is a huge bureaucracy to slow down development as much as possible and complain when things get delayed. They look at the company as a factory that output lines of code, bugs as product defects and treat developers as factory line workers who are insignificant and easily replaceable.
kippel 2y ago
Blaming it to the keiretsu is too simplistic. Here other factors that in my experience (living, studying & working) in Japan contribute: - Graduates don't apply to a job, but to a company. The company decides where to place then. The first years are generally a rotation between departments until it is decided where to allocate them. This means that they will be often misplaced in positions for which they don't have the necessary background nor motivation to learn or contribute because in 6 months they'll be somewhere else. - It is not uncommon for developers not to have a CS or coding background. They learn on the job how to "program" but lack best practices, etc. and figure out things as they go. - Standing out is frown upon - People who are good at their jobs are generally rewarded with more work. One can know who the manager's favourite is by who busy the person is. At the end, the good ones end up burned out, over-stressed and brain death. - Looking busy or hard working is more important than the outcome. - Combine the above, and there is no point to do a good job: There is no reward other than more pressure to deliver but on the other hand, as long as you look busy, not delivering is not "punished". Clear what option most people will take. - As already commented, decisions are top down and often very conservative replicating old methods digitally. - Many customer facing products will try to cover as many cases as possible to avoid complains, perceived discrimination or causing trouble, for example. This results in over bloated software, websites, flyers full of information, etc.
- vishnugupta 2y ago
  From what you wrote none of the factors seem to be specific to software/CS. But then Japan is quite well known when it comes to physical products. So I wonder what’s it about software the Japanese culture inhibits.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    I don’t think anything about Japanese culture or generalizations like that tell you much about this. Physical products: you are buying them for their software. That’s why you choose an iPhone over an Android phone. They’re all rectangles with screens. When Sonos screwed up its app it was a crisis because: people pay for the software not the hardware. Is this true about cars? EV design is converging. It will be. CarPlay controversy is a great example: people choose cars that support it. Vanmoofs have a lot of hardware problems but the reason people bought them was software (like location tracking and e-Shifting). So “well known when it comes to physical products,” that may be, but all products are software products. “Software is eating the world” was all about like, replacing human labor or whatever, disruption. Marc Andreesen thinks he was saying something forward looking when it was all backward looking. The story is differentiation and customer choices. Truly forward looking. But are Japanese firms incapable of that? Of course not. Once there was a guy on here who said he had the brilliant idea of using a web browser to make an airplane UI. Listen brother, everybody knows how to write good software. It’s a business strategy not execution problem.
ambyra 2y ago
https://youtu.be/ky1nGQhHTso?si=XN5Hny_Yd6Svx5M_ https://youtu.be/ky1nGQhHTso?si=XN5Hny_Yd6Svx5M_ Asianometry has a good one on this. They’ve become dependent on US software (and hardware), and programming is considered a low prestige job.
slightwinder 2y ago
> The reason Japanese software development stopped advancing in the 1980s had nothing to do with a lack of talented software developers. I disagree. Software is very bottom-up-orientated. The culture that developers create is a very strong influence on the industry as a whole. And Japan had for very pragmatic reason a serious lack of this. PC usage in Japan was for a very long time very low. Partly because they are expensive and big, and most Japanese homes are small and have no place for them. And partly because Japan has a very elaborated culture around their language and analog tools, which was hard to transfer to the digital world. This ultimately resulted in highly specialized, small and focused devices, which left no room for people to grow the same deep software-culture that other industry nations had. And this resulted also in kids not being embraced by computers from early on, preventing the growth of a serious foundation for the next generation in the 90s+. Funny enough, we see the same now happening with younger people in western countries, who also are lacking serious competence in PC-usage, leading to similar effects.
mlinksva 2y ago
Some other aspects are covered in a favorite paper and recent book: - How Law Made Silicon Valley by Anupam Chander https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1211&context=elj https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a... compares the US, EU, Japan, and South Korea policy including copyright, intermediary, and privacy and US policy was more permissive and very importantly, offered more certainty earlier, to internet entrepreneurs; I don't recall the Japan-specific details but the abstract includes the line "Innovations that might be celebrated in the United States could lead to imprisonment in Japan." - Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition by Jeffrey Ding (not open access that I know of) uses Japan/US competition in IT as a case study in its critique of the idea that "leading sectors" determine economic and ultimately geopolitical dominance, roughly the idea that early innovators capture global monopoly profits which ultimately accrue to the state/military; instead it argues what's determinative is diffusion of general purpose technologies throughout an economy. In IT, Japan attempted to translate "leading sector" theory into reality with its 5th generation computing project, a widely known failure. At the same time, it was decades behind the US in both establishing CS as a discipline at top universities and making CS education widely available across state/equivalent universities. I imagine there's substantial interaction between the above theories and the keiretsu system but I don't recall (which doesn't mean much) anything on that in the above two works.
Tiktaalik 2y ago
Young Japanese computer hobbyists created a number of small games companies in the 1980s and 90s and many of them went on to become large world wide successes. Most people would be aware of the big dogs like Sega and Nintendo, but companies like HAL, Game Freak, Square, and Koei were all tiny startups at one point. It seems implied in this article that Japan has struggled in consumer or business software of the sort that startups in SV make. It would be interesting to discuss why that is while they became quite successful in games software.

275 points by ayoisaiah 2y ago

This is actually really interesting history, but I wonder about apps like Line, which the Japanese still prefer. It's not a great app, but it's a user app, not a corporate one.

zdw 2y ago
Interestingly, Line originally was developed by Naver which is a South Korean company, although it's gone through several changes of corporate control since.
- yongjik 2y ago
  It's jointly owned by Naver and Softbank. A few months ago, there was a public outcry in Korea when the Japanese government threatened to twist Naver's arm to give up its share of Line, and South Korea's inexplicably pro-Japanese government stayed mum. With both governments enjoying abysmal public support, I have no idea how it will eventually be settled.
  - onetokeoverthe 2y ago
    s.korea is pro japan. =. better than china.
    - onetokeoverthe 2y ago
      So s korea should favor the country that boycotts them for random hurt feelings?
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    I wonder why Koreans care: they don't use LINE anyway, AFAIK. They all use KakaoTalk.
    - yongjik 2y ago
      Why wouldn't Koreans care? We're talking about 50% ownership of a messaging platform that's de facto standard in multiple Asian countries. Imagine the UK government trying to force Google to sell DeepMind.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        >Why wouldn't Koreans care? Because they don't use it. >We're talking about 50% ownership of a messaging platform that's de facto standard in multiple Asian countries Yeah, except Korea. If they think it's so great, why aren't they using it themselves? It seems hypocritical. >Imagine the UK government trying to force Google to sell DeepMind. Does Google or anyone in the US actually use DeepMind? If so, that's a poor analogy.
timoth3y 2y ago
Line was actually a Korean startup. There days, it's not a great app, but strong network effects keep it dominant here in Japan.
- rwmj 2y ago
  Really? I use Line all the time including for sending text, video, and making audio and video calls, and it works great. Never had issues with it.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    This Line? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details/%EB%9D%BC%EC%9D%B8_LINE?id=jp.naver.line.android&hl=en-US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details/%EB%9D%BC%EC%9D%B... From the reviews, it looks like the unhappy path wasn’t well tested.
    - klausa 2y ago
      FWIW, this is on par with reviews for _anything_ in Japan. The fanciest and most recommended ramen shops don't crack 3.9 on local review sites, the mindset is completely different from "oh nothing went wrong, 5 stars I guess!".
      - freddie_mercury 2y ago
        Ha, I'm reminded of reviews from Vietnam where you'd usually see restaurants get destroyed in reviews because they are 20 cents more expensive than some place else. Price was such a much bigger part of the review than other places I've lived.
      - hnlmorg 2y ago
        I wasn’t looking at the stars. I was looking at all the reviews from different people saying the app locked them out of all their contacts.
    - rwmj 2y ago
      Yes that one. It works very effectively for me and I've not had any dropped calls, except for the obvious where we one of us loses network connectivity.
ilamont 2y ago
Also used widely in Taiwan.
- tjpnz 2y ago
  And Thailand, apparently.
  - FMecha 2y ago
    It was also popular in Indonesia, but the userbase eventually moved to WhatsApp and Discord. People who run "official accounts" on LINE in Indonesia eventually moved to Twitter (the Indonesia-specific "base"/"menfess" accounts/culture were originally from similar LINE accounts allowing users to send anonymous messages so it can be relayed to many users, as well as from K-pop roleplaying on Twitter) and Instagram (for news, after LINE Today, their news aggregator, closed), too.

stevecalifornia 2y ago

[flagged]

Sakos 2y ago
We see similar factors in Germany, which I find interesting. To the point where Volkswagen is investing billions into Rivian to save their software side. I've never heard anything good from developers I know who worked at VW or any other German manufacturer.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Having worked at a number of hardware manufacturers, a lot of them really don't understand software at all. They look at software as if it were just another line item on the BOM: 12 qty 6-32 screw, 2 qty rubber gasket, 1 qty plastic case... OH AND 1 qty "firmware software thinggy," that we add to the product at station 244 on the assembly line. Go make some software that meets the requirements and spoon it into the product so we can ship. No thought about longevity, updates, security threats, intercompatibility with other devices and standards, UX, accessibility, the software ecosystem, nothing... Software is just another part number that's supplied by a supplier and bolted onto the "real" physical product. So it's no surprise when software companies come in and eat this mentality for lunch when they decide to come up with a competing hardware product.
  - simne 2y ago
    Your comment wonder me. As I hear from CS community like a mirror words - because semiconductor manufacturing is prohibitively expensive, cs becomes too abstract. But my own exp, mostly confirm your words, even when I sure see just my side of whole picture and I'm attracting to explain my exp as regional specific (I'm in Ukraine, exUSSR, and people here conservative and share old USSR habits).

Animats 2y ago

We're back to keiretsu. They're called Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Netflix. Each has its own closed world, moat, and small vendors subservient to it.

echelon 2y ago
Netflix doesn't belong on that list. They're tiny in comparison. YouTube is bigger than Netflix.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Citation needed; Netflix has a ~$350 billion market cap [0]. Google has one of $2.227 trillion [1], and 10.25% of its revenue is attributed to Youtube revenue. Since I haven't found a quick reference to youtube's net worth, let's assume it's 10.25% of $2.227T, which is ~$222 billion, making YT smaller than Netflix. [0] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nflx/market-cap/ https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nflx/market-cap/ [1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/marketcap/ [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/289659/youtube-share-of-google-total-ad-revenues/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/289659/youtube-share-of-...
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    Regardless of numbers, Netflix is nowhere near as influential as the others. It’s just a website that plays videos, and one can easily live life without it. The other big companies are much harder to avoid, they’re basically infrastructure.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      If Netflix closed up shop tomorrow, there'd be a long a thread here, lots of headlines, and lots of whining, but at this point there are a ton of other streaming services and most of us would shrug and move on. Netflix has been on my bubble for a good couple of years and has only marginally kept my monthly subscription. In fact, I'm still somewhat angry at Netflix for wiping out disc rental and then killing their own DVD by mail which was a good source of reliable one+ year old movies.

lebuffon 2y ago

I read this book a long time ago. It provided some insights on the role of Japan's difficulty with foreign languages in the 1980s and the desire to create AI translation. The "Fifth Generation project" was a massive government and big-business joint venture that amounted to almost nothing. The author explores why with some surprises along the way. I would say it is like the "Mythical Man Month" from the Japanese side of computing. The book also opened my eyes to the difficulty of mastering Japanese. https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial- https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial- Intelligence/dp/019504939X

lazyasciiart 2y ago
Your link is broken, please fix it for me to check out :)
- Minor49er 2y ago
  Just remove the space from the URL
  - Qwertious 2y ago
    The URL doesn't completely display itself on mobile, it gets cut off with an ellipsis added. Why not just edit the link to remove the space?
    - D-Coder 2y ago
      Here you go: https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial-Intelligence/dp/019504939X https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Fallacy-Artificial-I...
    - Minor49er 2y ago
      I have not and am not seeing this problem, and I have been posting on mobile Alternatively, you could just search the name that was provided instead of demanding to be spoonfed

PhasmaFelis 2y ago

> First, as the cold war heated up in the 40s and 50s, America’s idealistic vision for a democratic and progressive Japan took a back seat to the more practical and pressing need to develop Japan into a bulwark against Communism. Funny how protecting the ideals of progressive democracy from Communism so often involved suppressing those ideals ourselves. Beat the Commies to the punch, I guess.

Aeolun 2y ago
Arguably it worked out pretty well for Japan, given where the rest of the post soviet countries are now.
- pezezin 2y ago
  Like post-Soviet Estonia, which is way more advanced than Japan when it comes to digitalization?
  - jesterson 2y ago
    How do you measure "advanced"?
    - pezezin 2y ago
      For example, being able to do online administrative procedures by using digital signatures, instead of doing them on paper with personal stamps.
      - jesterson 2y ago
        How "advanced" is that? Considering myself quite immersed in tech world, I would prefer paper to digital signatures and alike. Advanced doesn't mean putting tech everywhere regardless whether it improves life or not
        pezezin 2y ago

quanto 2y ago

Blaming all ills of any Japanese industry on the keiretsu is in vogue for decades, but at best, keiretsu is a symptom, not a cause, of the underlying risk-averse culture. Keiretsu, even when they were toxically anti-competitive, did not go out of their ways to crush would-be global startups in Japan; keiretsu, by the author's own argument, didn't care about the global software-only market, thus would not kill those startups. The true culprit, the risk-averse culture -- while with own merits -- did not mesh well with the more fluid flat culture of software development. It was not an accident that software did well in the most hippy region in the US, San Francisco. On the contrary, hardware development, due to much more constraints from the laws of physics and economics, has been done well in Japan et al as careful top-down planning is the edge, not individual-level agility.* I am a little surprised that the author, who is active in Japan, is off the mark. I regularly talk to many engineers/entrepreneurs in the region, and the cause-and-effect are quite easy to see and are unanimously agreed upon. Kudos to people there who are trying to change the software development culture for the better. * Elon's ventures seem to challenge this conventional dichotomy as he attempts to bring both agility and top-down leadership into his firms. More power to him.

KerrAvon 2y ago
[flagged]
- octopoc 2y ago
  He makes a lot of people mad but that doesn’t make him an idiot. It just makes him genuine. Everybody else who looks polished is hiding secrets behind excellent PR.
  - MrLeap 2y ago
    I agree that making a lot of people mad doesn't necessarily mean someone is an idiot. At the time time, making a lot of people mad does not necessarily mean someone is genuine. For example, someone who manipulates a lot of people with misinformation might manifest anger in many. In that hypothetical scenario, I wouldn't think that the anger is because the target's an honest, forthright, genuine straight-shooter. Furthermore, most people are genuinely kind and compassionate towards others. For those people, mass anger is not their genuine goal, or a likely consequence of them being genuine.

miki123211 2y ago

There's one more aspect to this that wasn't mentioned at all in the article. In Japan, home computers never really made sense until it was far, far too late. In the west, you'd buy a PC (or a home computer) to play games, edit documents or manage your business. The latter two were pretty much impossible in Japan, as the computers of that era couldn't handle the complexities of the Japanese language and character set. Gaming was all that remained, and if you only wanted gaming, you could just as well get a NES (known in Japan as Famicom), which was much better suited for the purpose. Computers eventually caught up, but some of the cultural impact remained, still making them less popular than in the west. This is one of the reasons why Japanese were so good at consumer electronics, they just needed that electronics a lot more than we did, and the devices needed a lot more features, as "just plug it into a computer to do the complicated stuff" wasn't really an option there.

ghaff 2y ago
I don't know exactly the reasons but Japanese software is basically embarrassing. I was talking to a good friend of mine last month who is a very good photographer about how you basically don't have GPS or a ton of other features in the main cameras from Japan--so both of us increasingly just use iPhones unless we really need to use big bodies and lenses. Sure, some of it is that iPhones (Pixels) do a good enough job for a lot of us. But it's also that the gap has closed so much and a lot of it is about software. Go to events in Japan and a lot of the design of posters and so forth just looks seriously bad to US (and presumably European) eyes. And even in the large systems space, when I was an IT industry analyst, there was just a lot of quirky Japanese tech stuff that was out of step with the world as a whole. I don't have a coherent theory for it all but Japan just fell out of alignment with mainstream patterns especially in the 90s or so.
- pezezin 2y ago
  > Go to events in Japan and a lot of the design of posters and so forth just looks seriously bad to US (and presumably European) eyes. As an European living in Japan, I can confirm. Japanese advertisement and presentations look like a competition in who can cram the most text in epilepsy-inducing colors in a single page/poster. Bonus points for cramming both horizontal and vertical text in the same page. I don't know if they really like it, or if they just follow what everybody else does.

delichon 2y ago

Ruby is not awful, it's closer to insanely great. Open source may be something of an antidote to keiretsu.

djmips 2y ago
I truly believe that. Their close to the chest self-taught masters of programming did not scale well. They competed even within companies this way - every coder having to produce their own libraries. If they embraced open source earlier and in a big way they could have catapulted themselves to success but they also have a Not Invented Here attitude... The fact that I could code better than them (performance wise) was regarded as a marvel.

alephnerd 2y ago

I don't buy the Keiretsu argument. South Korea and China both adopted the Keiretsu model for conglomerates due to Japan's Flying Geese doctrine, yet both still have fairly robust software scenes. If I were a betting man, my hunch would be the collapse of domestic financing during the Asian Financial Crisis and Great Financial Crisis. Japanese asset managers who concentrated on tech like SoftBank, Nomura, and MUFG had better options in Asia (South Korea, China, India) or in North America (USA) to invest in with better returns compared to Japan. This is why SoftBank has always been a prominent checkwriter in those markets.

creakingstairs 2y ago
I mean it is _better_ than Japan, especially after 2015. But Korean software scene is still pretty bad. I still have nightmares about ActiveX/IE6 era. It's just comes down to whether the management sees software as a product or as cost centre. When it is seen as a cost centre, they tend to start a chain of sub-contracts which is never a good thing for software quality.

29athrowaway 2y ago

Video games are technically software and we all know the Japanese are highly skilled in making them, with few to none glitches, etc. My view is different: software is a response to a need. And the Japanese have found ways to solve many of their problems without software. They are OK using a fax and it works excellently for them. Sometimes software is a solution to a trust problem, or a reliability problem, or a synchronization problem. The Japanese are trustworthy, reliable and punctual in general and do not have those problems.

lupire 2y ago
A fax machine is not a seriously useful alternative to online information sharing, storage, and retrieval.
Aeolun 2y ago
> And the Japanese have found ways to solve many of their problems without software. If you consider ‘throwing bodies at’ a problem an acceptable solution, then yes, they’ve found something that works for them. Personally I can’t stand watching the nonsense Japanese people have to go through to get their boss to like them.
shiroiushi 2y ago
>They are OK using a fax and it works excellently for them. You obviously don't live in Japan. No one here uses faxes unless they're at work, doing business with old-fashioned companies. It's not much different than the USA, where fax machines are commonly used by lawyers and realtors.

araes 2y ago

Prior post with 393 comments by frellus on Jan 10, 2023 can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320669

guardiangod 2y ago

I am reminded of a revelation from a man who has seen it all From the creator of Windows' kernel: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-longhorn-david-culter-laments-the-worst-code-hes-ever-seen https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-longhor... >Cutler found what he terms "the worst code he has ever seen," some IME code developed in Japan. He states that the code had no regard for bugs and that it got to a point where they couldn't fix some of the overflow plugs. In the very same article he said: >However, progress on this project halted as Windows XP's security had gone from bad to worse. Cutler states that his team alone fixed over 5,000 bugs while turning over some of the system's code. His team fixed over 5000 mostly security bugs in Windows XP, and he still thinks it's still better than "some IME code developed in Japan". The mind boggles.

Aeolun 2y ago
Presumably he knows what he’s talking about? I think it’s not so much that the code doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. It’s that it’s an absolutely impenetrable mess. You’d never know if there were bugs unless your customer (or QA team) runs into them.

Prickle 2y ago

As a person working in Japan's programing industry, specifically with integrating machine tooling with a web UI; A lot of this sounds accurate. Though, I am not sure if any keiretsu had an influence on my current employer.

blueyes 2y ago

rule of thumb: questions in a headline precede articles without answers.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

treflop 2y ago

I think it's population decline. It's extremely severe in Japan. Percentage aged 15-64 is now nearing 1950 levels. And it's only going to get even worse. 12% are young kids today. In 1950, it was over 35%.

Mashimo 2y ago
Why do you think Japanese software is bad because of population decline?
- treflop 2y ago
  Because innovation tends to come from younger people who have bright ideas, or want to make a name for themselves, or simply because they have free time. You also need other people to work with, so even if you have an idea, it’s much easier when there are a lot of people in the area with the right skill set. With a significant declining trend in population, especially in younger people, there just wouldn’t be as many opportunities. Japanese software is not the only place where we are seeing a decline in innovation. This is the country that that provided us a lot of modern electronics as well. 35% of people are now over 65 in Japan. A much larger percentage of the economy now has to be dedicated to taking care of the elderly. The percentage of elderly in 1950 was tiny.

kazinator 2y ago

> Japan simply missed the opportunity to develop a globally relevant PC software industry. The PC software industry was organized around American operating systems that couldn't even display Japanese text without having your path separating backslash turn into a yen symbol. Pretty much nobody outside of the USA or USA-based multinationals developed a globally relevant PC (no non-PC) software industry. There are only some rare exceptions to this like SAP (German). All the American software was developed for English speakers, with internationalization as an afterthought. Not for the global market at all. You could not take this approach in Japan, like oh, I'm gonna write a word processor for people here in Japan and then we will throw it over the wall to an i18n team to internationalize it and sell it everywhere else.

potamic 2y ago
China seems to have a decent software industry
- Shank 2y ago
  China also has the 996 working system in many companies. Anecdotally from many Chinese friends studying in the US, they virtually all agree: they would prefer to work for an American company or even a Japanese company, but not a Chinese company, with a very short list of exceptions (e.g., miHoYo). I think China does get results with its businesses, but it's not as if that comes for free or at anywhere close to the same cost for people in the US.

lmm 2y ago

Was hoping this would be about Unicode and Han unification. Unicode is uniquely worse for Japanese than for any other real-life world language. You can't make an application that displays Japanese correctly using Unicode, unless you implement mumble mumble font selection mumble ranges vaporware, which no-one (except web browsers) actually does. Or you can sacrifice the ability to display Chinese correctly for the sake of displaying Japanese correctly, but no international software maker will do that. The result is that Japanese software mostly doesn't use Unicode (because it sees no benefit), and, more insidiously, the whole Unicode-first (and, increasingly, unicode-only) world of open-source libraries and languages is much less useful in Japan. So whether by accident or design, Japan is cut off from the global market, in both directions.

Onavo 2y ago
> Or you can sacrifice the ability to display Chinese correctly for the sake of displaying Japanese correctly, but no international software maker will do that. I am not a speaker of either but aren't kanji and written Chinese the same language? It's like French and English, you can use the same keyboard except for certain diacritics. What's so special about Japanese that it can't be displayed by Unicode? Unicode seems to work fine for Korean and Chinese, and Japanese is basically a hybrid of those two. If the Unicode standard has space for an ever-expanding list of emojis, they can fix their rendering issues with the Japanese language too.
- hinoki 2y ago
  They were the same a long time ago, but there has been some drift. If you use the wrong typeface, it’s still intelligible but looks strange. Blog post I found with some examples: https://blog.skritter.com/2015/06/font-differences-between-japanese-and-chinese/ https://blog.skritter.com/2015/06/font-differences-between-j...
- wffurr 2y ago
  Many Kanji and Chinese glyphs are distinct. There are also many variants of Chinese, among them simplified and traditional. They don't have distinct Unicode codepoints due to Han Unification which tried to cram them all into UTF-16. You have to know the intended locale or the text to disambiguate and select the correct glyphs.

timoth3y 2y ago

Hi, I'm the author and I'm delighted that people are still interested in this topic. There are a lot of great comments, but I'd like to collect and respond in bulk to the ones about keiretsu, since there are a lot of misunderstanding about them. 1) It's not the keiretsu, it's X. It's not just the existence of keiretsu in isolation. They keiretsu produced incredible innovations in the 60s and 70s. It was the combination of the keiretsu control and the shift to domestic markets (which the keiretsu also controlled) that killed the PC software industry in its infancy. 2) Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google are like keirestsu. They really are not. In fact, they operate on a radically different philosophy. Keiretsu would be willing to lose money (and a lot of it) in order to keep business in-house. Their supply chains were owned, integrated, and exclusive. Employees did not leave their keirestu group It fostered innovation as long as they were export facing, but it fell apart once they started to focus on the domestic market. Thank you again for reading. I'm happy to discuss.

fallous 2y ago
How much do you think the MITI Fifth Generation Initiative negatively impacted the Japanese software industry by side-tracking so many educational and corporate initiatives?
- timoth3y 2y ago
  That's a great question. I think that program was a good example of a overall inward-facing industrial policy that dominated in Japan in the 1980s. I'm not sure how much that one program was at fault, but it a great example of many similar misguided policies of the era. When the feedback from the global markets was removed, most of this kind of planning just stopped working.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
doctorpangloss 2y ago
The list of US firms are media companies and also the reason people choose their products is software. Why didn’t Sony, Nintendo and Sega become the biggest firms in Japan? They were well positioned to become its biggest media companies. Why is WhatsApp adopted widely without preloading but not LINE, which was way ahead of the curve in terms of media apps?

upfrog 2y ago

For an alternative take on this, here is Patrick McKenzie (patio11)'s take on some similar issues: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan... A lot of people in this thread have been mentioning the importance of risk tolerance in Japan's (lack of a) software industry. He gives some good examples of just how omnipresent that risk aversion can be; from getting funding, to renting an apartment, to finding a significant other, running a startup makes your life much more difficult in Japan than in eg the SF Bay. He also gives a bit more context on the matter of overall software quality, and I think that's an important point: writing assembly for small-scale electronics or cars or industrial machines is just as much "software" as writing a modern web app. Also, while I'm not universally endorsing Japanese web design; dense UIs for the win!

a1o 2y ago

> I have about 30 of these article in progress, and that’s far more than I’ll ever develop into podcasts. I’ve been thinking of starting a Substack newsletter to publish some of these in a much shorter form. Let me know what you think. Is that a good idea? No, If you do that you get the satisfaction from the shorter format and won't have fuel to get around to doing the podcasts of the same topic.

jankcorn 2y ago

I spent ~11 years in Japan, porting/building telecom protocol software and, more importantly, trying to build software development and business competence in our teams. Sadly, although I had a reasonable impact on individual software engineers technical ability, I was unable to find any path to leverage that into "software business building" expertise. Of course, the attribution of causes to this is highly subjective and I expect every person to come away from the elephant with a different interpretation. In my case, the very, very top down 'age hierarchy' culture was (and continues unabated) to crush any ideas and proposals that come up from younger and more competent engineers. In the last 30 years with Japan, I have met only a small handful of people that are willing to take input, let alone change direction, from someone younger than them. (a trivial example was a fellow company director of mine that was born 5 _days_ earlier than me. In 4 years working together, not once would he take anything I said seriously. Hmm...) Give the number of excellent Japanese software engineers that I know, the burden of this "culture" is (to me) quite tragic on its impact slowing down national progress in an important global field. If anyone as ideas how to get around this, I would love to know and learn.

Gravityloss 2y ago
I guess the solution would be to build a different company from the ground up and then shield against the common culture sneaking in. You would need to repeat it very often though. Or have a branch office of a non-japanese company. I live in a small country and there are foreign companies and while they have to adjust to local laws and have mostly local employees, they still are culturally different from each other. I wonder how GE with a strong central process and culture control is doing in Japan?
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  IBM does very well in Japan, or used to, so there might be something there.
adev_ 2y ago
Yes, exactly: That summarize it all. It is not only in software that Japan has currently difficulties. It is in any domain that requires to "move fast and break thing". Japan is excellent at incremental improvement (Kaizen) but absolutely terrible at managing disruptions. And the reasons are exactly the ones you point out: Excessively hierarchical management practices means that mid-management will kill any evolution that is seen as a risk to them.

hello_computer 2y ago

Japan makes beautiful things like Mario and Katamari Damacy and El Shaddai. America makes ugly things, like Facebook and Twitter and Android/iOS (Stallman is right). The SoCal money-machines make whorehouses and speakeasies look like social reform institutions. If only such a killer could make its way over here...

ekusiadadus 2y ago

Japanese game companies became successful because they owned the patents for gaming systems like Nintendo and PlayStation. However, even though Japan invented the Walkman and early mobile phones, they couldn't keep control of the smartphone market. This shows that having patents for gaming machines worked well, but patents for music players and phones didn't help Japan stay on top.

langsoul-com 2y ago

Blaming ills on keiretsu seems wrong when South Korea effectively had the same and they're way ahead in terms of hard ware and software innovation

personalityson 2y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320669 Highlights from the previous thread: "I experienced this working for the US arm of a Japanese company. To report a bug would cause the programmer to lose face, so we had to waste a lot of time going through all kinds of contortions to lead someone to the bug without calling it out. We wrote a lot of "feature requests" that were really bug reports." "In a Japanese company, people in general do not speak openly in meetings, because they are afraid of disrupting group harmony. Ideas need to be circulated in a series of one-on-one discussions--this is called "newashi" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi). This means that for a group of N people, it's N*(N-1)/2 private discussions that need to happen. And everyone needs to be in agreement and comfortable that the idea is "right", and that there is nothing the slightest bit off with it. Only after all these discussions have happened and everyone is fully bought-in, there is then a meeting to "rubber stamp" the idea." "While the risk-adverse and face-losing-adverse traits of the Japanese culture can explain the (in general) slow development and response of Japanese companies (not limited to software), they cannot explain the quirky, often ugly and not user friendly UI of Japanese software. Germans are a bit risk-adverse, too, though not comparable to Japanese, their software, especially enterprise software are showing the same rigid UI and in general difficulty to use. In fact, you can not use them without reading the manual or being trained and that is expected from the end users, too! In a stark contrast, user-oriented software today are very intuitive, offers pleasant onboarding thus every user can use them casually." "The same holds for Germany. Beside the "no pain no gain" attitude, the pursuit of "perfection" leads to weird outcomes. For example, the music band Kraftwerk dissolved because half of the members wanted to make sounds that looked "perfect" on an oscilloscope and not how good they sounded."

rudolftheone 2y ago
Is it really true that the Kraftwerk "dissolved"? (They do tours still in 2024) Also the claim the reason anyone left because half of the members wanted to make sounds that looked "perfect" on an oscilloscope and not how good they sounded - where can I see any confirmation of that?

hnaccountme 2y ago

I work for a fortune 500 Japanese tech company developing software. Its a cultural problem Japanese cant create software. There is no sense of "Hacking". For them everything has to be formalized with detailed processors, costing and KPIs. There is a huge bureaucracy to slow down development as much as possible and complain when things get delayed. They look at the company as a factory that output lines of code, bugs as product defects and treat developers as factory line workers who are insignificant and easily replaceable.

kippel 2y ago

Blaming it to the keiretsu is too simplistic. Here other factors that in my experience (living, studying & working) in Japan contribute: - Graduates don't apply to a job, but to a company. The company decides where to place then. The first years are generally a rotation between departments until it is decided where to allocate them. This means that they will be often misplaced in positions for which they don't have the necessary background nor motivation to learn or contribute because in 6 months they'll be somewhere else. - It is not uncommon for developers not to have a CS or coding background. They learn on the job how to "program" but lack best practices, etc. and figure out things as they go. - Standing out is frown upon - People who are good at their jobs are generally rewarded with more work. One can know who the manager's favourite is by who busy the person is. At the end, the good ones end up burned out, over-stressed and brain death. - Looking busy or hard working is more important than the outcome. - Combine the above, and there is no point to do a good job: There is no reward other than more pressure to deliver but on the other hand, as long as you look busy, not delivering is not "punished". Clear what option most people will take. - As already commented, decisions are top down and often very conservative replicating old methods digitally. - Many customer facing products will try to cover as many cases as possible to avoid complains, perceived discrimination or causing trouble, for example. This results in over bloated software, websites, flyers full of information, etc.

vishnugupta 2y ago
From what you wrote none of the factors seem to be specific to software/CS. But then Japan is quite well known when it comes to physical products. So I wonder what’s it about software the Japanese culture inhibits.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  I don’t think anything about Japanese culture or generalizations like that tell you much about this. Physical products: you are buying them for their software. That’s why you choose an iPhone over an Android phone. They’re all rectangles with screens. When Sonos screwed up its app it was a crisis because: people pay for the software not the hardware. Is this true about cars? EV design is converging. It will be. CarPlay controversy is a great example: people choose cars that support it. Vanmoofs have a lot of hardware problems but the reason people bought them was software (like location tracking and e-Shifting). So “well known when it comes to physical products,” that may be, but all products are software products. “Software is eating the world” was all about like, replacing human labor or whatever, disruption. Marc Andreesen thinks he was saying something forward looking when it was all backward looking. The story is differentiation and customer choices. Truly forward looking. But are Japanese firms incapable of that? Of course not. Once there was a guy on here who said he had the brilliant idea of using a web browser to make an airplane UI. Listen brother, everybody knows how to write good software. It’s a business strategy not execution problem.

ambyra 2y ago

https://youtu.be/ky1nGQhHTso?si=XN5Hny_Yd6Svx5M_ https://youtu.be/ky1nGQhHTso?si=XN5Hny_Yd6Svx5M_ Asianometry has a good one on this. They’ve become dependent on US software (and hardware), and programming is considered a low prestige job.

slightwinder 2y ago

> The reason Japanese software development stopped advancing in the 1980s had nothing to do with a lack of talented software developers. I disagree. Software is very bottom-up-orientated. The culture that developers create is a very strong influence on the industry as a whole. And Japan had for very pragmatic reason a serious lack of this. PC usage in Japan was for a very long time very low. Partly because they are expensive and big, and most Japanese homes are small and have no place for them. And partly because Japan has a very elaborated culture around their language and analog tools, which was hard to transfer to the digital world. This ultimately resulted in highly specialized, small and focused devices, which left no room for people to grow the same deep software-culture that other industry nations had. And this resulted also in kids not being embraced by computers from early on, preventing the growth of a serious foundation for the next generation in the 90s+. Funny enough, we see the same now happening with younger people in western countries, who also are lacking serious competence in PC-usage, leading to similar effects.

mlinksva 2y ago

Some other aspects are covered in a favorite paper and recent book: - How Law Made Silicon Valley by Anupam Chander https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1211&context=elj https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a... compares the US, EU, Japan, and South Korea policy including copyright, intermediary, and privacy and US policy was more permissive and very importantly, offered more certainty earlier, to internet entrepreneurs; I don't recall the Japan-specific details but the abstract includes the line "Innovations that might be celebrated in the United States could lead to imprisonment in Japan." - Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition by Jeffrey Ding (not open access that I know of) uses Japan/US competition in IT as a case study in its critique of the idea that "leading sectors" determine economic and ultimately geopolitical dominance, roughly the idea that early innovators capture global monopoly profits which ultimately accrue to the state/military; instead it argues what's determinative is diffusion of general purpose technologies throughout an economy. In IT, Japan attempted to translate "leading sector" theory into reality with its 5th generation computing project, a widely known failure. At the same time, it was decades behind the US in both establishing CS as a discipline at top universities and making CS education widely available across state/equivalent universities. I imagine there's substantial interaction between the above theories and the keiretsu system but I don't recall (which doesn't mean much) anything on that in the above two works.

Tiktaalik 2y ago

Young Japanese computer hobbyists created a number of small games companies in the 1980s and 90s and many of them went on to become large world wide successes. Most people would be aware of the big dogs like Sega and Nintendo, but companies like HAL, Game Freak, Square, and Koei were all tiny startups at one point. It seems implied in this article that Japan has struggled in consumer or business software of the sort that startups in SV make. It would be interesting to discuss why that is while they became quite successful in games software.