Japan's electronics industry has many issues holding it back, but the biggest one in my mind is how they perceive and implement user interfaces. I recall buyin

Japan's electronics industry has many issues holding it back, but the biggest one in my mind is how they perceive and implement user interfaces. I recall buying a Sony MZ-N10 minidisc player [1] around 2002 and it was a technological breakthrough for its time - impossibly thin, light, robust and could record audio to disc with incredible clarity. The electronic disk ejection mechanism was very cool. The battery life was unheard of. The was a button for every function, and every function could be messed with. I remember keeping the language in Japanese and the eerie blue backlight on the remote permanently turned on so that it looked cool. But at the time it was released Apple had released the iPod. Basically a tiny HDD and audio decoder hidden under a simple user interface and simple human-machine-interface. All it did was play music, and it could store a lot of it for a little over half the price of the MZ-N10. Instead of being encrusted with a myriad of buttons, it relegated the functionality to the user interface. Simplicity through clever software. Since then every Japanese gadget I've purchased has suffered from the same problem - excellent engineering but poor user-interface. The one exception being my Canon image stabilised binoculars which have exactly one button and a focus ring. Japan still reigns supreme for optics. [1] http://www.minidisc.org/brian_youn/mzn10/ http://www.minidisc.org/brian_youn/mzn10/