5 ms·

You're forgetting about digital media: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/15/3628376/japan-digital-content-ecosystem-hulu-country-future http://www.theverge.com/20

You're forgetting about digital media: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/15/3628376/japan-digital-content-ecosystem-hulu-country-future http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/15/3628376/japan-digital-con... There's a lot more to moving your life online than social networking. I'm not big on social networking either. But that doesn't mean I still rent my videos at the corner store or go to the local record store to buy albums on CD.

veidr 14y ago
I don't think I am forgetting about those things -- read the closing paragraph of the article you link: The real question, however, is whether or not Japanese consumers even want these services that we from the West can no longer imagine life without. Hulu and Sony are making good starts, but they certainly have their work cut out for them in Japan. As far as I can tell, most people are pretty happy as long as they live within bicycle distance of a Tsutaya — that’s basically everyone in Tokyo, by the way — and its convenient, cheap access to rented media. Which, of course, can be copied and kept forever; a practice that Tsutaya has gone out of its way to encourage by actually selling burnable discs and drives alongside its J-pop CDs. And for casual consumers, maybe it is a better solution. No DRM, no extortionate prices, and a sense of ownership. That’s the thing about Japan — for better or worse, you can always count on the place to march to the beat of a different drummer. Like I said: different. It reminds me of how Japan kept (and keeps) using fax machines. It seems archaic, but fax machines are dramatically easier to use and far more reliable than any email system every devised. Part of what is going on here is that all the digital solutions suck too much ass. It took Apple ten years from when they launched iTunes Store to make the legal digital music scene actually better than CDs (when they finally shitcanned all DRM and stopped sucking more than the process of driving to Best Buy). It took an Amazon to make digital books not suck balls. Nobody has done that with movies and TV yet (other than the bootleg torrent scene, I mean). But I note the article mentions Hulu is doing well in Japan. Well, the suck-ass Hulu that they have in America wouldn't do well here -- they had to make Japanese Hulu significantly better (no ads, faster speeds, subtitles, etc). It's still not good enough that I can say walking down the street to Tsutaya is Doing It Wrong. I'm not saying the Japanese are the masters of the Internet, either. It turns out that the reason all Japanese websites look like shit is because that's how the Japanese want 'em. I spoke to an engineer for Rakuten at the last HN Tokyo meetup -- turns out Rakuten actually does have some designers and they've A/B tested their current 450-blinking-mini-banners-per-6MB-page against some clean and modern designs. The horrific eyesores won. The people had spoken. And what they said was, well, different.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > It seems archaic, but fax machines are dramatically easier to use and far more reliable than any email system every devised. Are you kidding me? I have never had issues with reliability of email, but fax machines are always breaking down, running out of toner, and lord knows what else. That's why services like HelloFax exist. > It took Apple ten years from when they launched iTunes Store to make the legal digital music scene actually better than CDs (when they finally shitcanned all DRM and stopped sucking more than the process of driving to Best Buy). Uhh, no. Most Americans I know stopped buying CDs from Best Buy some time around 2005 or 2006. And those were the latecomers. The younger people stopped pretty much after Napster became big in the late 90s. > Nobody has done that with movies and TV yet Have you never used Netflix? > It turns out that the reason all Japanese websites look like shit is because that's how the Japanese want 'em. I spoke to an engineer for Rakuten at the last HN Tokyo meetup -- turns out Rakuten actually does have some designers and they've A/B tested their current 450-blinking-mini-banners-per-6MB-page against some clean and modern designs. The horrific eyesores won. The people had spoken. And what they said was, well, different. A/B testing is not the be all and end all of website design: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/07/groundhog-day-or-the-problem-with-ab-testing.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/07/groundhog-day-or-th... And I wouldn't use Rakuten as an example of shining engineering (or design) talent. I interviewed with them and quickly realized that it was a place where engineers went to get super shitty. Not to mention that Mikitani's famed "B2B2C" model is just plain idiotic. Surprise surprise, give people too much control over their "store pages", and they turn to shit. In America we'd already learned that lesson from MySpace, but it apparently never translated over to Japan. And if the Japanese like crammed and messy designs so much, why have the iPhone and iPad been such big hits? Shouldn't they have just kept using their Galapagos keitai, with the horribly confusing byzantine UI and tons of features that no one ever used?
  - veidr 14y ago
    Real quick: 1.) Yes you have had reliability issues with email. And so has everybody else who has ever used it. It's inherently unreliable by design, and errors can happen anywhere along the chain and often don't reported back. 2.) I have used Netflix. It's the best legal solution I've seen so far, but the selection still sucks and it doesn't work internationally. Not solved. 3.) Most Americans you know may have stopped buying CDs in 2005, but not most Americans I know, and (more to the point) not most Americans in general[1][2]. I dabbled in buying digital music back then, but it was inferior, crippled, DRM-laden shit. iTunes didn't fix that until 2009[3]. US digital music sales didn't surpass physical sales until 2011. 4.) I wasn't using Rakuten as an example of shining engineering or design. I'm saying the horrible, garish store pages on Rakuten -- apparently as shocking to your sensibilities as they are to mine -- are actually what the Japanese people, in aggregate, seem to prefer. Understanding that goes a long way toward understanding why all my Japanese bank websites look so heinous[4], why my coworkers here prefer Yahoo to Google for web-searching, and so on. The iPhone? Well fuck it, that must be the exception that proves the rule. ;-) But before you diss those old Galapagos keitais, people did use the hell out of those. I know 50 year olds who can still reserve a flight way faster on one of those things while driving down the street than I can do with my iPhone using both hands. My point in all of this was just to say Japan isn't "behind" the US in Internet use (in terms of per capita users, they are very similar, ranked #14 and #13 respectively[5]), they just use it differently. Some differences I like (e.g., not prematurely accepting cunty DRM-ridden systems that aren't really as good as the old systems they purport to replace). Some, I don't like (e.g., bank website design). And some, like not really having digital books here yet (outside of manga, anyway) are a just function of the USA's global economic dominance -- those markets take an Apple or Amazon to spearhead. Japan is not those American companies' first priority. It'll take more time before those products are available here. OK, I lied, that wasn't real quick. [1]: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120105005547/en/Nielsen-Company-Billboard’s-2011-Music-Industry-Report http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120105005547/en/Niel... [2]http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130104005149/en/Nielsen-Company-Billboard’s-2012-Music-Industry-Report http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130104005149/en/Niel... [3]: http://www.pcworld.com/article/162732/drm_free_itunes_meaning.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/162732/drm_free_itunes_meanin... [4]: Yep, including this one (lol!): http://www.rakuten-bank.co.jp http://www.rakuten-bank.co.jp [5]: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/int_use_percap-internet-users-per-capita http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/int_use_percap-internet-us...

veidr 14y ago

I don't think I am forgetting about those things -- read the closing paragraph of the article you link: The real question, however, is whether or not Japanese consumers even want these services that we from the West can no longer imagine life without. Hulu and Sony are making good starts, but they certainly have their work cut out for them in Japan. As far as I can tell, most people are pretty happy as long as they live within bicycle distance of a Tsutaya — that’s basically everyone in Tokyo, by the way — and its convenient, cheap access to rented media. Which, of course, can be copied and kept forever; a practice that Tsutaya has gone out of its way to encourage by actually selling burnable discs and drives alongside its J-pop CDs. And for casual consumers, maybe it is a better solution. No DRM, no extortionate prices, and a sense of ownership. That’s the thing about Japan — for better or worse, you can always count on the place to march to the beat of a different drummer. Like I said: different. It reminds me of how Japan kept (and keeps) using fax machines. It seems archaic, but fax machines are dramatically easier to use and far more reliable than any email system every devised. Part of what is going on here is that all the digital solutions suck too much ass. It took Apple ten years from when they launched iTunes Store to make the legal digital music scene actually better than CDs (when they finally shitcanned all DRM and stopped sucking more than the process of driving to Best Buy). It took an Amazon to make digital books not suck balls. Nobody has done that with movies and TV yet (other than the bootleg torrent scene, I mean). But I note the article mentions Hulu is doing well in Japan. Well, the suck-ass Hulu that they have in America wouldn't do well here -- they had to make Japanese Hulu significantly better (no ads, faster speeds, subtitles, etc). It's still not good enough that I can say walking down the street to Tsutaya is Doing It Wrong. I'm not saying the Japanese are the masters of the Internet, either. It turns out that the reason all Japanese websites look like shit is because that's how the Japanese want 'em. I spoke to an engineer for Rakuten at the last HN Tokyo meetup -- turns out Rakuten actually does have some designers and they've A/B tested their current 450-blinking-mini-banners-per-6MB-page against some clean and modern designs. The horrific eyesores won. The people had spoken. And what they said was, well, different.

w1ntermute 14y ago
> It seems archaic, but fax machines are dramatically easier to use and far more reliable than any email system every devised. Are you kidding me? I have never had issues with reliability of email, but fax machines are always breaking down, running out of toner, and lord knows what else. That's why services like HelloFax exist. > It took Apple ten years from when they launched iTunes Store to make the legal digital music scene actually better than CDs (when they finally shitcanned all DRM and stopped sucking more than the process of driving to Best Buy). Uhh, no. Most Americans I know stopped buying CDs from Best Buy some time around 2005 or 2006. And those were the latecomers. The younger people stopped pretty much after Napster became big in the late 90s. > Nobody has done that with movies and TV yet Have you never used Netflix? > It turns out that the reason all Japanese websites look like shit is because that's how the Japanese want 'em. I spoke to an engineer for Rakuten at the last HN Tokyo meetup -- turns out Rakuten actually does have some designers and they've A/B tested their current 450-blinking-mini-banners-per-6MB-page against some clean and modern designs. The horrific eyesores won. The people had spoken. And what they said was, well, different. A/B testing is not the be all and end all of website design: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/07/groundhog-day-or-the-problem-with-ab-testing.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/07/groundhog-day-or-th... And I wouldn't use Rakuten as an example of shining engineering (or design) talent. I interviewed with them and quickly realized that it was a place where engineers went to get super shitty. Not to mention that Mikitani's famed "B2B2C" model is just plain idiotic. Surprise surprise, give people too much control over their "store pages", and they turn to shit. In America we'd already learned that lesson from MySpace, but it apparently never translated over to Japan. And if the Japanese like crammed and messy designs so much, why have the iPhone and iPad been such big hits? Shouldn't they have just kept using their Galapagos keitai, with the horribly confusing byzantine UI and tons of features that no one ever used?
- veidr 14y ago
  Real quick: 1.) Yes you have had reliability issues with email. And so has everybody else who has ever used it. It's inherently unreliable by design, and errors can happen anywhere along the chain and often don't reported back. 2.) I have used Netflix. It's the best legal solution I've seen so far, but the selection still sucks and it doesn't work internationally. Not solved. 3.) Most Americans you know may have stopped buying CDs in 2005, but not most Americans I know, and (more to the point) not most Americans in general[1][2]. I dabbled in buying digital music back then, but it was inferior, crippled, DRM-laden shit. iTunes didn't fix that until 2009[3]. US digital music sales didn't surpass physical sales until 2011. 4.) I wasn't using Rakuten as an example of shining engineering or design. I'm saying the horrible, garish store pages on Rakuten -- apparently as shocking to your sensibilities as they are to mine -- are actually what the Japanese people, in aggregate, seem to prefer. Understanding that goes a long way toward understanding why all my Japanese bank websites look so heinous[4], why my coworkers here prefer Yahoo to Google for web-searching, and so on. The iPhone? Well fuck it, that must be the exception that proves the rule. ;-) But before you diss those old Galapagos keitais, people did use the hell out of those. I know 50 year olds who can still reserve a flight way faster on one of those things while driving down the street than I can do with my iPhone using both hands. My point in all of this was just to say Japan isn't "behind" the US in Internet use (in terms of per capita users, they are very similar, ranked #14 and #13 respectively[5]), they just use it differently. Some differences I like (e.g., not prematurely accepting cunty DRM-ridden systems that aren't really as good as the old systems they purport to replace). Some, I don't like (e.g., bank website design). And some, like not really having digital books here yet (outside of manga, anyway) are a just function of the USA's global economic dominance -- those markets take an Apple or Amazon to spearhead. Japan is not those American companies' first priority. It'll take more time before those products are available here. OK, I lied, that wasn't real quick. [1]: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120105005547/en/Nielsen-Company-Billboard’s-2011-Music-Industry-Report http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120105005547/en/Niel... [2]http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130104005149/en/Nielsen-Company-Billboard’s-2012-Music-Industry-Report http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130104005149/en/Niel... [3]: http://www.pcworld.com/article/162732/drm_free_itunes_meaning.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/162732/drm_free_itunes_meanin... [4]: Yep, including this one (lol!): http://www.rakuten-bank.co.jp http://www.rakuten-bank.co.jp [5]: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/int_use_percap-internet-users-per-capita http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/int_use_percap-internet-us...