A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

All credibility lost here:

> Cloud computing drastically reduced the capital and time required to start a startup. In the dot-com era a decade before, starting an internet startup required purchasing racks of servers and paying system administrators to keep them running, but suddenly fully configured, maintained, and secure serves could be had for a few cents per minute — pay as you go.

> Suddenly Japan’s software developers didn’t need to explain their idea to a VC and convince them that it would sell. They could just build things and get people to start using them and start paying for them. And that’s just want they did.

Your hosting cost, whether you're on bare metal or the most opinionated git-push-your-rails-app is a tiny line item on the P/L. Rarely have I seen an instance where the pay-off period for spending, say, a month of one engineer's time (for a nice round number, say, $10k) reducing the hosting expenses is less than a year (say, $1k/mo in hosting expenses).

In just about every case you're better off spending that developer-month building a feature or delivering a contract.

So yeah, maybe cloud computing saved you, at the outside, $10-20k server parts and a rack in a colo or whatever.

TLDR with or without The Cloud, 2022 or 1999, your server costs are tiny in comparison to what you spent on payroll getting to market.

Yeesh.

I know the author likely has more experience in Japan, but I don't understand this lust some developers in Japan have being like American start-up workers. There is a lot of money in it as an individual, but start-ups have sometimes been great but have also been terrible as well. I know I'm kicking against the goads here on HN by pointing that out, but an objective look at it shows it to be true. Just remind people that wework and Theranos existed, or point out the most important IT companies today started out as start-ups perhaps but are nothing like them now, and now look very much like the old guard they "disrupted." Start-up'ing at least from the outside just looks like an initial condition, a spawn point, but the final situation that is recognized as success is a large company with many admins and an HR dept, or being bought by one. That looks a lot like the keiretsu but without the commitment to workers, so really the worst of both worlds but the best for MBAs and HR people.

I sympathize with the lack of respect software developers have there perhaps, that I understand.

> The struggle of a Japanese developer to make an app is greater than that of a primarily English-speaking developer.

And yet somehow, Chinese developers manage just fine?

> So there's still the unexplained question of why Japanese software is still bad, in 2023.

I think its to do with their protectivism culture. My previous job was doing digital distribution of advertising content around the world. The Japan market was difficult to move because they could pay someone to ride a bike down the road to deliver an advert. And they activately avoided moving digital as it could put alot of people out of work.

When they did begin the move to digital in ~2018 they formed a comany called CMDeCo. https://ad-edi.com/cmdeco.html

It doesn't serve any real purpose at all, but what it did was move a bunch of tape jobs into digital jobs. But it made what should be a simple process into a complicated process.

Is gaming not part of the software industry? What aspects of Japanese game development made it hugely successful compared to business and other software development?