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A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

disruptingjapan.com

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Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#171

Post by nottorp »

braingenious wrote: post #63
asddubs wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes?

@dang I’d look into this. Edit: There are two accounts that are happy to publicly disagree with me within seconds of eachother, and three-six that are are happy to downvote privately within those same seconds. Maybe I’m magically guilty of having The Wrong Take or there are some people that will kneejerk use their network of accounts to downvote things that aren’t useful to their buddies.

You're humour challenged. But so is most of HN.

Perhaps if you scrolled down to the actual article you would have found it interesting?

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#172

Post by PurpleRamen »

jfk13 wrote: post #90
Dalewyn wrote: post #77

Speaking as a Japanese-American, I personally think the biggest problem with Japanese programmers comes down to the Japanese being too crafty and elitist. What do I mean by this? Basically: If you're a wizard at peeling the skin off an apple with your knife you never need an apple peeler; consequently, you never get a good peeler industry going. Meanwhile, Americans manufacture the best apple peelers because they can…

> Japanese programmers continue to be utterly inept That's quite a sweeping statement! Plenty of Japanese programers I know are extremely competent.

One can be competent and still suck. The thing with software is that it's quite easy to reach mastery in some very specific domain, while lacking any competence in other important areas.

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#173

Post by rippercushions »

m4jor wrote: post #161
desi_ninja wrote: post #32

Developing video games will come under software development and Japan has world class video game studios for decades now. Kojima Studios is in Japan

Japan still to this day fails at gaming (see Nintendo)

Seriously? PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch remain top of the class for console hardware, and Square Enix, Bandai Namco etc are still huge names in games.

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#174

Post by xrd »

Cerium wrote: post #141
skissane wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can hardly remember an example of FOSS from Japan except for CrystalDiskInfo. The programming language Ruby has to be the most famous Japanese open source software of them all

Of course that is because Matz is nice.

It's never really occurred to me before, but Matz is Mormon, right? I wonder if that informed his decisions differently than if he were heavily influenced by Buddhist or Shintoist thinking, as the larger population does. It would be fascinating to see if there is any correlation between alternative religions and approaches to software in Japan.

Feels like there is a heavy influence of Buddhist thought (mindfulness) on the silicon valley community.

Perhaps people that come from minority spiritual communities have to "think different?"

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#175

Post by bmacho »

rippercushions wrote: post #166
midoridensha wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dishwashers make sense if you have a lot of dishes, and make a practice of filling the dishwasher before washing. For a single person, this can take many days. The total amount of water and time ends up being less by using the dishwasher. However, if you have a small number of dishes so that you can't afford to wait 3-7 days between washings, and need to clean them daily, the dishwasher makes no sense.

Are people really leaving dirty dishes in the dishwasher for a week? That sounds like it would smell terrible and anything left on the earlier plates would be dry as cement by then.

> anything left on the earlier plates would be dry as cement by then.

Water makes it soft again in a minute. Postponing dishwashing is not worse than doing it right after eating.

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#176

Post by oriolid »

a_c wrote: post #158
Dalewyn wrote: post #77

Speaking as a Japanese-American, I personally think the biggest problem with Japanese programmers comes down to the Japanese being too crafty and elitist. What do I mean by this? Basically: If you're a wizard at peeling the skin off an apple with your knife you never need an apple peeler; consequently, you never get a good peeler industry going. Meanwhile, Americans manufacture the best apple peelers because they can…

So true. Perfect did indeed become an enemy of good. And good stuff end up being better than perfect. Two related examples I can think of: - China skipped credit card to use mobile payment directly as credit card is already perfect for the western world. - Apple didn't iterate over blackberry, the then perfect phone. On the other hand, do we count games as software? Japan still produce lots of great game AFAICT, no?

I would call it "good enough" rather than perfect.

The usual meaning for "perfect is the enemy of good" I've heard is the danger of spending forever to perfect something instead of releasing and learning from experience.

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#177

Post by slim »

rippercushions wrote: post #169
skissane wrote: post #128

Bit of history many people are not aware of - in the 1980s, Japan developed its own indigenous operating system, TRON. Towards the end of that decade, the Japanese government wanted to adopt it as a national standard. The US government started threatening trade sanctions, which gave Japan cold feet. (Some accused Microsoft of being behind it, although others insist that’s untrue.) How would have the Japanese software…

Japan developed plenty of its own operating systems like MSX, PC-98 and DOS/V, none of which went anywhere (outside Japan, that is).

MSX was an architecture and had no operating system. it booted into Microsoft BASIC

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#178

Post by PurpleRamen »

makeitdouble wrote: post #62

The key part to me: > But the rest of the word was moving in a different direction. The rest of the world was moving away from dedicated hardware and towards innovative software running on standard hardware platforms. This piece is about Japan vs the world, but looking at countries other than the US I'm not sure this narrative works. For instance did the UK become a Software behemoth ? France ? Germany ? Brazil ? Ind…

> For instance did the UK become a Software behemoth ? France ? Germany ? Brazil ? India ?

UK, France and Germany all are pretty big in software, as also in gaming. Japan is also big in gaming, but they started with consoles and hardware. Only in the recent decade became their software-side better, but it's still kinda crappy to be honest.

Brazil and India, were they not to poor to made it big in the early IT-years? Even today they are busy with catching up. Though, India has found their stance in IT at this point, at least as contractors.

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#179

Post by xrd »

timoth3y wrote: post #79

Hi. I'm Tim, the author. I'm delighted to see the interest in this subject on Hacker News and happy to answer any questions. To group and respond to a few common comments: > 1) Is this unique to Japan? Most other countries have not developed world-dominating software industries. That is true, but most other countries did not enter the PC era after spending several disrupting and dominating multiple global industries.…

Tim, as a Mombusho exchange student in Kanazawa (and Rotary before that in Sapporo) your post brought up some great memories of my time in Japan in the 90s.

Do you have an email addres? I want to ask you some questions regarding my startup approach with a big Japanese company we are engaging with.

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#180

Post by alternatetwo »

rippercushions wrote: post #166
midoridensha wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dishwashers make sense if you have a lot of dishes, and make a practice of filling the dishwasher before washing. For a single person, this can take many days. The total amount of water and time ends up being less by using the dishwasher. However, if you have a small number of dishes so that you can't afford to wait 3-7 days between washings, and need to clean them daily, the dishwasher makes no sense.

Are people really leaving dirty dishes in the dishwasher for a week? That sounds like it would smell terrible and anything left on the earlier plates would be dry as cement by then.

I'm not sure what you leave on your dishes, but generally it's just a few crumbs, maybe a bit of butter, if it's obviously too much for the dishwasher - oatmeal does get as hard as cement for example - you need to rinse it off first anyway.
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