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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?

#201

Post by nvrspyx »

skissane wrote: post #126
IYasha wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also note the hereditary love for trade/manufacturing secrets which transformed into adoption of extremely proprietary licensing. Developers prior to ~2015 hardly ever considered publishing their code or even format specs. This secrecy has deep roots and it really annoys and pisses me off. I'm not narrowing down on corporate software - even hobbyists who write "dating games" would never publish code even if it's…

> 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

Another example is OpenToonz[0], which is one of the animation tools used by Studio Ghibli and developed in collaboration with Studio Ghibli, another Japanese company called Dwango, and an Italian company called Digital Video. Although, Digital Video does have a premium, paid version called Toonz[1].

0: https://opentoonz.github.io/e/

1: https://www.toonzpremium.com/

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

#202

Post by presentation »

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…

But Japanese companies produce tons of borderline useless convenience gadgets?

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

#203

Post by Jensson »

Dalewyn wrote: post #167
a_c wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We have to remember that it's the writing, the graphics, the music in Japanese video games that make them great, not necessarily their programming. They are amazing works of art, but unimpressive technical demonstrations.

The movement code in mario games is better than anything in the west though. But you could call that type of code "art" as well, it isn't really a software engineering feat. Maybe you could say that Japan has great software artists, but they aren't that great at software engineering.

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

#204

Post by _fat_santa »

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)

I wouldn't consider Nintendo a failure, rather they do things their own way. While Sony and MSFT both compete on the latest and greatest hardware to run AAA games, Nintendo is instead providing an entirely different gaming experience. Typical games reach success by making graphics better, framerates higher, and pushing the boundaries of what the system can do, Nintendo seems to have taken the approach instead of making modest hardware with software that is very tailored to that hardware.

The best example of this is Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Technically the game is not that impressive compared so some of it's RPG peers, but that's not the point. While no detail is by itself that impressive, the whole package is fantastic.

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

#205

Post by johnwalkr »

bamboozled wrote: post #113

One of the key issues of Japanese software is that most companies don't rethink problems and processes to suit software, they try make software around an existing process. Most Japanese companies will just try to automate, or digitize some type of manual process and keep the people involved, I'd say just to hang onto jobs because firing people in Japan is pretty much impossible. Recently while visiting Japan, I tried…

One thing that trips up even native Japanese speakers is the windows IME. It likes to change characters like spaces, dashes, alphabet letters and numbers to roman ones when you intend them to be Japanese "full-width" characters. In our office there, our address was often rejected because the final part describing the floor number should be "−４Ｆ" would come out of the IME as something like "-4F", "−４F", "-４Ｆ" (yes that last one is wrong).

The MacOS IME is much easier to use, and was the singular excellent use of the MacBook touch bar. It lets you pick the correct character, pick autocomplete suggestions, and convert between full-width, half-width, katakana, hiragana, etc.

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

#206

Post by rramadass »

simonh wrote: post #192
rramadass wrote: post #138

IMO the Japanese failed at Software Development because they never thought of it as distinct/different from and more important than Hardware that is used to run it. It requires a certain degree of forward abstract thinking which they unfortunately missed. They then compounded this mistake by staying on it for decades. As an example, in the late 90's i was part of a group developing a Office Software Suite for a Japan…

I think this is on the right track, Japan has a fantastic hardware oriented manufacturing culture, but this can be a serious impediment when it comes to approaching software development. One symptom is that software teams are seen as part of a product line team rather than having their own org. Famously this was a major issue at Nokia and Blackberry, who institutionally believed that their competitive edge was in the…

Right; when you are good at one thing, you tend to look at everything else through that framework only. If you then have a strict Hierarchical Organization/Society (i.e. thou shalt not question) which enforces that thought pattern, you miss out on "the next big thing".

The success of American Software Companies is a direct result of limited structure, controlled chaos, lots of money to experiment with and loose financial controls pioneered by DARPA and transplanted to Silicon Valley.

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

#207

Post by wink »

ido wrote: post #198
PsycheOS wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of Kodak (my father used by an engineer there and his neighbor at time Kodak also in charge of digital cameras and was warning about digital cameras in the 1970s) and other incumbents like this ,for the current Csuite there is NO incentive to cannabilize the product and take risks and lose revenues (think film, processing, etc) to prepare for the future. Kodak with digital cameras. Nokia with smart phones…

Nokia made smartphones very early actually (in the 90s), but they were just not very good at it.

That's not true - they weren't hitting the mass market very well, but to a certain demographic those were really nice.

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

#208

Post by acdha »

nindalf wrote: post #45
fexecve wrote: post #20

I disagree with everything in this article post-2000. There were no "software gatekeepers" preventing Japanese software from flourishing on the PC or Mac. I'm not sure what the author is talking about there. So there's still the unexplained question of why Japanese software is still bad, in 2023. And I think the answer is the language barrier. Windows and Mac dominate the world's computer systems, and the development…

> 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?

I think it’s more than just language but in this case I think the relative economic history is a factor: Japan had a large modern economy so there were tons of jobs working at domestic companies building with domestic tools. Modern China’s economy & educational system developed later and a lot of high tech work was dominated by American companies. I think that meant there was a generation where an equally bright engineer in Japan could think they’d have a solid job at one of the biggest companies in the world and never need to be highly proficient in English but their Chinese counterpart would make the opposite decision.

We’re at a really interesting point where that calculation may be reversing with China being a huge domestic market with strong pressure for independence.

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

#209

Post by dathos »

steve1977 wrote: post #190
bitL wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess there's a reason why Japan is often called the Germany of Asia.

I think there was another reason for that

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

#210

Post by BlueTemplar »

mchaver wrote: post #107
spullara wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a good reason though that the most common communication mechanism in China is talking rather than typing.

What is your source or personal experience for that? I don't think the typing system has any correlation. In fact you can actually type pretty fast with modern keyboard software, there are lots of shortcuts. I type in Chinese with friends and family everyday and so do my kids. Hardly anyone uses voice messages. I find leaving voice messages on messaging systems more popular with Spanish speakers than Chinese speakers…

Yes, but software keyboards still suck compared to hardware ones.
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