A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

Post by yourapostasy » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

courgette wrote: post #78

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…

France had more than ok software company. Bull for instance. Ubisoft and a bazillion other video game company. Alcatel / Lucent / Thales for industrial stuff. For the deepness of my ass I would say failure was tree fold : - France like a good old top down approach. That … mostly don’t work for software. - France decided to listen to our American friends and sell the familly heirloom to the market. ( I’m bitter on thi…

Post by ndiddy » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #200

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…

This example is complicated by games also being art and how it can be hard to separate both (even when it's just graphics and audio that you keep on a more closed license). See how Western games are still overwhelmingly closed source, despite the now known rewards : like Civilization 4 (2005) opening most (but not all) of its C++ (dll) source code, as well as easy to mod XML & Python scripts resulting in a still aliv…

Post by pmarreck » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 2:20 PM UTC

bitL wrote: post #187

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…

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.

Post by manojlds » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

dudeinjapan wrote: post #193

Tim Romero (author of linked podcast) misses the point. Paul Graham has a far better take on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html The problem isn't that Japanese companies "missed" the opportunity to do software at X point in time--the problem is that they are culturally Japanese. Japan is about consensus-based design, there is a high penalty for making mistakes, and individuality/creativity is not valued.…

Post by manojlds » Tue, Jan 10, 2023, 2:24 PM UTC

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…