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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?

#231

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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 think most people usually get almost all of the food off the dishes before putting them in the washer.

If your dish is covered in dried yogurt & avocado slime - a lot of time the dish washer won't even get it off.

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

#232

Post by manojlds »

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.

Not very good at it is a bit too much. My most fun with phones todate were with the Symbian phones especially the N-gage and 6600

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

#233

Post by yurishimo »

Jensson wrote: post #203
Dalewyn wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you expound upon this? I've not heard this talking point before. I do know Nintendo has a history of pushing the technical limits of their own hardware, but I'd be interested to read more about some specifics.

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

#234

Post by bamboozled »

nottorp wrote: post #168
bamboozled wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they were cross checking the name on the card with the name on my passport, apparently they think it's a security check and some how not realizing that: 1. The name on the card is rather arbitrary. 2. Accepting names without spaces isn't really a good check IMO. If you wanted thing to line up exactly, spaces should be accounted for, but who cares? If it feels good... This is a bit of a cultural thing I find common…

> 1. The name on the card is rather arbitrary. In the US, that is. Other places put the name on your ID on your card :)

The name is there but almost no payment processing companies that I know of care about it at all.

It serves no real purpose, hence how I could get a eSIM by supplying an incorrect name.

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

#235

Post by dvngnt_ »

Retric wrote: post #219
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.…

Yet, Japan had no issue building a wide range of popular console video games but had far less success in PC games. Language seems like a better explanation as US and Japan had quite different UI constraints in their native language.

I'd argue that Microsoft still takes the lead in software compared to Sony and Nintendo

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

#236

Post by yurishimo »

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.

Dishes have been known to sit in my house for 3-5 days depending on how many we use. The only reason we don't run it every day is to save on washing pods.

Ideally, I would probably run it every day right before bed and then unload it first thing in the morning. As is, I forget, then there are too many dishes to fit in the machine and I need to wash them by hand to cook with immediately.

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

#237

Post by dudeinjapan »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #222
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.…

I’m having a hard time squaring the circle of “consensus based design doesn’t work for software but it does work for cars.” By all accounts, here in the US, we regularly bounce software architecture decisions around a room and land on a best design based on inputs from many. Likewise, our cities and cars are founded upon (id even say drowned by) consensus based design. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the thesis here, but…

It's not the same as in the US.

In the US, consensus would be achieved through brainstorming, open debates, etc. and at the end maybe a vote, or maybe the leader just says "let's try it my way, and if it doesn't work we'll do it your way."

In a Japanese company, people in general do not speak openly in meetings, because they are afraid of disrupting group harmony. Ideas need to be circulated in a series of one-on-one discussions--this is called "newashi" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemawashi). This means that for a group of N people, it's N*(N-1)/2 private discussions that need to happen. And everyone needs to be in agreement and comfortable that the idea is "right", and that there is nothing the slightest bit off with it. Only after all these discussions have happened and everyone is fully bought-in, there is then a meeting to "rubber stamp" the idea.

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

#238

Post by Retric »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #228
Retric wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, Japan had no issue building a wide range of popular console video games but had far less success in PC games. Language seems like a better explanation as US and Japan had quite different UI constraints in their native language.

Language (i.e. character sets) is not a good explanation for differences in software outcomes. It is possible write Japanese entirely in Hiragana charset (~50 chars) which can be represented in 8-bit alongside ASCII chars, which is how early Japanese computers like the PC-8001 worked. The JIS standard for double-byte representation of kanji also characters was also made in the 1970s. So that doesn't explain why Japan…

Language is more than charger sets. Japanese is often read in vertical columns, then right to left. The space of UI’s that feel natural in both languages are just different.

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

#239

Post by bamboozled »

johnwalkr wrote: post #205
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 tha…

Interesting. The "full-width" characters is a whole other kettle of fish!

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

#240

Post by djmips »

IYasha wrote: post #125
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…

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've worked for Japanese companies several times in the eighties and nineties and this was definitely a thing. We were an American division and yet we couldn't even get source code or art for the game we were supposed to be making for them. This continued when I worked for a Japanese video card company. They had good programmers but they jealously guarded their code even from other Japanese programmers in the same company and surely they wouldn't give any to us... working at the same freaking company. Another thing about Japanese code that was notable is that in my experience it was always bespoke and custom and quite often spaghetti. It could be brilliant but it had that hand crafted aspect, and was inscrutable outside of the mind who created it. There was no 'computer science' or any attempt to make it engineered - no self conscious thought about how to make software better other than to meet the target and often that target was defined by performance so the end result was no slouch but it wasn't what you would call elegant. This approach becomes very hard to scale. And I believe that is a key element in why Japanese software lagged. Great craftsmen but they did not evolve into engineers but of course I think this is probably changing because my snapshot is old.
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