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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?

#241

Post by quercusa »

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.…

> there is a high penalty for making mistakes

I experienced this working for the US arm of a Japanese company. To report a bug would cause the programmer to lose face, so we had to waste a lot of time going through all kinds of contortions to lead someone to the bug without calling it out. We wrote a lot of "feature requests" that were really bug reports.

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

#242

Post by dudeinjapan »

Retric wrote: post #238
dudeinjapan wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not true. Nearly all text in Japanese print media, ads, brochures, websites, video games, etc. is left-to-right horizontal. Only books and some magazines are written in vertical columns. Anyway, this again is not an insurmountable technical hurdle that held back Japan's otherwise burgeoning software industry.

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

#243

Post by Alex3917 »

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.…

Most Japanese didn't historically own desktop computers due to the average Japanese home not having enough square feet to easily accommodate them, which is why they adopted smartphones ten years earlier than every other country except Finland. If they had had a couple more decades to play with computers before software took off as a big industry, maybe the culture would have shifted somewhat.

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

#244

Post by ginko »

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)

That's a bit like saying:

America still to this day fails at smart phones (see Apple)

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

#246

Post by justsomehnguy »

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 :)

Not necessary, especially if you have 'extended-ASCII' or non-Latin alphabet.

And overall, why do check on the card and not on ID?

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

#247

Post by Retric »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #242
Retric wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not true. Nearly all text in Japanese print media, ads, brochures, websites, video games, etc. is left-to-right horizontal. Only books and some magazines are written in vertical columns. Anyway, this again is not an insurmountable technical hurdle that held back Japan's otherwise burgeoning software industry.

You misunderstood, the fact that the language does both means the design space is different. Stuff that would seem natural in Japanese would seem very odd in English.

Similarly there are far more people fluent in English so small dev teams can reach a much larger audience without considering translation issues.

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

#248

Post by dudeinjapan »

quercusa wrote: post #241
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.…

> there is a high penalty for making mistakes I experienced this working for the US arm of a Japanese company. To report a bug would cause the programmer to lose face, so we had to waste a lot of time going through all kinds of contortions to lead someone to the bug without calling it out. We wrote a lot of "feature requests" that were really bug reports.

Yes, this is completely stupid and something I've tried to do away with at my company. Who cares who made the bug, let's just fix the damn thing.

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

#249

Post by djmips »

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.

I disagree, they were often impressive technically but what I feel was at a great cost. They had some great individual programmers but they did not seem to develop technologies that could be shared and amplify and did not value systems or computer science or sharing. Contrast that to say a John Carmack who lifted an entire industry in the west with his thoughtful engineering and complete openness (all ID code was shared and formed the backbone of a lot of other game engines even today). Who is that Japanese Carmack? They had great programmers and great tech but it was hard to scale and they did fall behind. I sense a comeback now. They have swallowed their pride and are using Unreal Engine for example. That's a big step.

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

#250

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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