251–260 of 408 posts
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…
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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.
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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.
This article describes how Japan's economy and the software industry evolved from the post-WWII years to the present day. It explains how the Zaibatsu, large corporate groups that dominated the economy before WWII, were dismantled by the American occupation forces and replaced by the Keiretsu, weaker but familiar forms of the Zaibatsu. It highlights how the Keiretsu focused on the domestic market, rather than expanding globally and developing a software industry, during the 1980s and 1990s. This had a negative impact on innovation and caused Japan to fall behind in software development. The article then goes on to explain how cloud computing and smartphones have enabled Japan's software developers to start their own companies, rather than working for large corporations, thus creating a more vibrant startup ecosystem. It also suggests that Japan's software industry still has a long way to go to catch up with other countries, but there are positive signs of progress in certain areas.
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Xerox's PARC has to be the biggest example of a company not capturing the value of its inventions.
Absentee leadership with no understanding or care to monetize it - including the pricing on the first Xerox Computers. Also many deca billion dollar spinouts from Xerox Parc: 1. SGI / silcon graphisc based on Jim Clarke's work on 3D chips. 2. 3Com / ethernet based on Bob Metcalfe's work. 3. Adobe based on John Warnock and Charles Geschke on vector graphics and printing. etc.
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…
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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 co…
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?…
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> 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?…
India has been a significant force in IT since at least the 1990s. Look at Infosys, Wipro, Tata, etc - all huge multinationals that give the IBMs, HPs, and Accenture's of the world a run for their money.
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.…
As it is now, software engineering us not respected as real engineering because we neglect to apply general engineering principles. We throw away battle-tested solutions and learnings very few years in favor of shiny brittle toys, in the name of "disruption".
I guess the only thing that would change things is something I call some kind of consistent regulation. Too much gate-keeping like in traditional engineering or medical fields can stifle innovation. However, software used by a certain minimum number of users, and software used in certain fields like medicine, transport, finance, need to be subjected by regulatory agencies to certain objective (hence automated?) tests to ensure they meet some minimum reliability, usability, security, and performance requirements. In this regime, small-time SaaS software, or hobby projects, would not need any regulation, but flagship software products of Facebook, Google, SAP, Oracle, Tesla, etc would need it.