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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?

#341

Post by golemiprague »

makeitdouble wrote: post #135
courgette wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes. Also France made a real big effort to protect its agriculture, wine and luxury industry. LVHM grew and flourished, but there was no love for the software industry. I kinda think there was no alternative scenario where it would have worked out, culturally most people really don't give a damn. Also having a smaller internal market makes it harder to bootstrap new ideas to a decent size before getting it out. Even…

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

#342

Post by mcguire »

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.…

Paul Graham (who is about 4 years older than I am (eek)) and I apparently remember the 1980s and 90s very differently.

At the time, Japan was going to eat our lunch while it simultaneously kicked our butts. Its government-academic-industrial complex was how to do things. It was the technological and industrial leader, the one everyone was chasing. (This was possibly entirely due to the automotive industry, but.... And consumer electronics had something to do with it.)

Then the wheels started to come off. In the software world, the Fifth Generation project came up with...a PROLOG machine. At the same time that Lisp machine companies were going belly up all over the US. And then Japan disappeared entirely. From what I saw and heard, the Japanese software industry became very insular and remote from the rest of the world. And then, the lost decades.

The process described in the article does a better job (and a more relatable one) at explaining what I saw than "they were Japanese", I think. But then, I don't know what the last 20 years have been like, since I haven't needed to follow the Japanese software industry. (Well, there was Ruby, but that was a pretty big mistake.)

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

#343

Post by metalcrow »

Cyph0n wrote: post #39
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

Kojima Studios is not that impressive when it comes to volume. Better examples: * Nintendo first-party studios * Square Enix * From Software * Sega * Bandai Namco * Capcom Note: Sony/Playstation is a Japanese company, but most of its first-party studios are outside of Japan.

FROM is a a great game company, but also a perfect example of what this post is talking about. Their code is REALLY bad. There was a cross game RCE they had to shut down all their servers for recently, the games are riddled with bugs, and the actual code structure itself (from reverse engineering) is spaghetti.

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

#344

Post by xxpor »

satvikpendem wrote: post #299
rippercushions wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you putting dishes directly from eating into the dishwasher? Most people rinse it off, especially anything that could dry out. The dishwasher is more to automate the application of soap and water, not to literally remove every piece of dried food from a dish.

if you rinse your dishes, you're Doing It Wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04

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

#345

Post by IYasha »

djmips wrote: post #257
djmips wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'll also speak to 'elitist' of the top comment. One of the first times I had felt prejudice was when I wrote a very good piece of code for their video card which accelerated some video processing by 4X or more. Seriously they (the Japanese) were surprised and started treating me like a miracle talking dog as they just couldn't seem to get their mind around me being able to figure out their systems and contribute som…

But, seriously, how did you do that??

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

#346

Post by Firmwarrior »

suction wrote: post #13
Firmwarrior wrote: post #9

Thanks for this. I'm probably going to have to move back to Japan soon, since the wife is from there and can't handle living in the USA Rather than take an 80% pay cut to partake in the salaryman lifestyle, I'm going to have to start some sort of business. This podcast should have some relevant info, haha

Could you elaborate a little on why she can’t handle living in the US?

ah, she just doesn't like the way things work here, and she's scared to learn to drive

The service in the SF Bay Area is really amazingly dismal. It's embarrassing every day to be an American living here. People at restaurants, stores, etc are all angry and stressed out.

I'm hoping I can convince her to move somewhere else in the USA with me, since it'll be a lot easier to find some remote work in my same time zone

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

#347

Post by golemiprague »

jimmcslim wrote: post #29

Although the article is about the entire software industry of Japan, and not about the efforts of one individual, I feel like it does a great disservice to not mention Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka Matz, the inventor of Ruby? Since 1995. How many startups have been launched with that platform as their basis?

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

#348

Post by justsomehnguy »

bamboozled wrote: post #263
justsomehnguy wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessary, especially if you have 'extended-ASCII' or non-Latin alphabet. And overall, why do check on the card and not on ID?

Are you asking me? Because I'm complaining about the system in-case you didn't notice?

No, the person I responded to, and honestly that was a rhetorical question.

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

#349

Post by skissane »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #271
skissane wrote: post #128

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…

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but your comment seems to imply that the US directly intervened/prevented the Japanese from making their own operating system. Curious, I read the wiki page and if I'm reading it correctly, at the time DOS was already dominant in Japan and TRON/BTRON being incompatible with it made it economically unviable, which is the main reason why it was cancelled as a national standard. https://e…

That Wikipedia article says:

> the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued a preliminary report accusing BTRON which only functioned in Japan of being a trade barrier and asked the government not to make it standard in schools.[12][13] TRON was included along with rice, semiconductors, and telecommunications equipment in an April 1989 list of items targeted by Super-301 (complete stop of import based on section 301 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988).

> According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, in 1989 US officials feared that TRON could undercut American dominance in computers, but that in the end PC software and chips based on the TRON technology proved no match for Windows and Intel's processors as a global standard.[14] In the 1980s Microsoft had at least once lobbied Washington about TRON until backing off, but Ken Sakamura himself believed Microsoft wasn't the impetus behind the Super-301 listing in 1989.[15] Known for his off the cuff remarks, in 2004 governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara mentioned in his column post concerning international trade policy that TRON was dropped because Carla Anderson Hills had threatened Ryutaro Hashimoto over it.[16][17]

It seems clear the US government did pressure Japan to kill the “BTRON in schools” project. It also seems clear that the project was facing its own internal obstacles (like the DOS compatibility issues you mention), quite apart from any US government pressure. The respective weight of those two factors in leading to its demise is a matter of opinion.

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