101–110 of 408 posts
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…
The US has won the Software (ie: not the games, but the core Software market) because it had pocket deep VCs that understood tech. Everything else is secondary. This is of course, my opinion.
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?
There is this cute photo of Nishi-san posing next to the young Bill Gates:
https://ozeidi.wordpress.com/2015/10/10/my-first-personal-co...
This gives a good overview on Ascii Corp: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Corporation
I disagree with everything in this article post-2000. There were no "software gatekeepers" preventing Japanese software from flourishing on the PC or Mac. I'm not sure what the author is talking about there. So there's still the unexplained question of why Japanese software is still bad, in 2023. And I think the answer is the language barrier. Windows and Mac dominate the world's computer systems, and the development…
Sorry but this is BS. What's your background here? The author of the article has quite some credibility here having lived in Japan for decades, and worked in said industry. > And I think the answer is the language barrier. You need to learn about a dozen English keywords to use something like C++. The rest is abstract thinking. Windows, Visual Studio etc have been available in Japanese for a long time. By that logic,…
Better to say every country where the professional class can’t be expected to read English can be expected to suck at software development. I can’t think of an obvious counter example. Being mostly isolated from the mainstream of software development doesn’t mean you can’t achieve anything but it does make it harder.
I disagree with everything in this article post-2000. There were no "software gatekeepers" preventing Japanese software from flourishing on the PC or Mac. I'm not sure what the author is talking about there. So there's still the unexplained question of why Japanese software is still bad, in 2023. And I think the answer is the language barrier. Windows and Mac dominate the world's computer systems, and the development…
> The struggle of a Japanese developer to make an app is greater than that of a primarily English-speaking developer. And yet somehow, Chinese developers manage just fine?
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…
All the countries that see/saw software development as a trade instead of a highly paid white-collar position fell behind. It seems sort of consistent?
(even if there weren't a substantial rate difference: it is far less painful to stay awake until Pacific Time to coordinate with people who grok remote development than to attempt to deal with people in my time zone who do not)
I don't disagree with much of the story, but there are other factors too. A big one is that due to the complexity of the Japanese writing system, PCs never went mainstream: the older generations survived with handwriting, faxes and dedicated word processors, and the newer ones jumped right to mobile phones, meaning the PC hacking generation of the 70s and 80s that kicked off the dot-com boom was much smaller than in…
There is a good reason though that the most common communication mechanism in China is talking rather than typing.
I type in Chinese with friends and family everyday and so do my kids. Hardly anyone uses voice messages. I find leaving voice messages on messaging systems more popular with Spanish speakers than Chinese speakers, and Spanish is one of the easy languages to write for native speakers.
Yet Japan has had a flourishing video games industry since the 70s starting with arcade games. I would have liked the article to touch on such counterexamples and what is different in their case.
This also correlates well with my personal knowledge of the industry. Japan has a great track record of game design, but they aren't exactly known for innovation in software specifically. Some examples:
Teenagers from the UK where hired to write the code for Starfox, because they could and Nintendo's programmers couldn't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to4Ekb0kXiE
Xbox spearheaded the consoles in the online space, and Nintendo is still far behind.
Japan runs circles around the rest of the world when it comes to making successful fighting games. Yet western modders are also known for coming in and fixing online play by adding network rollback.
Hi. I'm Tim, the author. I'm delighted to see the interest in this subject on Hacker News and happy to answer any questions. To group and respond to a few common comments: > 1) Is this unique to Japan? Most other countries have not developed world-dominating software industries. That is true, but most other countries did not enter the PC era after spending several disrupting and dominating multiple global industries.…
I'm as surprised as SovietSwag ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34321796 ) to see no mention of Japan and Fifth Generation Computing in the 1980s. It was a big ambitious well backed plan to pursue the silly notion (as if!!) of massively parallel computing with unheard of numbers of cores to jump start AI networks etc. Are there any stories there on how that all fizzled out and came to naught back in the day?
(b) it took a lot longer for Moore's law to end for traditional ISAs than we had been fearing, back in the 1980s. Like many things in tech, maybe Fifth Generation had just been Too Early.
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…
Scotland did. We all know that the video games industry just exploded in Dundee about 20 years ago, but the whole area has a rich software development industry across a lot of fields.
One reason games became such a big thing in Dundee was because that's where the Timex factory where they built the ZX Spectrum was. And because that's where the factory was, everyone had one because everyone's dad knew someone who could "get" one, bypassing the usual supply chain hassles that Sinclair had at the time.