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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?

#211

Post by xrd »

wil421 wrote: post #195
xrd wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never really occurred to me before, but Matz is Mormon, right? I wonder if that informed his decisions differently than if he were heavily influenced by Buddhist or Shintoist thinking, as the larger population does. It would be fascinating to see if there is any correlation between alternative religions and approaches to software in Japan. Feels like there is a heavy influence of Buddhist thought (mindfulness) o…

Are you saying Buddhist thinking helps SV or hurts Japan? Or both?

I'm not sure, I'm someone that has studied a little Buddhism, and lived in Japan, but I don't live in SV and haven't lived in Japan for almost 30 years. I am just pointing out that it is notable that Matz is probably the most well known Japanese software engineer, and he is Mormon, and wondering if that influenced his thinking. And, if "that" was because he had a very different spiritual experience in Japan. Or, perhaps, wondering more generally, if "anyone, anywhere having an non-majority spiritual experience" puts you into a mode of thinking that leads to exciting outcomes, such as inventing an amazing language like Ruby!

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

#212

Post by Narishma »

dsr_ wrote: post #183
galangalalgol wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why peel apples? I do cut it in half and take out the core, but that is mostly to be sure there is no Griswald.

If you are cooking with apples as an ingredient, the skin will often be a textural problem. If you're eating a fresh apple, it generally isn't an issue.

Touching apple skin with my teeth gives me the same sensation as fingernails on a chalkboard. I don't have this issue with other fruits, just apples for some reason.

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

#213

Post by presentation »

noobermin wrote: post #65
nindalf wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 only difference I see is the Chinese market is large enough that you don't need to appeal globally.

That's true for Japan too, though. With 125M people, there are plenty of local incumbent apps and tech companies that don't feel any need to compete globally.

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

#214

Post by rswskg »

yokoprime wrote: post #46
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

Exactly! Going back to the 80s, Nintendos developers made top notch software.

Great video here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDHZKYETDyU) showing the dev process for nintendo. Looks like a collaborative environment to me?

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

#215

Post by ergonaught »

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.

My family will not start the dishwasher until it is completely full or we have otherwise run completely out of clean dishes of some category that they want to use. Tends to stink quite badly eventually, yes. I have failed utterly to persuade them to do otherwise, so mostly handwash my own dishes and let them do their thing.

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

#216

Post by bowsamic »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #184
kryptiskt wrote: post #50

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.

Japanese games usually have a pretty low software-quality. They are full of strange bugs, lacking good UI&UX, are technical inferior to the western state of the art. Even AAA-Games have often insane bad details on non-game-parts. They often compensate this with good or at least different content, but as we are talking here about software, engine-features and -quality do matter. To name some prominent example: the lat…

Pokemon is a pretty extreme example though. In my experience, Japanese games are generally less buggy than AAA games from the west. Though they are less graphically ambitious

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

#217

Post by scott_w »

rramadass wrote: post #206
simonh wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is on the right track, Japan has a fantastic hardware oriented manufacturing culture, but this can be a serious impediment when it comes to approaching software development. One symptom is that software teams are seen as part of a product line team rather than having their own org. Famously this was a major issue at Nokia and Blackberry, who institutionally believed that their competitive edge was in the…

Right; when you are good at one thing, you tend to look at everything else through that framework only. If you then have a strict Hierarchical Organization/Society (i.e. thou shalt not question) which enforces that thought pattern, you miss out on "the next big thing". The success of American Software Companies is a direct result of limited structure, controlled chaos, lots of money to experiment with and loose finan…

> lots of money to experiment with

This particular point is addressed directly in that the ready access to money made Japanese corporations stagnant. Why innovate if you can continue to get rich doing what you already do?

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

#218

Post by johnwalkr »

I worked in Japan for ten years in tech and these points jumped out at me:

>Software development was an exercise in box checking. You implemented a feature once the customer had asked for it and the contracts had been signed.

I recall a meeting where we were trying to set some requirements for a product based on what our potential customers would need. It was a requirement that all customers would need, not some unique thing that would probably change based on each customer. I understand pushing back against scope creep but as an analogy, we were building a PC designed to put our customer's peripherals inside. But we decided not to add a PCI slot even though the potential customers made PCI cards. By the end of the meeting it was agreed that since there was no signed-up customer yet, there could be no requirement. Our eventual customers of course needed that PCI slot to be added mid-design.

In general it takes a lot of consensus building to add a requirement in the first place, and once it's there, it's seen as the exact and maximum. Going beyond is seen as only adding risk. It's very difficult to ask for effort to optimise something within a given constraint. There's good and bad things about this.

>There was no real career path in software development. I mean, maybe you could move up into project management or over into sales, but if you were still actually writing code when you were 30, people kind of wondered what went wrong.

It was common to interview senior software engineers with a good resume, but find out they were one of two types in the interview. Type 1: a middle manager that has done nothing in the last ten years aside from passing excel files back and forth between junior software engineers and other managers. Type 2: considers "software design" to be making block diagrams in Visio (or worse, drawing things in excel as if it were Visio), and considers writing software to be beneath him. This type usually plans to outsource the actual development work

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

#219

Post by Retric »

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.

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

#220

Post by HideousKojima »

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.

Japanese game devs didn't put nearly as much effort into PC games as they did into console games, outside of some early exceptions like the MSX and the Sharp X68000. The main issue was that there really wasn't a domestic market for PC games in Japan, and Japanese game devs focused on serving the domestic market first. So you had half-assed efforts like a single outsourced developer "porting" Mega Man 1 and 3 to DOS (they weren't anything like the real MM 1 and 3). PC ports of most popular console games weren't common until the Xbox 360/PS3 era.
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