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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?

#351

Post by pelasaco »

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.…

> "if it doesn't work rewrite it" and I would add: .., and if the business go bankrupt, start a new one.

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

#352

Post by skissane »

slim wrote: post #177
rippercushions wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan developed plenty of its own operating systems like MSX, PC-98 and DOS/V, none of which went anywhere (outside Japan, that is).

MSX was an architecture and had no operating system. it booted into Microsoft BASIC

MSX ran the MSX-DOS operating system - which was developed by Tim Paterson under contract to Microsoft. It was a port of MS-DOS 1.x to the Z80. ASCII in Japan wrote the device drivers but the core OS was developed in Seattle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX-DOS

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

#353

Post by marcosdumay »

_skel wrote: post #294
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.…

Being culturally Japanese didn't prevent Japanese companies from achieving dominant positions in electronics, automobile manufacturing, video games, shipbuilding, steel production... Why is software so special? I would argue that the kind of risk aversion that holds back software companies is just as evident in most of Europe as it is in Japan. It is also the norm in a bunch of American companies in the tech industry…

What allowed Japan to modernize in the 1980's was a huge full society effort (with a lot of government backing) to remove the hierarchism from their work culture. All the great management innovations they started at that time are of the form of bottom-up knowledge transfer and distributed control.

If the software development is done under their "office culture", instead of the "factory culture" that was changed, it would be a very good explanation for why it's not very innovative. But I have no idea if that happens.

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

#354

Post by galaxyLogic »

olivermuty wrote: post #334
twblalock wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But again, how is that a Japanese problem specifically, when the same risk aversion exists in corporate culture in other countries (as I mentioned)? The reality is that only a few countries are dominant in software, and they dominate to such an extent that they draw in software engineers from the rest of the world. That didn't happen because all the other countries have a Japanese business culture... A convincing exp…

Fair point, I don’t really have oppinions on that. My point was the inverse, that the archetypical Japanese approach to engineering suits the iterative careful development that hardware requires.

Right when the basic product can not change much it makes sense to improve it and the process to manufacture it gradually. Really Japanese quality movement was much about process quality. You produce the same thing but with a gradually improving process that brings in better quality and better efficiency of production.

But because software is "virtual" it can change-shape in whatever way as long as it does something useful. The software products change rapidly whereas we are still in the beginning of trying to understand what are the best processes for producing it, why because process depends a lot on the product. So if the product changes fast process must change too. And when it changes fast it is difficult to improve it gradually.

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

#355

Post by galaxyLogic »

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.

To report a bug would cause almost a hara-kiri I can assume. It's a crazy evil society where anybody had to commit hara-kiri. It doesn't help anyone if you kill yourself. If you want to atone for your sins better do it by working harder. Is that a major difference between East and West? Is that a benefit of Christianity that you can be forgiven for your sins, once you admit them?

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

#356

Post by satvikpendem »

xxpor wrote: post #344
satvikpendem wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What part of that video are you referring to? I also don't use dishwasher pods, if that's part of what you're saying.

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

#357

Post by galaxyLogic »

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…

What is "bad software"? It is not software that has bugs. It is software that does not do the right thing. Any amount of money and effort invested in SW quality and process quality is simply wasted if the software does not do what its users need it to do.

Now tradition prioritizes quality. Do it the right way, like it always has been done. Tradition is not a good ingredient for software industry. If your motto was write software "like it has always been written" you are missing the boat because there is no need to write the same program again and again.

There's no reason to write the same software again - because then you could just use old existing code instead of retyping the same characters again in your editor. Déjà vu. Groundhog day.

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

#358

Post by hbn »

simonh wrote: post #192
rramadass wrote: post #138

IMO the Japanese failed at Software Development because they never thought of it as distinct/different from and more important than Hardware that is used to run it. It requires a certain degree of forward abstract thinking which they unfortunately missed. They then compounded this mistake by staying on it for decades. As an example, in the late 90's i was part of a group developing a Office Software Suite for a Japan…

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…

It's interesting how that ties into some of the famous missteps from Japanese video game companies in the past.

Nintendo went overconfidently into the 5th console generation with the cartridge-based Nintendo 64, allowing Sony to step in out of nowhere and eat their lunch since Nintendo alienated developers who obviously wanted the format where they weren't bound to the small storage sizes on cartridges. Including their bread-and-butter partnerships like Capcom with their Mega Man games and Square with the Final Fantasy series, both defecting to make PlayStation games.

Albeit their lunch was eaten by another Japanese company, but Sony made an overconfident hardware misstep themselves a couple generations later after feeling invincible with the success of the PS2, releasing the PS3 which was technically impressive from a hardware standpoint, but difficult to develop for, causing them to alienate developers (see Gabe Newell's famous comments) and lose steam for a lot of that generation.

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

#359

Post by qiqitori »

makeitdouble wrote: post #130
bsder wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japanese mobile phones kicked the ever lovin' crap out of western phones for a very long time. The Japanese got into social media way before the West did. And Yahoo Japan actually still exists and seems to be doing okay. And that's not to mention the success of Japanese video games. The big problem that Japanese software has is simply that its market is too much smaller than anything which caters to English. This is…

To me the main difference is they failed to push an operating system. As you say, they were really ahead in mobile, and docomo had an honest try to push imode in europe for instance, but it couldn't take off as the markets were too different. The iPhone not supporting Felica gave the maker a small bubble to thrive but android was too far behind. Now they are barely surviving.

I'm probably misreading you a little bit, but here's my two yen.

There were a bunch of silly operating systems in the history of computing, and Japan had a few too. TRON was pointed out in another thread, which still exists in some embedded stuff, even in modern stuff you may have used before, for example the Nintendo Switch joy-cons.

But TBH, there can only be a handful of operating systems that actually matter. So you'd have to outpush some extremely pushy companies in a very tight space, and the market for commercial operating systems is almost dead anyway.

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

#360

Post by xxpor »

satvikpendem wrote: post #356
xxpor wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you rinse your dishes, you're Doing It Wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04

What part of that video are you referring to? I also don't use dishwasher pods, if that's part of what you're saying.

Ah sorry, should have copied that: https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04?t=1613
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