This is our 200th episode, so I wanted to do something special.
Everyone loves to complain about the poor quality of Japanese software, but today I’m going to explain exactly what went wrong. You’ll get the whole story, and I’ll also pinpoint the specific moment Japan lost its way. By the end, I think you’ll have a new perspective on Japanese software and understand why everything might be about to change.
You see, the story of Japanese software is not really the story of software. It’s the story of Japanese innovation itself.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS | More
Intro
Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs.
I’m Tim Romero and thanks for listening
Shakespeare only wrote 37 plays, Orson Wells only made 64 films, Mozart wrote 41 symphonies, but Disrupting Japan? Well, as of today, Disrupting Japan has 200 episodes.
So, what to talk about on this special occasion? Well, I’ll be giving an in-depth answer to the one question I get asked most about Japanese software and Japanese software startups.
This is a piece I’ve been working on (on and off) for over three years. I know that seems like a long time, but a lot of my solo podcasts come together like that. I know what I want to say, and will let it will bounce around in my head for months or years before I figure out how to turn it into an interesting story that you will find worth listening to.
Some ideas are too short to develop into full-length shows, some I end up talking myself out of before a finish, and some — like this one — just take me a long time to craft in a way that I’m happy putting it out into the world.
I have about 30 of these article in progress, and that’s far more than I’ll ever develop into podcasts. I’ve been thinking of starting a Substack newsletter to publish some of these in a much shorter form. Let me know what you think. Is that a good idea?
Anyway, on our 200th episode, I want to thank you for listening, and making this show possible. I realize that “thank you the listener” has become cliche in and podcasting, but I don’t know what other words to use here.
I feel incredibly honored to be able to sit down and have these deep conversions with some of the most creative and visionary people in Japan, and to have thousands of people around the world care enough about my thoughts and options to listen, and to get in touch, and to tell people about it.
So thank you for listening, and thank you for coming on this journey with me. Let see where it takes us.
And now, on with the show!
The Elephant in the Room
Japanese software has problems. By international standards, it’s just embarrassingly bad.
We all know this, but what’s interesting is that there are perfectly rational, if somewhat frustrating, reasons that things turned out this way. Today I’m going to lay it all that out for you in a way that will help you understand how we got here, and show you why I am optimistic about the future.
And no, this is not going to be just another rant about all the things I dislike about Japanese software.
I am not going to waste your time or mine cataloging and complaining about the many, many bad practices, user-hostile design decisions, mind-boggling complex workflows, and poor development process that afflict Japanese software.
If you want details and debate about exactly how Japanese software falls short, or if you just in the mood for some good old-fashioned venting about being forced to use it, check out Reddit or maybe Hacker News. This topic comes up pretty often there.
No, for the sake of this podcast I’m going to assume that we are all in agreement that on average, Japanese software. is just … awful.
That way we can spend our time talking about something far more interesting. We are going to walk though the economic events and the political forces that made today’s poor quality of Japanese software almost inventible,
And by the end, I think it will give you a completely new way of looking at the Japanese software industry.
You see, the story of Japanese software, is not really about software. No, this is the story of Japanese innovation itself. The story of the ongoing struggle between disruption and control. It’s a story that involves, war, secret cartels, scrappy rebels, betrayal, rebirth, and perhaps redemption.
How This Mess Started
So let’s start at the beginning. The beginning is further back than you might expect.
To really understand how we got here, we need to go back, not just to the end of WWII, but to the years after the Meiji restoration, the late 1800s, back when the Japanese economy was dominated by the zaibatsu.
Now, “zaibatsu” is usually translated as “large corporate group” or “family controlled corporate group.” While that is accurate, it grossly understates the massive economic and political power these groups wielded around the turn of the 20th century.
Japan’s zaibatsu were not corporate conglomerates as we think of them today.
You see, although the Meiji government adopted a market-based economy and implemented a lot of capitalist reforms, it was the zaibatsu, with the full support of the government, that kept the economy running.
And the zaibatsu system was almost feudal in nature.
The national government could, and did, pass legislation regarding contract law, labor reforms, and property rights, but in practice these were more like suggestions. In reality, as long as the zaibatsu kept the factories running, the rail lines expanding, and the shipyards operating at capacity, the men in Tokyo didn’t trouble themselves too much with the details.
In practice, the zaibatsu families had almost complete dominion over the resources, land, and people under their control. They were the law.
At the turn of the pervious century, there were four major zaibatsu (Sumitomo, Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Yasuda). And each zaibatsu had its own bank, its own mining and chemical companies, its own heavy manufacturing company, etc. But it wasn’t just industry, each of these zaibatsu groups had strong political and military alignments. For example, Mitsui had strong influence over the army, while Mitsubishi had a great deal of sway over the imperial navy.
At the start of WWII, the four zaibatsu families controlled over 50% of Japan’s economy. This fact, when combined with their political influence, quite understandably, made Japan’s military government very uncomfortable, and during the war, the military wrested away a bit of the zaibatsu’s power and nationalized some of their assets.
After Japan’s defeat, the American occupation forces considered the zaibatsu a serious economic and political risk to Japan becoming a liberal, democratic fully developed nation. They targeted 16 firms for complete dissolution and another 24 for major reorganizations.
Rising from Ashes
Now, that was supposed to be the end of the zaibatsu. I say “supposed to” because those of you who know Japanese history understand that it never really happened.
Of course, many things changed. Important political and social reforms were implemented, the legal system was greatly strengthened, a lot of zaibatsu assets were nationalized, and the zaibatsu themselves ceased to be.
At least, officially.
You see, the zaibatsu were quickly allowed to restructure in greatly weakened , but very familiar, forms, as keiretsu. This was permitted for two main reasons.
First, as the cold war heated up in the 40s and 50s, America’s idealistic vision for a democratic and progressive Japan took a back seat to the more practical and pressing need to develop Japan into a bulwark against Communism. And that meant prioritizing economic growth over social reforms. With these new goals in mind, both the American occupation forces and the Japanese government, quite correctly, concluded that having something like the zaibatsu groups would to lead to faster, more predictable growth than tearing everything down and rebuilding from scratch.
The second important, and kind of surprising, reason was that almost no one in Japan really wanted to see the zaibatsu broken up. Not the politicians, certainly not the leaders of the zaibatsu, not the public at large, and to the endless frustration and confusion of western labor organizers, not even the rank-and-file zaibatsu workers and employees. In fact, at one point 15,000 Matsushita union members signed a petition demanding that the Matsushita zaibatsu(1) not be broken up.
So in the end, important changes were made. Labor rights and contract law were strengthened significantly, and even more zaibatsu assets were confiscated. The traditional family holding companies were dissolved, but they were replaced by cross-company shareholdings and interlocking corporate boards that achieved much the same result, but in a much more transparent and manageable way.
And so, most of Japan’s zaibatsu were allowed to morph into the smaller, less threatening, and much more manageable keiretsu.
Japan as a Global Innovator
In same way that the zaibatsu defined the economic miracle that was Japan’s Meji-era expansion, the keiretsu would come define the economic miracle that was Japan’s post war expansion.
Today there are six major and a couple dozen minor keiretsu groups, and during Japan’s economic expansion, as much as possible, they kept their business within the keiretsu family.
Projects were financed by the keiretsu bank, the materials and know-how were imported by the keiretsu trading company, and the final products would be assembled in the appropriate keiretsu brand’s factory. And supporting all of these flagship brands were, and still are, tens of thousands of very small, exclusive manufacturers that make up the keiretsu supply chain — and the bulk of the Japanese economy.
And with the exception of a tiny handful of true startup companies like Honda and Sony, all of Japan’s brands that were famous before the year 2000 or so, are keiretsu brands.
And for those of you who think big companies can’t innovate, let me remind you that from the 50s to the 70s, these keiretsu groups began innovating, disrupting, and dominating almost every industry on the planet; from cars, to cameras, to machine parts, to steel, to semiconductors, to watches, to home electronics, Japan’s keiretsu simply rewrote the rules.
But how did the keiretsu do in the world of software development? Well, pretty darn well, actually.
It’s important to remember, though, that the software industry in the 60s and 70s was very different than it is today. The software development process itself was actually rather similar. Fred Brooks wrote The Mythical Man Month about his experience during this era, and it remains as one of best books on software engineering and project management today.
But the way software was bought and sold was completely different. In the 60s and 70s, software was written for specific and very expensive hardware, and the software requirements were negotiated as part of the overall purchase contract. Software was not viewed so much as a product, but more like a service, similar to integration, training, and ongoing support and maintenance. It was usually sold on a time-and-materials basis, and sometimes it was just thrown in for free to sweeten the deal. The real money was in the hardware.
Software in this time (both in Japan and globally) was written to meet the spec. It did not matter if it was creative, innovative, easy to use, or elegant, it just had to meet the spec. In fact, trying to build exceptional software in this era was considered a waste of resources. After all, the product had already been sold and the contracts had already been signed. The goal back then, just like many system integration projects today, was to build software that was just good enough to get the client to sign off on it as complete.
Software that met the customer’s spec was, by definition, good software.
Japan’s keiretsu did well in the age of big-iron. Although Fujitsu, NEC, and Hitachi never seriously challenged IBM and Univac’s global dominance in the 60s and 70s, they did pretty well in mini-computers and large office systems.
They were innovators.
Japan Turns its Back on a New Industry
However, when the PC revolution arrived in the late 1980s, Japanese industry as a whole was hopelessly unprepared, and not for the reasons you might think.
The reason Japanese software development stopped advancing in the 1980s had nothing to do with a lack of talented software developers. It was a result of Japan’s new economic structure as a whole, and the keiretsu in particular.
As a market, personal computers were something fundamentally new. Sure, the core technology and the hardware were direct continuations from the previous era, but this new market was completely different.
The PC market quickly coalesced around a small number of standardized operating systems and hardware architectures. The keiretsu did pretty well in hardware side of this market, making some really impressive machines, particularly laptops.
But a market for non-spec or “shrink-wrap” software was something new to everyone. It required delighting the customer, and knowing what they wanted before they did. It was the kind of challenge that the keiretsu of the 60s and 70s would have thrown themselves into whole-heartedly, innovated aggressively, and then dominated.
But things in Japan had become very different in the 1980s.
Here was a chance to define and lead a new global industry. A chance for the keiretsu to build a software industry from the ground up.
But, wait a minute. Why should they?
Sure, back in the 60s when Japan’s economy was small, survival required looking outwards, competing globally, making long-term investments, and innovating to make the best products in the world.
But this was the 80s! Japan was the second-largest economy on the planet and in the middle of the largest economic boom the world had ever seen. This was the era of Japan as Number 1, with economists predicting Japan’s GNP would be larger than America’s within a decade.
With such a lucrative, and pretty well protected, market right at their fingertips it made much more sense for for the keiretsu to focus on the easy money rather than to take risky and expensive bets on an uncertain and emerging global market.
Each keiretsu group had their own technology firm who started selling PCs and software, some to consumers, but the big money was in corporate sales. And since the keiretsu liked to keep the business in the family, these technology companies grew and profited by selling to their captive customers within their keiretsu group. And just like before, they made the real money in integration, and customization.
An unfortunate result of this is that the big Systems Integration companies or “SIs” emerged as powerful players, and Japan’s software firms never had to compete globally, or even with each other.
Japan simply missed the opportunity to develop a globally relevant PC software industry.
The Beginning of the End of Innovation
Japan’s software industry in the 80s and 90s remained much like it was in the mainframe area. The software had to be just good enough for the client to sign off on it, and since they were largely captive clients unable to look outside their keiretsu group for support, that was a very low bar indeed.
But hey, as long as the economy was booming, no one minded spending lavishly to keep all the work in the keiretsu family, and all those little software defects could always be fixed in “phase two” of the project.
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.
This not only caused Japan to miss out on the global software industry, but it marked the beginning of the collapse of innovation across Japanese industry. Over the next 30 years, software would become a key driver of both innovation and efficiency. But by outsourcing their IT strategy to a single integrator, Japanese enterprise had tied themselves to an anchor that would ensure almost every industry fell further and further behind the technology curve with each passing year.
Japan still has not recovered from this. Even today most enterprise systems are decades behind their global competitors. But, as we’ll see a bit later, things are happening now that could enable a quantum leap forward in Japan.
Life as a Developer in Japan’s Dot-com Bubble
So, what was it like to be a software developer in Japan the 80s and 90s?
It was pretty bad. Software development was considered rather low-skill work. It didn’t pay well and was viewed as a kind of clerical work. The job was simply to write software that was close enough to whatever sales had promised the client while they were out drinking last week.
New hires with degrees in literature, business, or law, or whatever were rotated though software development for a few years to give them a sense of how different parts of the company worked. 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.
Of course there were some great, even visionary, software developers in Japan at that time. I knew some of them. People who wanted to make computers do new things. People who saw how technology could disrupt other industries, and developers who simply had a passion for making software that delighted users.
There were plenty of developers like that in the 80s and 90s. They were miserable.
Interestingly, hardware engineers were viewed very differently. Both then and now, hardware engineers are highly respected in Japan. Engineers are some of the most admired people at companies like Toyota, Mitsubishi, and Sony.
So, perhaps unsurprisingly, hardware innovation continued at a furious pace during the 80s and 90s. Products like the walkman and the Nintendo consoles achieved global success and the domestic market was filled with electronic diaries, dictionaries, and planners that were way ahead of what was available in the West.
And of course, eventually i-mode. Japanese consumers were sending email and browsing the web from their phone years before the Blackberry was released, and almost a decade before the iPhone.
Falling Down
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. As Marc Andreessen would later point out “Software was eating the world.”
As the dot-com bubble started to inflate, Japan began to realize they needed talented software developers, but without a a software industry that actually valued software developers, companies had no idea where to find them. The best talent was usually unrecognized and trapped at the lower levels of the org chart. There was not much of a future pipeline. Since software engineering was not a respected or profitable career, few students opted to pursue it.
Some did of course, but these were the people that just loved programming. It was like becoming a musician or a manga artist. It was great you are following your dreams. You might make it, but the odds were not in your favor.
When the foreign software companies starting crashing into Japan in the 90s, the domestic industry could barely put up a fight.
The dot-com boom of the late 90s was the first wave of venture-funded, disruptive innovation in Japan, but it was not yet time for Japan’s software developers to step into the spotlight.
The successful founders of that era were mostly well-connected or incredibly scrappy businessmen. The general opinion of software developers had hardly changed at all. They just weren’t the kind of people you would trust to run a company.
I started my first Japanese startup during the dot-com boom, and at that time, I think the fact that I was a technical founder was even more unusual than the fact that I was a foreign founder.
Of course in one sense, the dot-com boom was an amazing time to start a software startup in Japan. You could call up almost any talented developer you knew, let them know hat they would be working on something important, that they would have meaningful input into product development, they’d be on a team that cared about code quality, and that their skills would be respected … and yeah, they’d want to come on board.
The Lost Decades Were Never Really Lost
The late 90s and the naughts is often referred to as Japan’s “Lost Decades.” It was not a good time for the keiretsu companies. Not only did their power continue to weaken, but increased scrutiny of their cross-shareholdings and financials, and the merger of several banks across keiretsu lines meant that business as usual was over. And pushing the knife in deeper, all of the implied economic and social guarantees that the keiretsu system was based on began to unravel.
In previous decades, Japan had focused on exporting domestically made goods, but now, not only was the domestic market attracting a greater focus, but Japanese industry began moving production out of Japan into cheaper overseas markets.
This was considered a betrayal by thousands of mom-and-pop manufactures who had spent their lives (or sometimes generations) as a highly integrated and specialized part of a single keiretsu’s supply chain, and who now found themselves suddenly cut off.
Japan’s famous lifetime employment system effectively ended during this period as well. It made sense for corporate groups to promise lifetime employment and predictable promotions when profits kept rising and labor was scarce, but now faced with mounting losses, corporate Japan began walking back all these implied promises.
This was a shock for Japan. It was a breech of the social contract that holds everything together. If hard work and loyalty would not be rewarded, then why dedicate your life to the company? To the distress of pundits and politicians, many young Japanese started saying they had no interest at all in joining the corporate world.
But the truth is, especially now that we can look back on it, these decades were not really lost decades at all. Growth slowed, and the changes were incredibly painful, but they were absolutely necessary to set the foundations for the coming wave of startup innovation and for Japan’s software developers to finally get the respect they so deeply deserve.
The Triumph of the Japanese Software Developer
I mark 2010 as the year Japan’s software developers finally started stepping into the spotlight, although things starting moving a bit before that.
There were two triggers that led to this development. First, the emergence of cloud computing and second, the introduction of the smartphone. Although these were both technological developments, it was not the technology itself that led to the change.
Cloud computing drastically reduced the capital and time required to start a startup. In the dot-com era a decade before, starting an internet startup required purchasing racks of servers and paying system administrators to keep them running, but suddenly fully configured, maintained, and secure serves could be had for a few cents per minute — pay as you go.
Suddenly Japan’s software developers didn’t need to explain their idea to a VC and convince them that it would sell. They could just build things and get people to start using them and start paying for them. And that’s just what they did.
The other important development was the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and Android a year later. Not just because of the technology, but because of how it changed the software business model.
Japan’s i-mode was years ahead of the West when it first came out, but getting your app on i-mode was largely a matter of lengthy negotiations with the telcos for one of the few highly-coveted slots on the menu. The smartphone ecosystems were different. Anyone who could develop an app of reasonable quality could deploy and sell it. There were no business connections, exclusive negotiations, or revenue commitments required.
2010 marked the beginning of the end of the software startup gatekeepers. As more and more talented developers realized how easy it was to start a startup, more and more started choosing startups over the traditionally low-status career path at large companies.
This, combined with a large dose of Silicon Valley glamour, has complexly transformed Japan’s image of the software developer. Software developers are valued and respected today. Unlike the dot-com days, both startups and enterprises compete aggressively to recruit and retain talented programers, even though there are a lot more of them today. Thankfully, people also talk a lot more about code quality.
Of course, this attitude shift was much broader than just developers. With the safety net of lifetime employment and guaranteed promotions removed, people have had to become less risk averse and more innovative. Those workers who had rejected the corporate life, became freelancers and formed the core of Japan’s flexible startup workforce, and some of those tiny supply-chain companies began to rethink their business models.
This brings us to the start of the Disrupting Japan podcast about eight and a half years ago. We’ve talked to the innovators and followed the development of the startup ecosystem together during that time.
So, Where Do We Go From Here?
As we talk here together at the start of 2023, what does the future look like for Japanese software?
Japan has had a lot of catching up to do over the past fifteen years. After basically sitting out the global PC and dot-com revolutions, Japanese software developers have been making up for lost time and in the startup space. Japan is developing a competitive software market in some areas, but on average, there is still a long way to go.
Japan’s once dominant Systems Integrators will continue to see their power decline. Their customer lock-in is fading fast, and B2B SaaS software startups are letting Japanese enterprises leapfrog to modern IT systems for less than costs to maintain their SI-run legacy systems.
The SIs won’t disappear, of course. There will always be a need for good systems integrators, and the more forward thinking ones are already trying to reinvent themselves. However, the days when the SIs dictated their clients’ IT strategy are coming to a close. That is a very good thing for Japanese software, Japanese startups, and Japanese competitiveness as a whole.
The Kishida administration has made startups a national priority, and the importance of quality software and software startups in Japan has never been higher.
Even the old keiretsu firms have come around. They are increasingly looking to software startups to supplement internal R&D though both M&A and through long-term partnerships. In fact, last year Keidanren, Japan’s largest business federation, an organization that was one of the main architects and drivers of Japan’s post-war economic expansion, called on its member companies to greatly increase their startup investment and partnerships.
I am optimistic. As always, things will develop differently in Japan. In the same way the zaibatsu defined Japan’s Meja-era economic miracle, and the keiretsu came to define Japan’s post-war economic miracle, from some new combination of startups, enterprise, and academia will emerge something that will define Japan’s next economic miracle.
Today is a very good time to be developing software in Japan.
Outro
Thank you for sticking with me for this 150-year history of Japanese software development and for over eight years and 200 episodes of Disrupting Japan.
And you know, after all this, I feel like things are just getting started.
If you want to talk more about Japanese software, and come on, I know you do! Come by Disrupting japan.com /show200 and and let’s talk.
Hey, and if you enjoy the show, share a link online or just tell people about it. In this age of over-the-top hype, you’d be amazed how much power your honest recommendation has.
But most of all, thanks for listening, and thank you for letting people interested in Japanese startups know about the show.
I’m Tim Romero and thanks for listening to Disrupting Japan.
Footnotes
1. An astute reader pointed out that Matsushita was not a zaibatsu. While this is technically correct (the best kind of correct) there is some important nuance. While, Matsushita was not one of four traditional zaibatsu families, the power and profits they amassed during the wartime years lead the US occupation forces to label them as a zaibatsu family and target them for dissolution in 1946. Due largely to the reasons outlined in this episode, the zaibatsu designation was removed and the dissolution order reversed in 1950.
the game industry would seem to be an outlier, perhaps.
Hi James,
Thanks for listening. I only touched on the games industry briefly because it is quite complex. Console, PC, and mobile gaming are different enough to almost be considered different industries. It’s a really interesting topic, and I might do a podcast on it in the future.
Tim
You forgot to mention that Japanese S/F & H/W were always double byte systems while US and other systems had been single byte systems up until the late 80’s/ early 90’s. This was a technological wall that had been protecting and separating the Japanese domestic market from the international market.
Hi Lyal,
Thanks for listening.
I didn’t forget. It just wasn’t that relevant. For example, the Japanese-made mini-computers also supported double-byte OS, but the sold pretty well in the single-byte markets. The double-byte OSs might have protected the domestic industry for a few extra years, but I don’t think it made much of a difference in the long run.
Tim
Tim
Congratulations and many thanks for your explanation of Japanese Software history. I learned a lot from you in one article about the subject instead reading lengthy academic narratives. Well done. I shall subscribe to your podcast and support your efforts.
Many thanks and appreciate your efforts and also for me to motivate and support your work.
Hi Denis,
Thanks for listening. I’m glad you enjoy the show. It’s really a labor of love. I can never quite understand why the whole world does not find these topics as fascinating as I do. lol
Tim
“Japan was the second-largest economy on the planet and in the middle of the largest economic boom the world had ever seen. This was the era of Japan as Number 1, with economists predicting Japan’s GNP would be larger than America’s within a decade. With such a lucrative, and pretty well protected, market right at their fingertips it made much more sense for for the keiretsu to focus on the easy money rather than to take risky and expensive bets on an uncertain and emerging global market.”
Basically, the answer is complacency. However, there is one thing: “larger than America.” The United States had already been the largest economy in the world for decades. So how come it didn’t become complacent with software? Because American hardware manufacturing industries (like automobiles and televisions) had weakened by that time.
From “The Japanese Software Industry: What Went Wrong and What Can We Learn from it?” by Robert E. Cole and Yoshifumi Nakata:
“Japanese leaders, with their strong success in manufacturing hardware, found it much more difficult to envision software as a full partner, much less alternative model. It is also a plausible hypothesis that the weakness of American manufacturing globally, relative to Japanese firms, gave American firms stronger incentives to search, sense, monitor, and respond to the new opportunities created by software.” (pg 17)
Thanks for listening.
That’s an interesting perspective, and I think it is true as far as it goes. The question prompted by their hypothesis, however, is why even the pure software companies did not develop competitive software. In those cases, there was no hardware division who had to consider them partners. I think the financial incentives provide a stronger and more complete explanation, but I agree that those authors make an interesting and generally correct point.
Tim
Thank you for the excellent article, it was well thought out and provided some very interesting historical context to the issue.
I think another important aspect is cultural – Japan has traditionally been exceptionally good at technical perfection, organizing itself around the master/apprentice model (senpai/kohai) passing on skills from generation to generation and striving for perfection at each step (kaizen). This has clearly shown itself in the mechanical, electrical and especially civil engineering worlds, where Japan has been (and still is in my opinion) a world leader in quality.
When it comes to software a different model has shown success and Japan has (in general) found it very hard to adapt. Software development is cheap and the ‘agile’, try-it-and-see model, ‘fail fast and often’ mantra is leading the way. Silicon valley is the living embodiment of this philosophy.
However, over on this side of the Pacific, the desire to provide high ‘omotenashi’ levels of service to an unforgiving public means that the bare minimum often suffices. If it isn’t broke don’t fix it. There is no desire to improve especially if this introduces a risk of a system failure, extra cost or confusion for the users.
I think these aspects have also had a major contribution to the sorry state of software here, but perhaps these are the symptoms of the broader forces mentioned in your article, anyway, it’s a fascinating topic!
Hi Marcus,
Thanks for listening.
There is a lot of truth in what you say. The question that always fascinates me is how things got this way. While it is somewhat true to say that Japanese industry and startups tend to be quality obsessed, my inclination is to use that as the starting point. “OK. So what factors cause this obsession with quality?” Attributing it to “culture” cuts short some really interesting discussions.
Tim
A bit cumbersome to log in here. My initial comment was just about the spelling glitch of “pervious” for “previous”. Pretty close to the beginning.
On the presentation, I was reading it rather than listening, and it started to feel kind of tedious, so I didn’t finish. At least in written form, I felt you had teased me with an answer, so I expected you to summarize the answer and then explain the details, but I still couldn’t figure out where you were going after a long time. Couldn’t even figure out what to search for to peek ahead and then come back…
On the substance of the topic it may be an intersection with some recent reading on power structures. At least in the early parts you were describing unilateral structures. The archetype is the military, where orders always flow downward. A situation with strong unions can be a case of bilateral power, with some sort of balance. However the real world tends to be much more complex than that, with multilateral flows between many players. (Not part of my original source, but now I’m wondering if that’s why democracy matters?)
As it relates to creativity, unilateral control is not so hot. Hard to order people to be creative, and even harder for the top power to tolerate the kind of important new ideas that can change things. Big corporations favor unilateral power structures, but then they can’t sustain the creativity they need for many purposes, including the creation of good software.
Hi,
Thanks for reading. Don’t sweat it. It’s a complex issue. I think if could be summarized in a few bullet points, there would not be so much misunderstanding around the topic.
On power structures, I think it’s misleading to view Japan management as operating with a top-down or a unilateral power structure. It’s closer to a “middle-up” structure were various and fluid factions and cliques must be appeased. Very few Japanese leaders/organization can operate successfully in a top-down manner.
Tim
Thoroughly enjoyed your podcast, the research and conclusions. I was on the inside of i-mode in the early 2000s and while some of the take on placement is a little off from reality, I’ve always been frustrated by how far we were ahead until the iPhone and then Android emerged. My successive career has been in media and entertainment and I see some foreshadowing here!
Hi David,
Thanks for listening. I’m glad you enjoy Disrupting Japan.
I’d love to hear your i-mode insights if you are comfortable sharing them. Even from the outside it was frustrating to watch. It was launched in a few overseas markets, but never really seemed to get the traction it should have.
Tim
Hi Tim,
Thank you for making this podcast and sharing your insights about Japanese SW industry. I am a Chinese student, studying in the US and will work in Tokyo as an Infra Engineer later this year. I find the focus point of Japanese companies for new grad is quite different from China and US. They care more about why choosing us than your technical background. I am not sure if this is an effective recruiting system tho. But I still feel very excited to have a look at Japanese software industry and hopefully to witness its new miracle.
Hi CH,
Thanks for listening.
You are right. IN that respect, Japanese corporate culture is very different than the US or China. In Japan there is a lot of attention paid to why you want to work in a certain industry or a certain company. In addition to technical interviews.
Tim
Here is some support for your argument:
https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/Rowen_Toyoda.pdf
I have only scanned it but it definitely draws on many of the same themes (post-war keiretsu, focus on hardware, labor market, etc.). In 2002, there was little hope of fortunes changing in the immediate future. Hopefully you are right about new opportunities for Japanese startups. Maybe the combination of AI and robotics will be the seeds for a new trajectory.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for the link. I’ve downloaded to read later. AI and robotics are an interesting combination. Japanese startups are doing really groundbreaking things in robotics, but the Japanese AI technology has a hard time making it out of the university research labs.
TIm
Can I clarify my earlier comment? Or am I going to run into unsolvable login problems again?
Not really blaming WordPress, though I have found it cumbersome to work with on a number of previous occasions. It’s the spammers that make the tedious and cumbersome login mechanisms necessary, but it’s the imbalance of motivational forces that then make WordPress (and other websites) so close to unusable. My motivation to jump through hoops to post a comment is limited, but the spamming scammers believe it’s an unlimited source of money and their motivations to break any reasonable login mechanism are without limit. And as long as the spammers keep making money, they will continue to do it.
So let’s see if this approach to replying works…
Okay, so the communication channel is partly open now… However my second attempt to open it was several days ago and now I can’t remember the details of my original deeper response. Lost in a cloud of frustration with login attempts when I was notified of your initial reply.
Let me say that I am not trying to “sweat” anything. However I try to read at many levels at once. At the lowest level of the spelling mistake, I see (via a quick text search) that it’s still here in your original piece, so either you are also struggling with WordPress and can’t fix your mistake, or your real reply to feedback is that you don’t pay much attention to feedback. Perhaps “Don’t sweat it” is not advice so much as projection?
By the way, I was hoping that the successful reply I just wrote would also have resulted in a “logged in” state that would permit me to use the “REPLY” button associated with your initial reply. But no.
The resulting situation is a loss of dialog, which is quite important in the formation and expression of good reasons. “The Enigma of Reason” by Sperber and Mercier may be the best book I’ve read on that particular topic. However I also notice that none of the replies to this blog led to dialog, so now I think the “REPLY” buttons are also fake buttons that do nothing. Maybe there’s a setting for that and you have it set for “No dialog”. Laugh’s on me for trying so hard to “REPLY”?
But the main conclusion is that I think I was open to being motivated to make the effort to read the entire thing. But that was past tense, and now I am definitely not so motivated nor likely to become motivated in that direction. Actually now I am somewhat annoyed and motivated in the direction of disabling the email notifications that have been reminding me of activity in this non-discussion. (But I’m not saying it’s easy to host an online discussion of any depth… I think the best online discussions I participated in were decades ago. Places like the BBSes of Austin and ye olde usenet (before perpetual September). Still looking for interesting discussions after so many years, most recently via the cumbersome Mastodon.)
Tim, very good article and thinking and I hope it will go well in the future. We might see the end of giant IT companies and smaller and agile one might come up.
Hi Lorenz,
Thanks for listening.
I do think it is possible the one of the ways the big SIs can reinvent themselves will be to align with smaller, agile software startups. I don’t see much interest in it from the SIs yet, but it could be very good for them.
Tim
Really great podcast Tim. As a UX Designer and Solution Architect working for a global software vendor here, it is a topic I am often grappling with. Of course, I tend to focus more on the “how to address it / move forward” side of the discussion, but understanding how it came to be is a useful part of that. Would be interested to have another episode on your thoughts on “the fix”. For myself I find executives and the workers onboard with better software UX, its the middle where a lot of pushback occurs. Cheers!
Hi Kinkuma,
Thanks for listening.
You’re right. “The Fix” is not a simple topic. In the podcast we talked about three possible approaches; some “bad” design is not actually broken and does not need to be fixed, nemawashi is the way to make change happen in the short run, and in the long run better design is winning in the marketplace, particularly on mobile.
Tim
Hi! Truly awesome episode. In the US, Toyota Production Systems methodologies are widely studied and held in high esteem for many of the disruptive and innovative digital product development organizations. Concepts like Kanban, Gemma, and Kaizen permeate our landscape and are rapidly gaining traction. Why do you think these concepts are only now gaining traction here in the US and do you see Agile/Scrum based strategies for organizing people around work in Japan?
Check out my episode of my podcast on the origins of Scrum and Agile. I feel like you can fill in many blanks and errors in my knowledge. I would love the insight!
Thanks again!
Hi Drew,
Thanks for listening. I’m delighted that you enjoyed the episode.
Agile is something close to my heart. Beck’s Extreme Programming changed the way I thought about programming and about managing developers. In many ways, I still view it as a kind of Platonic Ideal. Scrum and Agile as commonly practiced today have strayed a long, long way from those ideals. Not that I am against either methodology. It’s just that “Agile” today seems to have a much broader meaning than it used to.
But to answer your question, Scrum and Agile processes are reasonably popular in Japan, but I don’t think Agile processes as practiced today are as conducive to innovative software the way Agile processes from 20 years ago were.
Tim
It’s really inspiring. I am a Chinese enterprise software investor. Although China’s personal software and the Internet are very developed, Chinese enterprise software service providers also face the problems of Japan in the 1980s. The needs of enterprises are acquired by system integrators. Some of these integrators belong to large state-owned enterprises, and some have customer relationships. In any case, there are very few with product competitiveness. So more often there is software customization and outsourcing, and the development of productization is very slow.
Hi Zicheng,
Thanks for listening.
It’s really interesting to hear that Chinese enterprise is facing a similar situation as Japanese enterprises in the 80’s. My impression was that China was a more dynamic market, but enterprise software is always a special case. I hope Chinese enterprises can break free of their systems integrators and wont face 30 years of frustration and falling behind like Japan’s enterprises did.
Tim