I was also surprised by the low score of NS. I think the ranking puts too much weight on pricing.
NS is quite expensive, but the service is way better than say, DB. In my last trip from the Netherlands to Germany, officially 2:45 hours, I had a 45 minutes delay just on the German side, on both ways, at least they are consistent.
For some reason, when talking about Japanese authors we (almost) always forget about: Ryunosuke Akutagawa [1], author of short stories like Rashomon or In a grove [2] (this actually the story that inspired Kurasawa's Rashomon)
Blaming it to the keiretsu is too simplistic. Here other factors that in my experience (living, studying & working) in Japan contribute:
- Graduates don't apply to a job, but to a company. The company decides where to place then. The first years are generally a rotation between departments until it is decided where to allocate them. This means that they will be often misplaced in positions for which they don't have the necessary background nor motivation to learn or contribute because in 6 months they'll be somewhere else.
- It is not uncommon for developers not to have a CS or coding background. They learn on the job how to "program" but lack best practices, etc. and figure out things as they go.
- Standing out is frown upon
- People who are good at their jobs are generally rewarded with more work. One can know who the manager's favourite is by who busy the person is. At the end, the good ones end up burned out, over-stressed and brain death.
- Looking busy or hard working is more important than the outcome.
- Combine the above, and there is no point to do a good job: There is no reward other than more pressure to deliver but on the other hand, as long as you look busy, not delivering is not "punished". Clear what option most people will take.
- As already commented, decisions are top down and often very conservative replicating old methods digitally.
- Many customer facing products will try to cover as many cases as possible to avoid complains, perceived discrimination or causing trouble, for example. This results in over bloated software, websites, flyers full of information, etc.
From what you wrote none of the factors seem to be specific to software/CS. But then Japan is quite well known when it comes to physical products. So I wonder what’s it about software the Japanese culture inhibits.
I don’t think anything about Japanese culture or generalizations like that tell you much about this.
Physical products: you are buying them for their software. That’s why you choose an iPhone over an Android phone. They’re all rectangles with screens.
When Sonos screwed up its app it was a crisis because: people pay for the software not the hardware.
Is this true about cars? EV design is converging. It will be. CarPlay controversy is a great example: people choose cars that support it.
Vanmoofs have a lot of hardware problems but the reason people bought them was software (like location tracking and e-Shifting).
So “well known when it comes to physical products,” that may be, but all products are software products.
“Software is eating the world” was all about like, replacing human labor or whatever, disruption. Marc Andreesen thinks he was saying something forward looking when it was all backward looking.
The story is differentiation and customer choices. Truly forward looking. But are Japanese firms incapable of that? Of course not.
Once there was a guy on here who said he had the brilliant idea of using a web browser to make an airplane UI. Listen brother, everybody knows how to write good software. It’s a business strategy not execution problem.
>> From what you wrote none of the factors seem to be specific to software/CS. But then Japan is quite well known when it comes to physical products. So I wonder what’s it about software the Japanese culture inhibits.
> Physical products: you are buying them for their software. That’s why you choose an iPhone over an Android phone. They’re all rectangles with screens.
> ...
> So “well known when it comes to physical products,” that may be, but all products are software products.
You're just plain wrong. Most physical products have no software, so you're not addressing the very real question (which is basically "Why does Japan produce such perfect physical products, but suck so bad at software? Why hasn't the attention to detail transferred?").
As an aside, it's actually really interesting to be how you could so wrong in this particular way. It kind of dovetails with a vague pet theory of mine that (roughly, very roughly) software engineers are sometimes so enamored with computers they can have a weird cognitive distortion where they see computers as everything (so a computer is the solution to every problem, and they're an expert at everything because everything's a computer or should be).
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As my contribution to answering about physical products. I met a woman once, while I was traveling, who spent a couple months in Japan. She said that Japanese cosmetics are very good and relative cheap because Japanese consumers are very picky and have very high standards. Maybe the reason is Japanese consumers just have higher expectations for physical products, but someone got enured to badly designed software.
> You're just plain wrong... Most physical products have no software
I'm just trying to be thought provoking. I can't generalize about whole cultures, other than to say, no one culture owns excellence.
Down this thread people are talking about stuff like, I don't know, home goods, or you're talking about cosmetics.
Are cosmetics software? Well the people who sell the most cosmetics have to master digital marketing.
"Chinesium" on Amazon is mastering software. It doesn't look that way. But the reason you are choosing things on Amazon is because of fulfillment software, advertising software, logistics software, that specifically the manufacturers of those products have all mastered. They are really smart sellers. The reason you choose a particular cosmetic is due to mastery of advertising and logistics software. You will never buy a cosmetic that isn't marketed by software.
Sure there's this box of, software on hardware means the thing that draws the pictures on an LCD screen. And indeed a lot of things that don't need LCD screens end up with them, and you know what? Consumers choose them. But that inside-the-box thinking aside, anything that reaches an industrial scale where you are able to buy it in many stores in America depends on mastery of some kind of software. The best of those choices happen to master both the logistics and the end-user software, whatever that may mean.
> But the reason you are choosing things on Amazon is because of fulfillment software, advertising software, logistics software, that specifically the manufacturers of those products have all mastered.
Just tacking on the word “software” to other fields does not mean that the program is the selling point.
Give that same software to a mom and pop shop and they will not become Amazon.
Give it to Walmart even, and they won’t become Amazon.
Software is a tool, not a selling point.
Most people buy from Amazon because they deliver addictively fast. That is, in part, because of their logistics, but also because they are very vertically integrated.
The convenience is what makes you buy. Pretty much all their customers wouldn’t care if Amazon switch to old school paper records if their delivery times didn’t change.
Being obviously wrong is probably not the way to do that.
> Down this thread people are talking about stuff like, I don't know, home goods, or you're talking about cosmetics.
It's all kinds of products. I have a Zojirushi travel mug and coffee maker that are both ridiculously well made and designed. The travel mug keeps things hot, never leaks and has a spring tensioned juuust right to fling the lid open and lock it behind a stop without bouncing back. The coffee maker has an unusual design that makes it very easy to clean. I've been using both daily for going on ten years. Japanese stationary is very good. Until recently, a Japanese company made the best chalk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagoromo_Fulltouch_Chalk). Back in the day, Sony CRT TVs were the best you could get. That's just the stuff I have personal experience to rattle on about without doing any research.
Japan has a longstanding reputation for producing very high quality products, which you don't seem to be very aware of. I'm kind of wondering if you're trying to make a point when you don't actually know anything about the topic.
> The reason you choose a particular cosmetic is due to mastery of advertising and logistics software. You will never buy a cosmetic that isn't marketed by software.
Like you're trying really, unusually hard to miss the point and reach to pull the discussion back to software. Again, I find that really interesting. At this point, are you just digging in your heels or is something else going on?
And the woman I met wasn't seeking out Japanese cosmetics because of marketing software, for the obvious reason that she was visitor buying things marketed to a domestic audience.
I don't think he's plain wrong. Almost any non-living product is born out of software. If Japanese products are good, the software taking care of developing, manufacturing, marketing, selling, transporting, maintaining, rma'ing the product must be good.
I might sound unbelievable for our fast-paced world of the west but there are centuries old shops in japan that still manufacture the same products with the same methods, not only in Japan but in various parts of the world, excellence wasn’t born after computers.
ISTM that both sides are right here, but both are deep in the woods and missing the trees.
"This product does not contain machines!"
"No, but it is made using machines!"
(Remember the 6 classical machines: screw, inclined plane, wedge, lever, wheel and axle, and pulley.)
Perhaps, just maybe, the real problem here is that the basic machines the world has standardised on are junk, and you can't make junk into something good?
You can use junk to make good things, but you can't make good things out of junk.
Maybe the problem isn't Japan. Maybe the problem is that all modern software is junk, and even Japan can't make that good.
>Perhaps, just maybe, the real problem here is that the basic machines the world has standardised on are junk
I believe most of the world has become complacent with “good enough” and a factory (be it hard or soft ware) that does not churn producs out of the door quickly enough is seen as “unproductive” Probably Japan software industry is trapped between being productive and excellent being neither after all.
> I don't think he's plain wrong. Almost any non-living product is born out of software. If Japanese products are good, the software taking care of developing, manufacturing, marketing, selling, transporting, maintaining, rma'ing the product must be good.
No. For a physical non-software-driven product, those things are pretty much orthogonal.
If a product is good, it's due to the attributes of the product itself, and those are mainly due to the design decisions and priorities of the manufacturer.
All the things you list may make the business more efficient and more successful, but they have little to do with the kinds of products I'm talking about.
Yeah listen, I own the same Zojirushi crap you do, a lot of it, and it has its own problems. The mugs leak occasionally, the rubber and silicone goods are cumbersome for many people to deal with, there are voids in the lids and interior corners in the rubber goods that are hard to clean, they mold all the same as anything else exposed to water. The boilers develop a lot of scaling issues, they are not easy to clean, the replacement parts are expensive, and you talk to their CS, they will tell you the wrong dimensions for things like screws. And they don’t replace anything for free.
I don’t know why you are being so hostile about my knowledge levels about $5 versus $30 pieces of junk. But I’ll just say that you are buying these things because you can buy it on Amazon, and Amazon wrote all this software to fill in the blanks like returns which Zojirushi would never do, and because Wirecutter told you to, and their affiliate marketing machine is very software enabled. It is actually a good example of my point: can you think of a Japanese brand that in your opinion has great purely mechanical products like mugs but advertises as aggressively as Apple does? What about a brand that can reach people with ad blockers, so therefore it must innovate, like by managing fleets of influencers, digital product catalogs / product syndication, affiliate schemes, etc.?
> I don’t know why you are being so hostile about my knowledge levels about $5 versus $30 pieces of junk.
I'm not being hostile, but I think you're being very non-responsive. At various points I've been trying to figure out why, because it's so baffling. I mean, the question is "Why is Japanese software crap when their physical products are well designed," and you're going on and on about Amazon's logistics software, which is pretty much a non-sequitur.
The simple answer is that Japanese software isn’t crap. It’s good in a ton of places that matter but might be invisible to consumers. Also in places that are visible: We play tons of video games developed in Japan, Nintendo might be the very best game studio on Earth. LINE was way ahead of its time too, it was a very innovative chat app that was synergistic with cell phone hardware in many ways that mattered like payments security, but maybe there isn’t enough space for chat apps to differentiate themselves and their success is driven by chance.
To me, one reason is that in some markets inside Japan, people do not yet pay for software. For example hardly anyone in Japan pays for Spotify subscriptions. However they do spend in gacha games. So it’s not as black and white as, tangible versus intangible goods. There’s no broad strokes generalization about a cultural difference that is persuasive to me. The article talks about stuff that is basically ancient history or industrial policy, which is also interesting but unpersuasive. I bring up the Amazon logistics software as an example of the possibility that even stoic hardware companies are software companies, and people like Zojirushi, so then it is sequiter to say, we’ll actually Zojirushi is good at software. So really we mean “bad at making globally important social media apps” which is a totally different thing than “bad at software.”
> software engineers are sometimes so enamored with computers they can have a weird cognitive distortion where they see computers as everything (so a computer is the solution to every problem
Does your pet theory extend beyond the adage “to a child with a hammer, everything is a nail?”
I think it’s self evident that anyone who works in a specific field will see the world through the lens of someone who works in that field…
We shall see. Cars with better software are a really important differentiator. Toyotas may be reliable, they may be the most popular today, but then why doesn't everyone choose a Toyota?
And anyway, Toyota's most innovative and market-making vehicles, like the Prius: software plays a pretty big role no? I don't think you can reduce a complex product like this, but I'm not wrong: a car with great user-facing software is pretty exciting to consumers. The Apple Car would probably be pretty successful, the Tesla has pretty innovative software that differentiates it from other EVs, the deployment and preferences for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto enabled cars... it can be true that someone buys something despite the software being bad, but that's not where the trend is going.
A lot of Americans buy American cars simply because they're loyal to American brands, or European cars because they want their neighbors to be jealous of their ability to buy such overpriced transportation. I think software is low on the list.
People buy Teslas because they go fast, get 300 miles to a charge and have five star safety ratings. "Software" is thing main thing capable of rivaling build quality and repair costs as the thing people most complain about. They're leaving a major untapped market for competitors to fill with electric cars that have tactile HVAC controls etc.
There was a meme a while ago where thing thing people used to want out of their car's entertainment system was satellite navigation and fancy everything, whereas the thing people want now is a dumb standard plug to connect their phone to the car's speakers.
It's the customer-facing software that looks sub-par. There are hundreds of thousands of lines of embedded code in almost each ECU. Those cannot be crap in a prius without having an effect on the car's (the hardware) performance.
The software in my Skoda Scala and my Vauxhall/Opel Corsa is terrible as well, but like most new-ish Toyota's, all of them support Apple Play so it doesn't matter.
The Honda software is mediocre as well but I suspect any sensible automaker realizes that most consumers are using Car Play or Google Play so they put some junior engineers on a checklist item and call it a day.
People had paper maps and often precise directions that they had on their laps or a human navigator using those maps or directions. They stopped at gas stations to ask for directions (or didn't--guys refusing to stop to ask for directions was something of a trope). So obviously they managed but probably in ways a lot of people today wouldn't find satisfactory.
How did you manage before smartphones and even email/text for meeting people and generally coordinating activities generally? People managed.
Sure. You may just not have a navigation system or be able to park in some places. I don't need a smartphone to drive in general and don't always plug it in locally. (I may more or less need a transponder on some roads or have a bit of hassle.)
I guess that could change at some point but would guess that there would be a lot of pushback to Operating this vehicle requires a working smartphone especially given there's no cellular access in a lot of places.
At a minimum, connectivity would have to be much more universal than today. Certainly, cellular is very far from pervasive and even satellite isn't 100%.
The reason you are choosing a particular hammer, comic book or umbrella on Amazon is because of mastery of marketing, logistics, and design software.
It sounds ridiculous but what is a software-enabled hammer? A construction robot could be a pretty big deal no? That might not exist today. You might still be buying hammers but everyone will want construction robots.
Some things go obsolete, some remain useful even when they are mostly replaced. All carpenters carry a hammer even though nail guns are used for almost all nails. By contrast I know a professional photography who uses film cameras as decoration - they still work but he doesn't own film for them (he also has a second job because professional photographer isn't nearly the job it used to be before everyone had a camera on them)
Even some electronics, I don't expect anything beyond a basic BMS (which has the logic baked into the IC) is inside my battery powered drill. All it has is a direction selector switch and a trigger.
even with electronics. Apple didn't achieve their dominance because of their software - any of the times. The physical products were continually refined and the software used as a lever to help them perfect the experience. When they focused on making the software "perfect" it almost destroyed the company.
Yeah dude. The iPhone continues to be chosen for its superior software. It absolutely became dominant because of the software. I mean they’re all black rectangles. Black rectangles with capacitive screens existed before the iPhone. A good mobile browser didn’t. This is coming from someone who owned a Zaurus, which had the closest thing to a decent browser, NetAccess, and a grid of icons touchable Home Screen all the same. You are underplaying how groundbreaking the software was.
This is one set of facts, totally correct, that you are talking about:
iPhones are made in China.
They cost $770 or so with tax.
They make a 55% margin (or whatever) per phone.
Consumers prefer premium materials like titanium, and they don’t prefer things like replaceable batteries.
Here is another set of facts:
Everyone’s phones are made in China.
But of course iOS is made in the US.
Consumers are choosing not between a titanium and aluminum phone, but almost always, they are choosing between Android and iOS
The margin on the software is like 99%
Apple News, the App Store, etc have a very powerful DRM scheme, where Apple is one of the only companies, besides maybe Sony, where you cannot pirate things they sell for the iPhone like services subscriptions, game IAP and extra iCloud storage.
The price of the iPhone isn’t its $770 sticker but the LTV of the owner.
This is a big deal because the second set of completely and utterly true facts is why Apple is the richest company in the world. And then you look at NVIDIA, another really rich company but which people feel less passionate about, and unequivocally, people choose NVIDIA because of its software, because of CUDA, which is why you can’t “just” add more VRAM, which is something else that everyone wants and would be a key differentiator, yet for some reason doesn’t manifest in the market.
This matters to firms everywhere not just Japan. If you can’t make 99% margin software someone else will. And consumers LIKE software. So everything you are saying is true but it doesn’t really disagree with me.
You are right, it is not specific to software, just wanted to add more context and also, because I don't know the answer and I believe there are multiple factors, but my two cents: a mix of history and culture.
By the time software came around, Japan already had a well stablished manufacturing industry that had a reputation for quality (this wasn't always the case).
Software was something totally new and wasn't considered important, why? perhaps management didn't understand it or didn't know how to handle it and did nothing.
The above made a career in software not very attractive compared to other industries. Since then, companies struggle to get good developers, who can move to more attractive sectors or countries than trying to change things within Japan with its rigid hierarchy.
How things move in Japan is generally by someone breaking the status quo and the rest following if it is a success. That was the case with Toyota in manufacturing for example. For software it hasn't happened.
Another problem IMHO is that code is invisible to users. If the app works, people don't care if the code is beautifully made or not, and without consumer pressure, management doesn't care either. Compare that with the complains they'll get if a physical object had the sightless defect.
Finally, there is a higher entry barrier for physical products than software. Any teenager can build an app in her bedroom, it is a different story to develop a bullet train. Inefficiencies and slow decision processes in manufacturing are less obvious than in tech (though manufacturing industries in Japan are struggling as well because of this), and Japan simply isn't competitive in this area, making it less attractive to invest.
And perhaps, the most important: People got used to it and don't have higher expectations.
It isn't clear from the picture and I guess it's too obvious, but if you have a neighbour, they can climb from their roof. That's how my neighbour got his installation done.
I have seen them do more complicated installations (4 floors scaffolding + crane to lift panels), I don't know why they refuse that one.
For me the problem with password managers, etc. is that it assumes that there will be a somehow tech savvy partner or relative left behind with all the knowledge of how to open it.
I prefer a method that can work in case me and my partner pass at the same time (e.g. accident). A paper will work for my partner, parents, siblings or an attorney in case of emergency.
