Because software developer jobs in Japan is infamous for low pay, long work-hours, and low job security. Japanese company considers software as "non-core, non-essential" or auxiliary part of their business that can be contracted out. So most software works are done by small software subcontractor house, so called "black company". Social image of software developer in Japan is perceived as poor, overworked and fatigued salary-man without girlfriend or wife, without career promotion, working overtime for small company, low on social ladder, not desirable for marriage candidate. Complete opposite of developers in USA.
I worked for Fujitsu Australia in the early 90s as a developer (porting IBM utilities to MSP). I also assisted in a major project for Canon. Canon flew a large team of developers to Sydney. They all dressed alike (suits), lived together, arrived at the same time every day (in a minibus), ate lunch from boxes at the same time every day. I read their code. They were rated by number of lines of code created each day. If something had to happen 5 times (say) they would not write a loop, they would copy the code 5X. The code they left behind worked, but was effectively unmaintainable.
I worked for Fujitsu Philippines, and I would say that this is true, and that was the worst company I've worked for in my life. (I lasted a month before resigning). And the amount of micromanagement from stupid managers is insane.
Because Japan is a Gerontocracy. Every government department, corporation and university is run by 60-80 yr old men who have zero interest and a huge distrust of technology !! Plus the entire bureaucracy is still run on paper, faxes & floppy disks ☹️
Just choose cyber security and take their faxes down? (Kinda a noob on the IT field in general here ; don't even know if "hackers" can take a fax machine down)
I know Japan’s government passed a law recently banning floppy discs from being used by government staff. There seems to be a push to modernize at least.
Actual software developer in Japan here. I would say the biggest contributing factor to poor engineering practices is less turnover of employees. People don't realize they're making complicated messes that veer from industry standards because they don't have people coming in regularly that voice their opinions. Similarly, new developers rarely have any experience and often didn't study programming before getting their first job. In other words, projects kinda becomes a cess pool of smart people doing stuff in creatively bad ways. None of this is helped by the terrible pay and frequetly poor work culture compared to global practices.
China is almost opposite with huge personnel turnover, meaning the whole industry is like one company with different departments. The US is somewhat this way as well, but there's still more "turf" than in China.
There are software engineers in the States that have been there for years. Due to how fast tech moves, it's important to keep reading and learning as you go. Being at the same company for a decade is no free pass to become stagnant. American companies will let you go if that happens to you.
Another software developer in Japan here. Really you gotta work for a foreign company if you want to have hope of competitive pay and good work-life balance. Not surprised in the least that things are the way they are with domestic companies.
I remember the first time I came across Japanese software. It was in the late 1980s on a stunningly expensive piece of semiconductor manufacturing kit from Canon (I'll not name it). There may have been some amazing things going on under the bonnet, but the human interface was unbearable. Press one wrong key and it would go off on a tangent and maybe not come back. One key on the keyboard was marked AIDS, people were not keen to try that.
@@knm080xg12r6j991jhgt I was thinking of making a security controller along that concept, all the keys were to be wired in parallel, connected to a latching relay driving a 120+dB siren.
This doesn't suprise me at all. Have you visited many japanese websites? their coding/navigation is horrible. They just think differently and it shows up in their coding.
@@markdsm-5157 that’s not becuase of coding but rather its because Japanese want all their information to be easily accessible. Not like in the western where stuff gets buried under layers and layers of Javascript. There was even a video about it
In the 1980’s my company received some Japanese software to control an aluminum smelter. Roughly 1045 FORTRAN files, each one had only one FORTRAN function! Linking was a nightmare. Clearly they had a large team and split the problem up. Clearly not all modules were written to the same spec, as it evolved over time. So we reverse engineered it and wrote a new version in Pascal that was a lot more reliable.
I was toured JPL's Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, Calif, USA at an open house(this s where the public was invited to tour their facilities) years ago, and I asked them what language did NASA use to control their space probes, and the answer was PASCAL. In the software business, it is best to stay to the KISS principle, ie Keep It Simple Stupid.
I used to work with both Japanese and U.S. variable frequency drives. The Japanese model had a menu diagram sheet that looked like a maze with arrows pointing everywhere. There was no consistency. The U.S. one had a very simple to understand hierarchical order that was easy to use. They Japanese version simply had no care or regard for the user interface.
Then today's 'Murican Teslas requires to go to menus to find where is Air Con adjustment or other nonsense when previously you had easily located own physical button to use.
I suspect for much the same reason as it is in Germany: 1. Old business owners and managers who cannot imagine paying good wages for good developers 2. Adherence to antiquated frameworks and rules 3. The usual corporate mess that leaves developers without the agency to make critical decisions (which reinforces point 2) 4. Reliance on unmaintainable legacy codebases
If you do not understand culture and how it developed it is hard to understand Japan or Germany. I recommending reading Peter Zeihan to get a 50000 feet view of it.
Germany literally has SUSE + some German states are keeping up with modern software standards, even going so far as to mandate usage of Linux for office work.
@@Art-is-craft You mean the Peter Zeihan who has been predicting the collapse of China every year for the last 20 years? Yeah I will be sure to listen to that Stratfor/CIA stooge.
ICT is not productive, that's why both Japan and Germany haven't developed a software sector, and that's a good thing, read Gordon's book the rise and fall of american growth.
Because a train driver is paid 120k per year and a software developer is 60k per year. Because English is crucial these days for software development. Because if someone in Japan can speak English and develop they might as well work for an American or European firm.
@@RicardoSantos-oz3uj trains in Japan are accurate to the second. You can basically close your eyes and step through at expected time. When I was there I never saw a train more than a few seconds late. I think they value that quite a lot.
It's weird because I used to work for a major Japanese equipment manufacturer, and they have pretty good in-house software developers. we had a guy who doesn't speak much English, visited one of our clients and listened to the whole conversation in English. He took about 20 minutes and in front of us wrote the logic for the software and explained if that's what the client wanted? Then when he developed the software, which was an automation add-on to the main operations software, it worked like a charm, our client was so happy with him. And even at the point of delivering the equipment, they did not send any of the mechanical or electrical engineers to do the machine installation, they sent this guy. At the date of installation, he found bugs and solved them on the spot, even added in new features when the client asked despite the machine having already been delivered. Dude was a Genius. I've since left the company, but i last heard the machine was still running great and software was still fine. I guess as what others had said, not many companies appreciate software developers in Japan. But let's hope they have since made significant changes in this new era.
Same here. Working for manufacturers pays good and treats good. One sad fact is that the engineers here are aging faster than other software industries, probably due to younger generations avoiding working with factories.
@@paulstubbs7678 From a company stand point that is totally not the way to do it 😊 I mean you are supposed to have at least a team so one person does not become irreplaceable. If that one person is gone for some reason, the company is fucked.
18:02 I think i-mode failed internationally because Japan used CDMA-based cellular networks so EVERYTHING had to use Qualcomm chips. Sprint was the only American carrier that really supported i-mode tech, since Verizon is weird and super stingy about what they allow on their network. Also every piece of Japanese electronics produced in the early 2000s were white/silver, before the iPod was a thing. But man it just goes to show with how fast tech evolves, i-mode was made obsolete within 5 years.
the marketing was also horrible i saw an ad for it once but i had no idea what it was supposed to do. if i knew what it was i would have tried it since it was awesome . but it was just some strange cryptic catchphrases .
We mustn't break the narrative that the USA is great at everything and never steals, and doesn't pull dirty tricks on ‘allied’ countries. And that this is the main reason why they lost out to the yellow fear of Uncle Sam, bad software vs excellent American made software like Microsoft ones :)
I mode was docomo. They did not use cdma. KDDI was the Qualcomm cdma house. Imode was first build on pcs, the Japanese 2g cellular standard. 3G was wcdma. AFAIK as 3G was developed by docomo it superseded imode. BTW, Garakei (Japanese feature phones) came in many colours and shapes. I had grey, blue and black. Pink , red were also common.
Only au/kddi used CDMA. DoCoMo and J-Phone/Vodaphone/Softbank used the same WCDMA standard as in the west. But I-mode wasn't a hardware thing, it was a software platform. In Europe it was implemented on standard Nokia phones. It was basically WAP on steroids, and more about the services delivered over it than the software itself.
Please do more on software and web development in asia, it's such an undocumented and recorded area to those of us in the west and it goes far in explaining some of the issues we're seeing today.
Especially China, because they seem to have some of the biggest and most successful software companies (Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance). They were on par with American big tech until CCP decided to weaken their influence
It’s ironic that one agile software development method kalled Kanban was based on the Toyota assembly line - but I heard when Toyota’s software department were doing poorly they brought in external consultants and were unfamiliar with the concept - they operated on what in software was considered ancient principles
Interesting. Last I heard Toyota had hired Joe Justice to help them make the transition to EVs, so it seems likely they are well on the way to correcting this now.
I'm a Filipino, working as a software engineer and making around $2500 per month after taxes. Imagine my surprise that similar jobs in Japan pays just as much... IN A FIRST WORLD COUNTRY!? They really don't pay their software engineers well.
Many Japanese companies IT department are run by old man who don't have any IT qualification. They are in that position because of their seniority and not because of their qualification. Many old man in manager position is in that position due to their closeness to the previous top management. In Japanese companies, as long as you maintain good relation with your managers, you will be promoted when there is manager position opening. Japanese companies also have the Ringgi system where all the managers need to agree in order to carry out any important changes. Office politics may cause one manager to block another manager's project.
@@kenyup7936we’ll see when we can test the Harmony OS. My Huawei p30 pro works like a charm, switched from iPhone7. Chinese are much more adaptable that Japanese, it might influence how things go. Have a friend that works at Volvo/Geely in China and he loved the efficiency. Japan has a lot more ”soft power” than China but that is not important for building industry.
@@kenyup7936 it depends as China is becoming a technocracy, old Chinese managers are often old bureaucrats with at least a degree or qualification in something; of course these degrees could be bought & having relationships help a lot, but it can be assumed that they know what their employees are doing on the other hand, most Chinese software company are relatively young, so any management they have are either relatively young (middle age men), or old men technocrats already in the IT field
I worked at the largest ISV in Japan in the early 90s, called Justsystems. The created the Atok input system and office products similar to Microsoft Office. Microsoft's entry into the market, especially Japanese versions of Office, combined with some poor business decisions doomed the company. It does still exist, but it is a shadow of what it once was.
"30 million yen to migrate to hardened linux, hire programming, networking and scripting specialists and bolster security? Make a foundation that'll work for 30 years? That's nonsense. Why would we spend that much money just so a few NERDS can play with computers all day? Our systems might be 20 years old but they still work! That Windows Embedded 2002 thing still has a few years left in it!" 2 weeks later: "WHAT? WE GOT ATTACKED WITH RANSOMWARE? ALL DATA GONE? WHERE ARE THE BACKUPS? WHAT?! I TOLD YOU IT WAS 'TOO MUCH MONEY'?! DON'T PIN THIS ON ME! 40 HOURS UNPAID OVERTIME TO FIX IT AND ANOTHER 40 HOURS FOR DARING TO BLAME ME!"
yeah no matter which country, the higher ups always get away while putting the guilt on the engineers/employees, just look at what happened in wall street: "Why didn't you question me when i gave you this direct order that lead to our company losing big money!" "I did, you told me to do it anyway" "Why didn't you ask me again? Well it's still your fault, you are fired and our firm is going to sue you" Yeah, that actually happened, and yes the court still somehow found the employee guilty as well...and the higher up in question is still working at the firm...
@@maxmustermann-zx9yq I found this to be true with a Mitsubishi Electric plant in Japan. One two people had Internet connections out of 600 employees. Everyone else was cut off.
😅Japanese propaganda from Nonsense TH-camrs. Japan is officially the most technologically advanced nation on earth. WHO IS THIS GUY EVEN WHO UPLOADED THIS VIDEO? Seriously youtube isn’t the REALITY.
I have a friend who moved to Japan and started a family there. We studied CS together, then he switched to Japanese, and in Japan he became a language teacher. For a short time he switched to a software job where he had a terrible manager and just bad office culture in general, and then basically the entire department got cut. So he went back to teaching languages, and people appreciate him.
@@philmulholland9378 A bad team will ruin the production no matter how good you are, if by chance you have worked in the classic Asian high intense software company in Asia where every programmer is playing political games, you'll understand. I've been through that, but luckily I found my current company which actually appreciates me.
@@philmulholland9378 ... nobody can deliver working software. If that was possible, Enshittification wouldn't be a trending buzzword. "Oh, apple can", "yeah, if apple lets you do the thing you want to do... try installing dosbox or a third party wifi scanner or *any scripting language* by name and get back to me on that one, and my alpicool fridge app is still going to be broken on iOS newer than version FIVE."
@@philmulholland9378 I think that's just the thing - you make 4x to 8x as a developer in countries that care about software and IT effectiveness. But Japan uniquely enjoys kicking fax machines and struggling through HTML if it means they can simultaneously take the baseball bat to the IT department.
One prescription for the Japanese software industry is to remove the middleman and raise salaries. Bloomberg did an article in 2021 on Masaru Tange, a CEO of a software testing firm who did just that. "CEO Behind 5,300% Stock Gain Says Secret Is Raising Salaries"
Why US is so ahead in software because the tech giants realize oh ya we just paid the developer a bit more money we make even more money than before. Like we get paid well here but still nothing compare to like the actual higher ups but its good enough to motivate us to do much better already and not like the higher up make less money. They make more because whole company is making more.
@@RexZShadow yeah well enjoy while it lasts softwarecel. Your CEO os tired of paying you 100 grand for wiping an office chair with your ass Business owners are the ones literally throwing money at ai companids in the hopes they can develop a programmer. You will be replaced first Software engineers weee the biggest cash sink of all workers
@@gimei-chan theoretically higher salaries increases the pool of workers in a trade and increases competition. Which usually leads to better product. in practice though, america is a clown-realm that doesn't follow the rules of conventional reality.
I think a strong factor in Japan’s lack of software innovation could be the Galapagos Effect, in which software gets developed to function only within the domestic Japanese market, and with their services in mind. If Japanese smartphones or keitai denwa only fully function within Japan, this leaves little to no room for marketing to foreign markets. This Galapagos Effect also means that if a foreign competitor with a product that uses a globally-accessible software were to take hold of the Japanese smartphone market, the domestic companies would not have an answer to this challenger. If Japanese customers are their only available customers, then once they switch to another mobile platform, the manufacturers are cooked. Enter the iPhone. The iPhone’s domination of Japan’s cell phone market disrupted the Galapagos software-based Japanese smartphone market significantly, as Japanese developers designing apps for Japanese consumers using iPhones or Androids are using the same sort of SDK as app developers from other countries. This gives Japanese companies no incentive to develop their own mobile software outside of transportation vehicle interfaces (cars, trucks, trains etc). Just like with German companies (which also rely heavily in the use of fax machines), Japanese companies seem to develop products with a hardware-first approach. I could be way off target in this one, though.
yea true but the iphone seemed quite bad at the time to a lot of people if you remember the era most people wanted physical buttons and most touch screens were bad .we know better now but it really wasn't very obvious at the time
I'd say their obsession with control (e.g. Nintendo blocking even TH-cam vids of gameplay of their games) resulting in they are intensely closed source and uncooperative, igoring suggestions and feedback.
@@chinesesparrows yea their takes on copyright are the worst. Nintendo rarely interacts with the fans Japanese music labels are also still refusing to upload their stuff to TH-cam while in most countries they started doing this in 2010. I heard about an old Japanese computer that had super good specs for the time. but apparently you needed a lisence to make 3rd party software for it and had a lockout chip similar to the nes. but this was a pc so it really limited the amount of 3rd party support
On top of that lots of Japanese software and websites are geo locked / geo fenced. I have a set of Japanese Bluetooth headphones with an android app that won't work because it checks in with a server in Japan, that rejects connections from outside Japan. Edit: The headphones work fine, just not the app stuff.
I had a NEC android phone before, it was so durable and well-built, screen is great for its time and waterproof. But yea, it was so slow it became useless in a year after. That was the only NEC mobile phone sold in Thailand and they went out of business after, missed opportunity, they could have done it a bit better with software and branding and they might still be around.
@@jewhunterbiden I think his comment still helps clarify the original comment, because "2000s" could mean either the "00s" of the 2000s, or it could be mean the 21st century, or heck even the 3rd millennium. 鬼塚アレクセイ's comment helps clarify that the original comment is referring only to the "00s" of the 2000s
That's why I changed my career in Japan from pure software developer to DX engineer for manufacturers. The closer to hardware the older work culture, but also the more pay and better welfare. But yes, most system integration, especially outsourced, earns slightly above double-part-timer, works 30+ hour overtime a month, and rests less than 120 days a year, if the employer obeys the law. One of my friends at so-called "black company" running borderline legally works extra 40-100 hours per month. Despite the distinctive tech otaku culture, actual number of domestic software engineers is in steep decline. Still, overall work environment is ever so slightly better than South Korea (unless you're in Korea's top five online platform companies) and far better than China or Vietnam would offer, so immigrants like me keep flowing in. However, there's a catch. Line gets even lower if a worker can't speak fluent Japanese; more than a half of foreign workers go back home in two years.
@@justadude8716 I could get any job in Korea, but any job doesn't mean a good one. Korea is heavily centralized society, economically, politically and culturally. Most fortune flows inner megacorps (chaebol) or big five platforms I mentioned; medium and small enterprises are in extremely harsh environment. Flesh-tearing competitions are in common, and many become unemployed for years to get into chaebol corporations. I disagree with wasting years for big corpo lotteries, so I prepared the second plan since I changed my major from BA to CSE. Japan, while its work culture is similar with my home country, has a few merits for me. Labor laws are stricter resulting in lower basic work hours while Korea has a lot of excuses and exceptions for software industry. I could earn more in the US, but I would be laid off whenever employer feels like it. Japanese law prevents it, and it's very huge for me as a lone immigrant. Comparative advantage was my main strategy. Competition is no problem when I can speak business-level Japanese here (earned JLPT N1 before I dropped grad school in Korea); every techie can speak English in some level. I don't have to compete for a position in NTT or LINE-Yahoo! either because there's also a chance to succeed in competent medium businesses. The size of the industry is about ten times bigger than Korea while population is only twice the South, since Japan has been one of the biggest IT hub in Asia-Pacific region, thus more opportunity. Distance from the rest of my family, cultural similarity and social security were in my considerations, too. After all, I couldn't cost my parents' savings either for chaebol preps or US immigration. Physically, legally and culturally, while not optimal, Japan was a decent place for a fresh start.
In the 2000 I imported Japanese domestic market MP3/MD players and cellphones, their proprietary software needed to transfer music was the jankiest and slowest thing I've ever used. Their phones boasted hardware specs years ahead compared to what we had in the west, yet their UI and software were a little better than some $50 flip phones from Walmart; they really aren't good at it.
Dude, you've just reminded me of when I bought my MD player in 2002 in Tokyo. I loved that little device but transferring cd to md was so slow I just kept listening to the same 5 albums for years.
Reminds me of early sony mp3 players, even the chinese junk ones had better UI, the sony ones reminds me of UI found on japanese manufacturing machines.
i live in japan and work in tech. the average salary for entry level SDE in japan is around 5-6 million yen a year with minimal growth each year. many of the most talented software engineers i know all transitioned into project management or management roles after gaining a few years of experience. being a project manager working on software development projects pays more than being a software engineer in japan. this mindset of rewarding management type roles more than the actual engineers is what will forever hold japan back
This also happens in Brazil though I wouldn't point it out as the main thing holding the Brazilian IT industry back compared to 1st world countries. That said, it is largely the main culprit for making talented software engineers and technicians to try to find better paying jobs offshore and to leave only the absolutely bottom of the barrel people behind that in many cases can barely understand concepts such as automation of repetitive tasks.
For reference, I'm a senior software engineer and I make the equivalent of more than 20,000,000 yen. It's also very common here for the starting salary of a new junior to be the equivalent of 10,000,000 - 12,000,000 yen.
An epoch making Japanese created p2p sotware I remember is winny, that was developed way earlier than bittorrent, was banned, and the developer was prosecuted and punished.
@@kenyup7936 Hard to say about China. While the programmers in China can be treated badly, but China is pretty strong in software. They have their own search engine and nationwide cashless payment and all kinds of ecommerce websites/apps. Since they censor western websites and apps, they basically need to build their own alternative for all those FAANG services.
@@kenyup7936 I don't know why youtube censor my previous comment, I basically said China is actually pretty strong in software. They have their own search engine and nationwide cashless payment and all kinds of ecommerce websites/apps. Since they censor western websites and apps, they basically need to build their own alternative for all those FAANG services.
I agree with MITI that 50 years copyright protection is too long for software. If Office 2003 were free by now maybe Microsoft would have to do something innovative to make people want their latest version.
I get that there would be a certain marketing advantage with there being a free version of old Microsoft software, but anyone looking to penny pinch to that level is already going to be using something like Google Docs, LibeOffice, or Kingsoft/WPS. I guess if you still need (old) VBA compatibility or are stuck with some ancient Access application 2003 still wins but otherwise I think modern alternatives have it beat. I doubt Outlook 2003 even connects to Exchange anymore, and you probably don't want to use it as a regular email client. As much as people bag on how stale Thunderbird is, even that is more modern.
No thanks. Word and excel needs no new inventions. It just needs to work and not be overwhelmingly complicated and packed with useless features no one likes.
As someone who currently runs an M365 shop and has been administering office for the last 25 years.....nah guy. Nah. I mean you could say that OpenOffice has easily surpassed Office 2003, which it absolutely has....that's not really why you kit out with the whole suite though and keep it current. It's free, It's there, yet Office is still a money making whale for MS. There's a lot more in the enterprise space to a software ecosystem than just baseline functionality.
Bought a Brother multi-function printer for like $600, It is a small business level printer. The function is unbeatable for the price but the interfaces is like from late 80's style. The print/scan app for Mac is 90's style and very lack of functionality for the price point.
That's a lot of comments...here is my 10 cents worth: Japan's hierarchical power structure is typified by the "team must meet the deadline" attitude of business managers. Of course, these deadlines are often arbitrary or based on competition between managers for promotion, and are simply abusive dictates that often have nothing to do with quality, profitability, or innovation. Any creative individual solutions to "assigned tasks" are destroyed before they can see fruition since the "group think" of the office team, in its unquestioning deadline goal in obedience to the "king" boss and his inflexible "orders", is self regulating. Any "team member" (wage slave) who dares to question the feudal authoritarian system in Japan is quietly ostracized...which is how most foreigners from egalitarian Western cultural backgrounds soon feel. Soon you will find your desk has been moved closest to the toilet! This is also why Japan's economic success is based on the exploitation of its own workers who must rely on reverse engineered Western technology and intellectual property.
That was deep I literally imagined myself having a great idea, being humiliated by management and getting moved to the desk next to the toilet This is literally standard protocol for me in workplaces
"Moved closer to the toilet" sounds like an advantage as they seem to excel in giving their workers the shits. On a side note, when I go camping, my wife insists on a site close to the amenities, lest she gets a 'late night call'
Moonshell was probably one of the greatest pieces of Homebrew ever created. Not only was it all written in Nintendo embedded C++, it supported ACII, UTF-8, UTF-16, and the old Windows ISO text formats. It distinguished between Unix and Windows carriage returns. It supported practically every MIDI format and every popular audio format (wav, mp3, ogg, etc.). It could play a special sized version of MPEG-2, and it also supported lots of image formats. I believe it also originally shipped with its own FAT driver to read files before a public FAT library was created, and long before libNDS. It was so good, the author made a rewrite Moonshell2 with all the new standard libs which was even better and extended the UI quite a bit with little mini apps that you could play with or add more to. It was almost a functional OS. The author was Japanese and he used to sometimes host the files on his own home network. I think his username was Moonlight. He disappeared into the shadows after his final Moonshell2 update. Sometimes I wonder where he is and how he's doing.
Competitive software development and innovation thrives in a much more individualistic culture. This could be the key factor the state of this industry in Japan (and most East Asian countries) considering their specific family traditions/relations that extend to how the work environment and corporate culture has evolved.
Except the two other East Asian countries, China and Korea, are doing really well in software, with China being second only to the US producing giants like Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance/TikTok and Korea, to a lesser extent, with Samsung and Kakao (which is currently resisting the Japanese government’s attempt at forcing it to sell Line to a Japanese company). Japan is just arrogant and clinging on to a time where they used to dominate. They still stubbornly use fax machines and retro tech made by Sony, Sharp, Panasonic because they refuse to accept the fact that they got dusted by their neighbors in emerging technologies. All they have left are cars now.
I know, man! That's what I was gonna say! They need to go back to that one! Their current logo is more sterile than a castrated bull dumped in a vat of bleach.
I'm actually surprised to hear that Japan, of all places, lagged behind in programming. I realize that's slightly stereotypical, and it makes more sense after hearing the reasons behind it. But given the meticulous attention to detail and memorization required to be a good programmer, one would think the Japanese tech community would have had a golden era of independent hobby projects spilling into the commercial market, similar to the PC revolution in the United States. On the flipside, Japan and America did the opposite with their auto markets. America's auto industry is overpriced with terrible quality control. Japan's been killing it with automobiles since the 1980s -- Toyota is literally the Microsoft of all-terrain vehicles. Again, interesting how different cultures evolve.
in the case of software its just that if you are not first don't bother you can have the best operating system in the world but its never going to be as popular as windows
@@belstar1128 I'd argue that there isn't really any OS better than Windows or Mac OS All the variations of linux have some fuckery to them that makes it a pain in the ass for the average user to want to use them Your point is still correct but it made me think of that.
@@dootthedooterI would argue there's no better OS than Linux. Proof of this is that most servers run on Linux, and pretty much anywhere where you want a reliable system you would use Linux. Even developers using Windows use small virtual Linux environments for development because it's just designed better. The difference is the efforts on Linux are not on the Desktop side, so unlike windows or apple that have poured billions of dollars into user interfaces and design, on Linux you got maybe a couple thousands dollars a year of investment by small groups, and a bunch of enthusiasts keeping the desktop going. The Linux OS is there, it's well designed and reliable, there's just not been much effort for the desktop too have an stellar user experience. All it would need is some investment on the desktop side to become great. Well that an increased interest from application developers
@@dootthedooter You're right, if you're referring to user-friendliness. Unix/Linux as server operating systems are best of class. I personally spent years trying to live with a Linux desktop, but it required a lot of compromises, and when I got a Mac, I was blown away by the smooth UI and integration with BSD. Now I keep a Linux box as a file server and for some legacy uses, but otherwise, the Mac does everything. Whoever decided to integrate BSD (Mr. Jobs, I assume) really made the right decision.
@@VictorRodriguez-zp2do Then I'd argue a difference in perspective lol. For average users, windows is good and they don't need more than that. For more advanced users like devs and engineers, linux is more comfortable to work with (probably, idk, I'm just an average user lol). That said, linux isn't bad if you get used to it.
Japanese society only has two phases: Everlasting stagnation and rapid progress. You see this factor in every aspect of Japanese society from economy, social development and military. You could see a modern day Japanese office still use fax machine to send documents because that’s how their grandparents does it and maybe the next time you come back they already invented a supercomputer to handle all information in and out.
@@ebx100 To be fair, faxing conveniently combines scanning, sending, downloading, and printing, without the delays of snail mail. They are only beaten by purely digital, non-phyiscal transfers.
Fax machines occupy a very interesting legal grey space. I work in finance and there is usually ALWAYS a fax machine somewhere for legal purposes. Fax machines are tied to land lines. Land lines are attached to addresses. Faxing a signature is unmatached from a machine standpoint. Even safer than a phone call now a days due to AI.
I was watching some Japanese TV few days ago at my aunt's house. It was one of those educational / random facts show, and one of the things they mentioned was Digitalization in Japan causing negative impact to their economy. They said the reason for it was that Japan rely on software services from overseas that a lot of money goes out from Japan (Amazon, Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, etc.) Pretty interesting topic.
Yeah, Yamaha also created a quite decent competitor to MP3, VQF, TwinVQ, which was FPU dependent and made heavy use of Real Point Maths to encode which resulted in much smaller files with the same or better quality than MP3. The files at 92Kbps were as good as MP3 at 164Kbps. As such my music collection was back then converted to VQF (which took over a week to do on a P3 500Mhz), but that granted me about 1 week non stop audio capacity on a single CD. So yeah, it did have its advantages. Decoding was also not that bad CPU usage wise, but again relied heavily on Floating Point Maths and could not due to the format nature, use MMX as those are integer based functions. It relied heavily on floating point high precision. I miss it and do not miss having to convert back to MP3 (well never actually did, my collection ended lost long ago)
If FANUC is an example of Japanese software I can tell you the concept of general purpose computing seems to elude them. Even in the late 1990's FANUC confused the BIOS with the operating system. Horrible systems software from the point of view of the operator.
Whenever I hear "Japanese software" I think of the Fujitsu Horizon scandal, here in the UK. It's been a big news story for the last couple of years, but it was going on long before that. The Post Office bought some really dodgy accountancy software from Fujitsu. The sensible thing to do would have been to ditch the software for a working alternative. Instead they started blaming the glitches on dishonest employees, and prosecuting them for fraud, theft, etc. None of the victims were told it was a widespread thing. There were thousands of them, some accused of stealing tens of thousands of pounds. They lost their jobs, some of their marriages broke down, a few committed suicide, etc. But eventually they reached a critical mass, and they started talking to each other and clubbing together to get proper legal representation. Then the Post Office had to admit they'd been lying about it for years. Some of the victims never lived to see their names cleared. Last I remember many were still waiting for compensation. It's been described as the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history.
I worked for several American companies that were hired to write the operational software for Japanese industrial equipment. The Japanese software developers were fine when the protocols, models, processes, and user interactions were well-defined, but tended to be very uncomfortable when things departed from their industry experience. I developed tremendous respect for the Japanese project managers responsible for dealing with the US software and application engineers. The constant gaze of their business management was exhausting.
Thank you; this is a very interesting video. I’m not a developer myself, but I launched a SaaS in Japan, Ship&co. I spent months negotiating access to non-public APIs from all major shipping carriers in Japan (the black cat and others), and it was possible. Things take time; the APIs aren’t perfect, but they work. There are some excellent developers in Japan, both Japanese and foreigners. It’s a shame that very few Japanese-made software solutions are exported or work outside Japan. It’s also a bit disappointing to see some foreigners here taking a negative stance (as seen in the comments below). If you think fax machines and software here aren’t great, create something different-there are tons of opportunities. I started Ship&co because nothing like it existed here. After a few years and with many large and small Japanese businesses using our app, we still don’t have serious competitors. NTT Data created something somewhat similar with a different model, but we’ve proven that we can offer high-quality software to major companies here in Japan. More and more businesses here are open to using APIs. Go build something-you might create a service that succeeds in Japan and beyond.
Because software developers in purely Japanese companies are treated like dishwashers or construction site workers. Strict rules of everything, no chance to participate in the technical decision-making, managers with no technical experience have superpower over engineers, very strict hierarchy. No way to grow professionally, no room for creativity, no way to share your feedback, no freedom of decision making. In such conditions, it's not possible to grow in your skills and follow the extra high speed IT field evolution. Of course I'm extrapolating, but I'm summing up my own experience of working in Japan and the experience of others. Surely, there are good companies with good management. But the majority are weird in terms of software engineering processes management.
Speaking as an American who has worked in construction, I think you underestimate how much room there is for ordinary workers to participate in decision-making in this field.
I worked at Fujitsu as part of their Worldwide System LSI Team, which was meant to bind their chip making software and methodology. I found their over-compartmentalization and Verilog parser guy: hired to parse Verilog, retired as such, and no one new how his software worked. A manager had his team arrayed in front of his desk in a 2x5 pattern, then arrayed down the hall, then arrayed up and down the floors. No worker would speak if a manager of theirs was in the room.
Japanese software industry has been dominated by outsourcing companies who keep Japanese programmer's wages and working conditions bad. The reason why outsourcing companies are so prevalent in Japan is that companies cannot hire software developers thanks to strict employment protection legislations and life-time employment customs.
@@electron6825 It means you're being expected to work for a single company throughout your life and switching jobs is frowned upon generally(tho some new companies MIGHT be more open)
Strangely when it comes to gaming (which is a type of software) Japan has a bunch of famous companies like: Capcom, From Software, Nintendo, Bandai, Konami, Square Enix, Sony Playstation.
Games are almost always greenfield software. There are no stupid business requirements made up by people who don't understand software, there are no ancient systems that need to be integrated with, and game programming doesn't require the complicated abstractions that information systems do. For example if you're building an ecommerce system you need robust abstractions for things like idempotent payments, error recovery, auditability, etc. and your code needs to be set up in such a way that it can be tested in isolation. For example, if you use Paypal, you need to have a way to run automated tests on your code without needing real Paypal accounts to send money back and forth with.
Because Japan as whole is bogged down in low-wage bureaucracy. Only those who are passionate innovate, but they can get paid the sane to do much less creative work or just leave Japan.
Ot the software that runs the hardware in a TV. Sony's software in there TV's are easy to understand without reading the manual. The symbols on the remote is easy to understand without reading the manual. Sony Playstation is another example of use without reading.
yea but the thing with video games is that there is always demand for more .but with non video game software its not .not a lot of people want to use a new spreadsheet or video editor every month they just want to use what works even if its not the best
I think if one were to consider the economic value chain, Japan became entrenched in hardware while the U.S. moved along to software and outsourced hardware. For decades, the Japanese industrial approach to solving problems in computing was fundamentally a hardware first one, with wildly powerful and highly customized hardware being the focus. The major industrial giants who played in the computing space all were focused on hardware and hardware design. But the line between hardware and software isn't very clear, and software has a way of eating custom hardware. It's also cheaper to develop, infinitely replicable for no cost, and can get legs into downmarket parts of the supply chain because the up front costs to get into software are fractions of what it takes to get into hardware. In the U.S. and to much of an extent Europe, they got out of hardware as fast as possible, but Japan had so much sunk cost in it they never really made the full pivot. In hardware land, software is also often necessary, but it's a cost center to the development of the product. In software land, it (and the services needed to maintain and customize it) are the product. Once you set up global compatible hardware standards, it's a race to commoditize it and eventually hardware becomes the cost center. It becomes infrastructure needed to host the hardware in the way sewage systems host bathrooms.
In the 2000s, Japan had several large web services that were popular nationally. MIXI for example. These products really focused on keeping the services as Japanese only. Often refusing to offer translations, and putting up barriers for foreigners to use them. Some of the barriers were requiring a Japanese phone number to get an account, or using capta passwords that required people to type in hiragana into the prompts. Whilst American software companies set their goals to be international and universal. There could have been an alternative universe where everyone in the world is using LINE for web-calls. But they have chosen to keep the doors shut.
I remember reading years ago that Japan's cybersecurity minister was a gentleman who wasn't ashamed of not even knowing how to turn on a computer! People said I was exaggerating, that he had a great team and that his job was to coordinate that team so they could get the job done. I laugh about it a lot to this day. The 'boss' knows the least of everyone, he's in the highest position and completely at the mercy of the information that's passed on to him!
Not only that, but his underlings are completely deferential to his decision making process because not doing so makes one lose face. That's a recipe for disaster unless the person in charge is really, almost supernaturally, insightful about leadership.
One problem in Europe, at least here in Finland, is that all innovative companies get sold to big American tech (sometimes China, Tencent) when they show commercial promise. It's not the lack of innovation or quality, it's that everything gets acquired by big foreign companies. I find it sad. All that education, brainpower, sold for few million dollars that do not benefit us collectively. Sure it makes the founders millionaires, but so what.
same thing in croatia, and probably all over the world. that's how they stay in power, buy everything and sit on it. the media here celebrates when a company gets sold which makes no sense.
@@_Love_And_PeaceLinux is opensource and economicly speaking collective Property and so cannot be "owned" itself, so it can not fall victim to capitalism.
Why do you feel something that does not belong to you must benefit, well… let’s say it honestly… you. If you were to fulfill this desire, it would require force, or governmental compulsion, or “market regulating” laws(to sugar coat it). Now I don’t know much, but forced decisions, and compulsion, for airy purposes of “the benefit of all” do sound a lot like coveting ending in theft. You can do that so much until your society transforms into… well look at your neighbors 35 years ago.
The TRON operating system is still going strong in embedded market. It’s used in a lot of consumer products like cameras, printers and the like. Some musical instruments run on it, Roland corporation uses the micro-tron kernel in some of their products (mentioned in some product user manuals). In my experience with some Japanese made systems the UI design is often a week point, they tend to create complicated user interfaces that are not always easy to navigate and that have a more complex structure. To be fair, some western made software can have janky user interfaces too (a certain industry-standard CAD package comes to mind that still requires a command line interface to use).
CAD software is hilarious. It combines some incredibly technologically advanced features with a codebase that has parts that clearly haven't been touched since the 90s. Autocad really shows its age sometimes
@@mattymerr701 Yeah, AutoCAD is the program I was thinking of. It's software from the darkages of computing. I still have to use it on a regular basis and it sucks. AutoCAD really belongs on the software graveyard, Autodesk should have replaced it 20 years ago. The UI is so obtuse compared to modern software. The DWG format is a 40+ years of legacy piled on top of itself, they should really start with a clean slate and develop a new format build on modern graphics technology like SVG and XML instead of sticking with a graphics model from the early 80's based on pen plotters that have become obsolete a long time ago.
Silicon Valley offers excess compensation when combined with bonuses and stock plans so draws talents from all over the world. 50-75% of the engineers are from Japan, China, Taiwan, and India so the problem is more with company management and incentives than specific culture.
Software Engineer in a "modern" Japanese company in Tokyo here that actually pays pretty well and has good working conditions. I feel most of the problems lie in the management of the organisations. Often decisions take months due to lack of leadership. Managers are way too cautious in making decision in fear of making the wrong one. Inability to cut resources if needed, especially when teams are producing literally nothing. I had one team mate who was writing 200 lines of code every 3 months, knowing he won't get any consequences for the slacking. Generally, the management is mostly occupied by people who happened to be good engineers but not qualified to be a manager, which is basically a completely different job.
It is interesting that Japanese companies excel at industries where they own the whole stack. (Cameras, video games consoles, automobiles , etc). It seems that solo-software companies (those w/o an OS) like Lotus, Ashon-tate, WrodPerfect) where the apps software are just 1 part of the eco-system did not interest the Japanese companies as much. Like the aforementioned in the video, however, they would rather go for a vertical stack market like IBM did rather than how Microsoft went after the app markwt. The Japanese companies further fell behind when the software industry evolves into services (Google/Amazon/iCloud etc). I think it's the corporate culture/mentality which doesn't want to be reliant on others which stifle the software scene.
Surprised no one mentioned about language. English proficiency is atrocious here, and 99% software are written with Latin characters. Japanese always try to avoid interacting anything that don't have their language support (part of the reason why they are afraid to travel out of country; less than 20% people have passports even though its one of the strongest in the world). Any Japanese that wants to learn programming has to conquer their alphabet-phobia. Disclaimer: I've lived in Tokyo for more than a decade.
@Nerinav1985 Japanese isn't the lingua franca, nor the lingua technica of the world. Nor, in any likelihood, shall it ever be, as Japan is materially dependent upon technological imports, & as such must sell overseas to make up the gaps not filled by added value... & no one outside of Japan speaks Japanese except as a hobby.
I worked at HP for 4 years, starting in 1979. I remember one division-wide meeting where the presenter talked about a Japanese government program to leapfrog the computer market. The program's stated goal was to create an industry sea change, including a new performance metric to replace MIPS: LIPS. Yes, instead of rating in millions of instructions per second, they planned to rate their Big New Thing by "Logical Inferences per second." (Very much AI stuff.) Some of us were genuinely worried the Japanese would make all our development efforts obsolete. We'd been watching Japan putting pressure on the US auto industry; were we next? I never heard about it again. Ever. It was like it never happened. Obviously nothing came of it, but I wonder how much money was spent (if any) and how far it got (if anywhere).
Coverage of the Fifth Generation was quite prominent in the UK computing press for a time, and the UK responded by creating its own initiative: the Alvey Programme. These efforts were aimed at things like logic programming, expert systems, and artificial intelligence. As far as the Wikipedia article is concerned, it indicates that the effort largely fizzled out, at least from a commercial and industrial strategy perspective. One might say that various technologies benefited from the investment, however. Similar observations can be made about Alvey and similar efforts.
I feel perfectionists would struggle with software development. For a society like Japan where they sell 1000 page books on how to use Facebook I can see why it's hard for them to keep up with Software development.
My father worked for Mitsubishi building an oil refinery (early 2000s). They gave him a company laptop to write his reports with and two 2-inch-thick paperback books on MS Word and Excel. Lol.
it feels like the tendency for "customization" mentioned in the video is a symptom of the broader issue of perfectionism. their meticulousness and almost stubborn insistence on precise details is kinda what makes their food and service industry best in class... but it's really bad when successful software products just requires "good enough (but appealing to the broadest base)" ... and then the earlier generation's innovation becomes the next generation's dogma.
Japanese corporate structure does not allow for production of software. Many corporations use old computers and floppy disks. The Japanese development environment is isolated from the global environment. Japanese people and programmers find it hard to learn and communicate in english. When japanese recruiters came to my developing country for software engineers, they only offered 500 dollars per month with 'expenses' included, like housing. I highly doubt those amenities would be up to par. In my country a good software engineer could earn about 2200 dollars monthly. They were hiring for big and legitimate companies though. Those companies paid the recruiters 20000-80000 dollars per worker that they hired. Naturally they were laughed out.
Great video. Have you ever considered doing a series on I-mode? For a while, it was the best way to get information with a cell phone, I believe it was an NTT platform? It was hilarious that Japan was once considered a great place to get technology, and mobile devices.
Love and agree with the handsome comment. Secondly and more importantly thanks so much for the various topics you bring us across all the possible fields, seriously for years now there is quite literally no one else on TH-cam that I will drop everything I am doing to instantly consume a video, adore all the research efforts and work you put into these.
Creo que el principal problema aparte que el boom de las pc y del software coincidió con su crisis económica, es que Japón siempre ha sido muy cerrada en cuanto a importación de talentos y para muchos programadores del mundo les era más fácil inmigrar a los EEUU. Recordar que el desarrollo del software en los EEUU se debe en gran medida a la inmigración de los mejores programadores y emprendedores del mundo, siendo el factor idioma un gran determinante.
I think there’s no point to focus on Japan’s weak software industry. Every country has a weak software industry compared to the US. The right question to ask is how does US become so strong in software that it monopolizes the world. There used to be Business Objects in France but it got bought by SAP. Germany has SAP that was strong in the 90s but it has since become an also ran. May be you can count Siemens but that’s not a pure software play. IMHO, it’s a combination of historical development, willingness of US companies to take risk and not be afraid of using new unproven software (you did an episode on Oracle and I presume you already know how slow and buggy it was before Oracle 7), and the accidental development of major software platforms like Unix and Windows. For a software industry to prosper, you need to have developers as well as a platform for them to work on. All significant platforms (C/Unix, Windows, iOS, Android) historically are all created in the US.
yea true most of the world can't compete because in software you have to be the first to invent something. because once something is popular people aren't going to stop using it unless it becomes obsolete or the new version are ultra glitchy and bad . most of the times America was first because of its business culture. and in the early days it was just because they were richer than most countries .
US companies receive funds by daddy government, the CIA literally has a fund to "invest" in companies, no other country funds private software companies in the world, the government of the US has a policy of using software to advance in its soft power structures, other countries don't (Except China), this is why software in China is also strong, but nobody talks about that
Android was created in the States, yes, but at its core is simply Linux (developped in Finland) plus Google's services. GNU/Linux systems were developped internationally: to the Finish Linux kernel, the GNU set was added (mostly developped in the USA, though the C library has significant German contributors) and in the periphericals you'll find network code developped by Italians, printer and camera drivers developped by passionate French guys, etc. And of course in userspace lots of open source programs have been created elsewhere: Gnumeric (Mexico), KDE suite (Germany). VideoLan VLC (France), and so on. My guess is the open source development model, being collaborative by nature, lends itself to being more international as you depend less on having lots of talent in a local area to hire from
In 1995 Bill Gates stopped by our city on his way back from NYC where he announced Win95. I asked him about the Japanese TRON project possibly taking over the U.S. software market. His answer was, "We are friends with the Japanese and look forward to working with them." Uh huh. In the late 90s I received an urgent call from the manager of the Sony plant that made CDs. We rushed to the plant only to learn that it was equipped with production equipment run by Japanese PLCs. His question, made with a hopeful response was, "Can you help us convert Japanese DOS to American DOS?" Meeting over. Then in 2008 we worked on a project for Mitsubishi Electric. The person in charge was almost geriatric. He appointed an American who wasn't even close to being competent. We completed the assignment and suggested we demo to the Japan factory live. Two weeks later we were informed that we couldn't do the demo because only 2 people in the 600 person factory had access to the Internet - and they were both in senior management. To top it off, the geriatric U.S. manager suggested we use the software they had just paid for, to resell their waaay over-priced hardware in the U.S. We were stunned. Goodbye to Mitsubishi. Goodbye to Japan. They are their own worst enemy.
Another path on this topic is the contrast of how great the hardware is of Sony, Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Panasonic and more cameras designed and made in Japan. Compared to the software and UI on the same cameras that is horrible. And lack any type of real innovation. A deep dive on that topic would be interesting. A few photography TH-camrs have looked into it. Like Tony Northrup.
It's particularly notorious with Sony: glorious industrial design that puts Apple to shame, great hardware, piss poor software; result: poor value proposition.
The Japanese government has been pushing lots of tech incentives as of late and there is an increasing number of tech startups that are following more in the western style design philosophy, so I expect to see things improve at least slightly going forward. Japan has this tendency of putting things off til the last minute and then going full throttle. Their web design which has been shite for so long as recently been waaay better as of late, even rivaling western websites, so hopefully software will follow suit.
The whole Japanese Game Industry almost collapsed in the mid 2010s. They were still using outdated proprietary engines and software that was becoming harder to run with new innovations to graphics technology that western game engines had come up with. PS3 was notoriously bad to develop for when it first launched and Wii/WiiU wasn't much better. Microsoft Xbox's XNA development environment was much more friendlier and open to use by 3rd party independents. Japanese games were being left behind, looking outdated compared to Western counterparts. It wasn't until Sony and Nintendo's adoption of western game engines, mainly Unreal Engine that they started to make a comeback, but it was already to late, Microsoft had take a bigger portion of the market to make a good foothold.
Even nowadays it's like this. I have worked as an American in the Philippines for over 6 years now, and the stories I hear from employees about working for Japanese software firms is horrible. Some employees have told me that in one particular firm, they couldn't even listen to music using headphones. You are required to work in silence, no music, no talking, no cell phones (you are required to lock your phone in a locker). Fucking CRAZY!!!!
Almost all Japanese companies have the same corporate environment. Workers are expected to work long hours and leave late in the evening. These Japanese companies are being run by 70 years old conservative men.
😅Japanese propaganda from Nonsense TH-camrs. Japan is officially the most technologically advanced nation on earth. WHO IS THIS GUY EVEN WHO UPLOADED THIS VIDEO? Seriously youtube isn’t the REALITY.
@@yuzuki7531This video is about software. Who invented Pascal, C, C++, Java, Python? Who invented SQL, Oracle? Who invented the Internet, where are Google, Apple, Meta, NVidia from? Where is this official list that has Japan as number one?
@@BorisBoris-sl1sfYou’re using currently a phone using a Sony Camera sensor. Sorry to say this but america is a gypsy nation. What exactly is an American? There are many colors. Japan is ruled by Japanese only. So what? 😂🎌 we invaded the QR code, Emojis etc. without help from other ethnicities.
@@BorisBoris-sl1sf America is a gypsy nation. Japan is a one typ race. Let’s be fair. And we still make the best games where coding is required. Your phone uses sony cam sensors. Are you Chinese American? 😂🎌
Japan doesn't have a Microsoft or an Oracle, and that's probably due to the history discussed here. But Japan also doesn't have a Google, Facebook, or Netflix, and while they do have an Amazon, I've had the misfortune of seeing under the hood of its software. (Rakuten sucks, inside and out) Likely the biggest software-defined success in Japan is the IP messaging client, LINE, but even that was originally developed in South Korea, and mostly persists because it came into existence at the right time to become ubiquitous in the face of exceedingly high SMS fees, which remain common. Even then, WhatsApp is gobbling up more and more of LINE's market share every day. More to the point I'm getting at, Japan doesn't have basically *any* venture-backed software startups, certainly not to the extent that the US does. And this is where I think the biggest lag in Japan's software industry comes from. It's not that Japanese companies are too conservative to develop good software- that's actually true no matter where you go- it's that their institutional investors are too conservative to... you know... Invest. Japan famously has massive cash surpluses all over the place. Companies and financial institutions save their profits, rather than re-investing them. This is an exceedingly low-reward practice in a country with negative interest rates, but the institutional culture seems to be that the known loss to negative interest is more palatable than the potential for unknown losses if an investment doesn't pan out. So there are billions and billions of dollars that get invested into startups in the US, because interest rates are too low to make money on normal financial products, and that's why the US leads the world in software companies today. There are billions of dollars in Japan (or their trillions of yen equivalent) but no appetite to get it out of the negative-interest savings account and gamble that a software startup will work out. This is exactly why the Bank of Japan implemented negative rates in the first place: to coerce institutional investment to happen because the stagnant cash surplus isn't getting the economy anywhere. But it didn't work, because the people who control those surplus accounts are too conservative and risk-averse. My opinion, as a software engineer living in Japan, is that there's plenty of talent and appetite to develop really good software here, there's just no money. And I don't think that's going to change any time soon.
When money seems scarce and hard to get, it's hard to invest. I could see the drain on money leading people to be more scared about money, and invest less, even though it could make more money. The risk is scarier, so you hold your dwindling pennies.
software being so scalable, needs market dominating ambition to sustain the high costs to create and maintain them. it seems in Japanese culture the tech guys aren't allowed to be high status or have much ambition.
The current state of the video game industry is a tempering forge for Japanese software engineers. The tech behind From, Capcom, and Nintendo games are brilliant pieces of engineering; further, they facilitate artists' visions to produce experiences unmatches by a floundering Western industry. Let's see what those engineers do when they retire from video games and work on other products. Many of the West's most famous software engineers made games long ago.
As far as From goes I worry that their games' code bases are effectively built off of the same codebase used all the way back in Demon's Souls with some modifications... but their design team? Flawless and consistently innovative, so maybe it's not all bad news after all.
Western industry is floundering? really? The absolute triple a studios are located in America. The tech that is used is American all the way down to the chips used in the big three consoles. Western and specifically America is definitely the leader for massive productions. Not only that, but in implementing new graphics tech and developing new hardware.
@@duckpotat9818 You're delusional if you think tech from Western games haven't been great. Cyberpunk 2077 finally took RT to the next level. Alan Wake 2 introduced path tracing. And if we go indie, the lighting and physics of small games called LIMBO and Inside were phenomenal when they were first released.
I work for a very large Japanese country in Australia, doing quite bespoke software in a small team (which won't be improved when we build the new system soon as part of a larger team). I'm sure I'm being paid a lot more than they do in Japan, and I'm being paid more than I was in the Australian government, but I was in the lowest paid department in the Australian government, which was no longer using an NEC supercomputer, having long-ago migrated to Cray. In the words of Dirk Gently, everything is connected to this video.
Excellent episode. I would be very interested to learn the Chinese experience in the commercial software field. Hopefully you will make an episode on this subject 🙏
The bureaucracy also plays a part. Everything needs to go up the bureaucratic ladder in HQ for approvals. They don’t want to rock the boat and make changes. No ambition to keep up with their competitors on technology.
Worth mentioning that even as recent as mid 2010s, most Japanese companies refuse to let go of waterfall project management for software development. If you apply for a technical PM position, there's a strict must know waterfall. I even had directly asked during interviews. To be clear, nothing wrong with waterfall. But most software focused companies use agile for a reason.
The US led the information technology revolutions in the late 20th century. US companies and the government often set global technical standards, making US software products more easily accepted worldwide in the wave of globalization. The US has a highly flexible and market-oriented system of universities and research institutions. So the monopoly effect caused by first-mover advantage and the Matthew Effect are quite pronounced in the software industry.
It's almost impossible to compete in software, because you need to have big base of consumers who use your product to be able to compete. That's why software is almost exclusively dominated by USA. Only exception is China, because they closed themself as much form foreign competition as possible and they have domestic market big enough. But still Chinese software is very popular in China but almost but rarely anywhere else, and if some of thier product has possibility to outcompete American one, USA simply ban it. There's no problem in Japan itself. Japan is one of the biggest video games producer, so they know how to code. It's just Americans doing everything to keep thier dominance over software, for various reasons.
Thats wrong and naiv. There are Tons of Software projects outside of the US. The first computer (Z3) was built in Germany - it never was an 'US' thing. You can also develop Software well in a small team, its sometimes even easier due to leaner development processes in smaller companies. There isnt really "competing" in normal software development, you either have a foot in the door and have a project or not in the beginning😅. The longer your projects run well, the more and better customer relations you get, the more money you can charge - due to the time of your developers becoming more and more valuable. Game development is just a part of all software development projects. Not every software is a video game 😂
Chinese cloud computing is huge in Southeast Asia...GCash, the payment system used everywhere in Southeast Asia is Chinese, e-commerce app Lazada is Chinese, TikTok is Chinese. Even frameworks used for building other software, like Vue 3 is second only in popularity to React now, toppling Angular. Chinese software is heavily used in other parts of Asia.
I'm not convinced that "having a big base of consumers who use your product" is the main reason why it's almost impossible to compete in software. It is certainly a factor into why Japanese software isn't as competitive, but not the reason. If I were to pinpoint the main reason, it's that Japanese research and development into software and technologies such as cloud and AI has drastically lagged behind other countries. For instance, you might say that Tiktok or WeChat are successful because of protectionist Chinese policies and having a large base of consumers, but I think the greater reason is that these applications are genuinely impressive technologies with perhaps some of the best backend technologies (with Tiktok having one of the most efficient recommendation systems) in the world. And I'll extend that point to a lot of US technologies in cloud systems, like TH-cam. I don't think you can say the same about Japanese software technologies. To be clear, I'm not saying their developers are any less competent, I'm saying the research and development has lagged behind. Yes, their video games are impressive, but their backend systems don't work at nearly the same scale or efficiency as Chinese and American systems, so you end up with a slow-to-use Nintendo E-shop, terrible train ticket reservation site, and more inefficient software.
Because software developer jobs in Japan is infamous for low pay, long work-hours, and low job security. Japanese company considers software as "non-core, non-essential" or auxiliary part of their business that can be contracted out. So most software works are done by small software subcontractor house, so called "black company". Social image of software developer in Japan is perceived as poor, overworked and fatigued salary-man without girlfriend or wife, without career promotion, working overtime for small company, low on social ladder, not desirable for marriage candidate. Complete opposite of developers in USA.
Why edit?
Yummy
Yummy
"perceived as poor , overworked and fatigued salary-man without girlfriend or wife working overtime"
Accurate
You mean complete opposite of south korea ? 😂
I worked for Fujitsu Australia in the early 90s as a developer (porting IBM utilities to MSP). I also assisted in a major project for Canon. Canon flew a large team of developers to Sydney. They all dressed alike (suits), lived together, arrived at the same time every day (in a minibus), ate lunch from boxes at the same time every day. I read their code. They were rated by number of lines of code created each day. If something had to happen 5 times (say) they would not write a loop, they would copy the code 5X. The code they left behind worked, but was effectively unmaintainable.
Lines of code per day is a terrible metric. Guess they copy pasted mass production metrics to software lol
Please, tell this black American your joking on the loop and copying the code 5x part?
sounds exactly like IBM down to the metrics.
NCSL (number of
Non-Commented Source-code Lines) was a common metric for developer productivity.
I worked for Fujitsu Philippines, and I would say that this is true, and that was the worst company I've worked for in my life. (I lasted a month before resigning).
And the amount of micromanagement from stupid managers is insane.
Because Japan is a Gerontocracy.
Every government department, corporation and university is run by 60-80 yr old men who have zero interest and a huge distrust of technology !!
Plus the entire bureaucracy is still run on paper, faxes & floppy disks ☹️
Just choose cyber security and take their faxes down? (Kinda a noob on the IT field in general here ; don't even know if "hackers" can take a fax machine down)
@@blindguyaudiophileJust keep sending them all-black pages to print
and america is not?
I know Japan’s government passed a law recently banning floppy discs from being used by government staff. There seems to be a push to modernize at least.
@@itdepends604 not even close to as bad in japan, where seniority is literally everything
Actual software developer in Japan here. I would say the biggest contributing factor to poor engineering practices is less turnover of employees. People don't realize they're making complicated messes that veer from industry standards because they don't have people coming in regularly that voice their opinions. Similarly, new developers rarely have any experience and often didn't study programming before getting their first job.
In other words, projects kinda becomes a cess pool of smart people doing stuff in creatively bad ways.
None of this is helped by the terrible pay and frequetly poor work culture compared to global practices.
China is almost opposite with huge personnel turnover, meaning the whole industry is like one company with different departments. The US is somewhat this way as well, but there's still more "turf" than in China.
There are software engineers in the States that have been there for years. Due to how fast tech moves, it's important to keep reading and learning as you go.
Being at the same company for a decade is no free pass to become stagnant. American companies will let you go if that happens to you.
Another software developer in Japan here. Really you gotta work for a foreign company if you want to have hope of competitive pay and good work-life balance. Not surprised in the least that things are the way they are with domestic companies.
Hey wanna help me find a gig in Japan? I'd love to move there.
@@pkal244That’s a huge over-generalization.
I remember the first time I came across Japanese software. It was in the late 1980s on a stunningly expensive piece of semiconductor manufacturing kit from Canon (I'll not name it). There may have been some amazing things going on under the bonnet, but the human interface was unbearable. Press one wrong key and it would go off on a tangent and maybe not come back. One key on the keyboard was marked AIDS, people were not keen to try that.
"Press the Any Key to self destruct"
It had to be a photolithography stepper. Canon was king in that area in the 1980s, and they were eyewateringly expensive too
@@knm080xg12r6j991jhgt I was thinking of making a security controller along that concept, all the keys were to be wired in parallel, connected to a latching relay driving a 120+dB siren.
This doesn't suprise me at all. Have you visited many japanese websites? their coding/navigation is horrible. They just think differently and it shows up in their coding.
@@markdsm-5157 that’s not becuase of coding but rather its because Japanese want all their information to be easily accessible. Not like in the western where stuff gets buried under layers and layers of Javascript. There was even a video about it
They dumped their skill points into hardware.
In the 1980’s my company received some Japanese software to control an aluminum smelter. Roughly 1045 FORTRAN files, each one had only one FORTRAN function! Linking was a nightmare. Clearly they had a large team and split the problem up. Clearly not all modules were written to the same spec, as it evolved over time. So we reverse engineered it and wrote a new version in Pascal that was a lot more reliable.
Mark
NON ASCII Fortran ?????
Why you did that, how mad are you ?
You need coding skills !
Pascal, yuk ☹
My good people, if you would inspect the above comment for the timeframe? It says 1980. Java was not a thing.
@@acceptablecasualty5319 C was a thing, though.
I was toured JPL's Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, Calif, USA at an open house(this s where the public was invited to tour their facilities) years ago, and I asked them what language did NASA use to control their space probes, and the answer was PASCAL. In the software business, it is best to stay to the KISS principle, ie Keep It Simple Stupid.
I used to work with both Japanese and U.S. variable frequency drives. The Japanese model had a menu diagram sheet that looked like a maze with arrows pointing everywhere. There was no consistency. The U.S. one had a very simple to understand hierarchical order that was easy to use. They Japanese version simply had no care or regard for the user interface.
Have you seen the interface for Fanuc CNC? They’re clearly still living in 80s.
Then today's 'Murican Teslas requires to go to menus to find where is Air Con adjustment or other nonsense when previously you had easily located own physical button to use.
Same can be said of their websites... Stuck in the early 90s
I suspect for much the same reason as it is in Germany:
1. Old business owners and managers who cannot imagine paying good wages for good developers
2. Adherence to antiquated frameworks and rules
3. The usual corporate mess that leaves developers without the agency to make critical decisions (which reinforces point 2)
4. Reliance on unmaintainable legacy codebases
If you do not understand culture and how it developed it is hard to understand Japan or Germany. I recommending reading Peter Zeihan to get a 50000 feet view of it.
Germany literally has SUSE + some German states are keeping up with modern software standards, even going so far as to mandate usage of Linux for office work.
@@Art-is-craft You mean the Peter Zeihan who has been predicting the collapse of China every year for the last 20 years? Yeah I will be sure to listen to that Stratfor/CIA stooge.
ICT is not productive, that's why both Japan and Germany haven't developed a software sector, and that's a good thing, read Gordon's book the rise and fall of american growth.
I was also wondering if Germany was facing a similar pattern
Because a train driver is paid 120k per year and a software developer is 60k per year. Because English is crucial these days for software development. Because if someone in Japan can speak English and develop they might as well work for an American or European firm.
OK but American and European firms in Japan won’t pay you above market wage. They’ll pay you as little as they can.
Why is a train driver being paid so much? What set of skills are required to operate a break?
@@RicardoSantos-oz3uj trains in Japan are accurate to the second. You can basically close your eyes and step through at expected time. When I was there I never saw a train more than a few seconds late. I think they value that quite a lot.
You can't live in Japan on European salary.
@КириллМакеев-я1э Japan is cheaper than my European country though. I wouldn't have a problem.
It's weird because I used to work for a major Japanese equipment manufacturer, and they have pretty good in-house software developers.
we had a guy who doesn't speak much English, visited one of our clients and listened to the whole conversation in English.
He took about 20 minutes and in front of us wrote the logic for the software and explained if that's what the client wanted?
Then when he developed the software, which was an automation add-on to the main operations software, it worked like a charm, our client was so happy with him.
And even at the point of delivering the equipment, they did not send any of the mechanical or electrical engineers to do the machine installation, they sent this guy.
At the date of installation, he found bugs and solved them on the spot, even added in new features when the client asked despite the machine having already been delivered.
Dude was a Genius.
I've since left the company, but i last heard the machine was still running great and software was still fine.
I guess as what others had said, not many companies appreciate software developers in Japan. But let's hope they have since made significant changes in this new era.
That is exception, not the norm
That's the way to do it.
Same here. Working for manufacturers pays good and treats good. One sad fact is that the engineers here are aging faster than other software industries, probably due to younger generations avoiding working with factories.
unfortunately, in most cases, geniuses don't grow beyond the system that they live it. He was a gem that left to rot in a bad environment.
@@paulstubbs7678 From a company stand point that is totally not the way to do it 😊 I mean you are supposed to have at least a team so one person does not become irreplaceable. If that one person is gone for some reason, the company is fucked.
18:02 I think i-mode failed internationally because Japan used CDMA-based cellular networks so EVERYTHING had to use Qualcomm chips. Sprint was the only American carrier that really supported i-mode tech, since Verizon is weird and super stingy about what they allow on their network. Also every piece of Japanese electronics produced in the early 2000s were white/silver, before the iPod was a thing. But man it just goes to show with how fast tech evolves, i-mode was made obsolete within 5 years.
the marketing was also horrible i saw an ad for it once but i had no idea what it was supposed to do. if i knew what it was i would have tried it since it was awesome . but it was just some strange cryptic catchphrases .
We mustn't break the narrative that the USA is great at everything and never steals, and doesn't pull dirty tricks on ‘allied’ countries.
And that this is the main reason why they lost out to the yellow fear of Uncle Sam, bad software vs excellent American made software like Microsoft ones :)
I remember i-mode being a thing in Europe (at least in France) back then.
I mode was docomo. They did not use cdma. KDDI was the Qualcomm cdma house. Imode was first build on pcs, the Japanese 2g cellular standard. 3G was wcdma. AFAIK as 3G was developed by docomo it superseded imode.
BTW, Garakei (Japanese feature phones) came in many colours and shapes. I had grey, blue and black. Pink , red were also common.
Only au/kddi used CDMA. DoCoMo and J-Phone/Vodaphone/Softbank used the same WCDMA standard as in the west. But I-mode wasn't a hardware thing, it was a software platform. In Europe it was implemented on standard Nokia phones. It was basically WAP on steroids, and more about the services delivered over it than the software itself.
Please do more on software and web development in asia, it's such an undocumented and recorded area to those of us in the west and it goes far in explaining some of the issues we're seeing today.
Especially China, because they seem to have some of the biggest and most successful software companies (Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance). They were on par with American big tech until CCP decided to weaken their influence
It’s ironic that one agile software development method kalled Kanban was based on the Toyota assembly line - but I heard when Toyota’s software department were doing poorly they brought in external consultants and were unfamiliar with the concept - they operated on what in software was considered ancient principles
Interesting. Last I heard Toyota had hired Joe Justice to help them make the transition to EVs, so it seems likely they are well on the way to correcting this now.
@@alanlight7740 Yes. I should’ve mentioned the story was from maybe over 10 years ago
Kanban was originally a paper (or card) based system.
I'm a Filipino, working as a software engineer and making around $2500 per month after taxes. Imagine my surprise that similar jobs in Japan pays just as much... IN A FIRST WORLD COUNTRY!? They really don't pay their software engineers well.
They are the average devs that get paid that low, and probably 3 times better than any you ever develop in your country.
@@cesaru3619 its racist what you are saying. Im sure there is people there 10 times more talented than you (or me).
@@corsairegg DATs rayciss!
@@cesaru3619ur brown tho
@cesaru3619 where you're from has nothing to do how skilled you are. He made an observation and you went bananas over it
Many Japanese companies IT department are run by old man who don't have any IT qualification. They are in that position because of their seniority and not because of their qualification. Many old man in manager position is in that position due to their closeness to the previous top management. In Japanese companies, as long as you maintain good relation with your managers, you will be promoted when there is manager position opening. Japanese companies also have the Ringgi system where all the managers need to agree in order to carry out any important changes. Office politics may cause one manager to block another manager's project.
it's the same in China
Lol IT is nothing to do with software dummy
@@kenyup7936 Which Chinese software company is run by old men?
@@kenyup7936we’ll see when we can test the Harmony OS. My Huawei p30 pro works like a charm, switched from iPhone7. Chinese are much more adaptable that Japanese, it might influence how things go. Have a friend that works at Volvo/Geely in China and he loved the efficiency. Japan has a lot more ”soft power” than China but that is not important for building industry.
@@kenyup7936 it depends
as China is becoming a technocracy, old Chinese managers are often old bureaucrats with at least a degree or qualification in something; of course these degrees could be bought & having relationships help a lot, but it can be assumed that they know what their employees are doing
on the other hand, most Chinese software company are relatively young, so any management they have are either relatively young (middle age men), or old men technocrats already in the IT field
I worked at the largest ISV in Japan in the early 90s, called Justsystems. The created the Atok input system and office products similar to Microsoft Office. Microsoft's entry into the market, especially Japanese versions of Office, combined with some poor business decisions doomed the company. It does still exist, but it is a shadow of what it once was.
yeah I was in Tokyo in the 1990s and Windows 95 just rolled through Akihabara like the 2011 tsunami disaster videos
"30 million yen to migrate to hardened linux, hire programming, networking and scripting specialists and bolster security? Make a foundation that'll work for 30 years? That's nonsense. Why would we spend that much money just so a few NERDS can play with computers all day? Our systems might be 20 years old but they still work! That Windows Embedded 2002 thing still has a few years left in it!"
2 weeks later:
"WHAT? WE GOT ATTACKED WITH RANSOMWARE? ALL DATA GONE? WHERE ARE THE BACKUPS? WHAT?! I TOLD YOU IT WAS 'TOO MUCH MONEY'?! DON'T PIN THIS ON ME! 40 HOURS UNPAID OVERTIME TO FIX IT AND ANOTHER 40 HOURS FOR DARING TO BLAME ME!"
yeah no matter which country, the higher ups always get away while putting the guilt on the engineers/employees, just look at what happened in wall street:
"Why didn't you question me when i gave you this direct order that lead to our company losing big money!"
"I did, you told me to do it anyway"
"Why didn't you ask me again? Well it's still your fault, you are fired and our firm is going to sue you"
Yeah, that actually happened, and yes the court still somehow found the employee guilty as well...and the higher up in question is still working at the firm...
you can't get hacked if your hardware can't even connect to the internet ;)
@@maxmustermann-zx9yq I found this to be true with a Mitsubishi Electric plant in Japan. One two people had Internet connections out of 600 employees. Everyone else was cut off.
😅Japanese propaganda from
Nonsense TH-camrs. Japan is officially the most technologically advanced nation on earth. WHO IS THIS GUY EVEN WHO UPLOADED THIS VIDEO? Seriously youtube isn’t the REALITY.
@@yuzuki7531 Sorry, can't hear you over the sound of Japanese fax machines
I have a friend who moved to Japan and started a family there. We studied CS together, then he switched to Japanese, and in Japan he became a language teacher.
For a short time he switched to a software job where he had a terrible manager and just bad office culture in general, and then basically the entire department got cut. So he went back to teaching languages, and people appreciate him.
That’s dumb. He could earn 4x to 8x as a developer vs eikawa. Can he actually code ? If you can deliver working software people appreciate you.
@@philmulholland9378 A bad team will ruin the production no matter how good you are, if by chance you have worked in the classic Asian high intense software company in Asia where every programmer is playing political games, you'll understand. I've been through that, but luckily I found my current company which actually appreciates me.
@@philmulholland9378 ... nobody can deliver working software. If that was possible, Enshittification wouldn't be a trending buzzword. "Oh, apple can", "yeah, if apple lets you do the thing you want to do... try installing dosbox or a third party wifi scanner or *any scripting language* by name and get back to me on that one, and my alpicool fridge app is still going to be broken on iOS newer than version FIVE."
@@philmulholland9378 I think that's just the thing - you make 4x to 8x as a developer in countries that care about software and IT effectiveness. But Japan uniquely enjoys kicking fax machines and struggling through HTML if it means they can simultaneously take the baseball bat to the IT department.
"He switched to Japanese".
So he became a Japanese citizen, a Japanese language teacher, a lover of Japanese food, or what?
One prescription for the Japanese software industry is to remove the middleman and raise salaries. Bloomberg did an article in 2021 on Masaru Tange, a CEO of a software testing firm who did just that. "CEO Behind 5,300% Stock Gain Says Secret Is Raising Salaries"
Everywhere this problem exists, more so in US and Canada
Why US is so ahead in software because the tech giants realize oh ya we just paid the developer a bit more money we make even more money than before. Like we get paid well here but still nothing compare to like the actual higher ups but its good enough to motivate us to do much better already and not like the higher up make less money. They make more because whole company is making more.
@@RexZShadow yeah well enjoy while it lasts softwarecel.
Your CEO os tired of paying you 100 grand for wiping an office chair with your ass
Business owners are the ones literally throwing money at ai companids in the hopes they can develop a programmer.
You will be replaced first
Software engineers weee the biggest cash sink of all workers
@@RexZShadow Software developers are already paid more than they deserve in the US. Hardware engineers are not paid enough.
@@gimei-chan theoretically higher salaries increases the pool of workers in a trade and increases competition. Which usually leads to better product.
in practice though, america is a clown-realm that doesn't follow the rules of conventional reality.
I built PayPal’s original database using a pair of Hitachi storage systems. I still have nightmares about HORCM files.
nice
Hitachi Uchiha
You were a worker at paypal and dealt with musk & thiel?
@@PakistanIcecream000 just cuz he developed a back end doesn't mean he dealt with those people
Well people believed that Elon Mask built the PayPal.
I think a strong factor in Japan’s lack of software innovation could be the Galapagos Effect, in which software gets developed to function only within the domestic Japanese market, and with their services in mind. If Japanese smartphones or keitai denwa only fully function within Japan, this leaves little to no room for marketing to foreign markets. This Galapagos Effect also means that if a foreign competitor with a product that uses a globally-accessible software were to take hold of the Japanese smartphone market, the domestic companies would not have an answer to this challenger. If Japanese customers are their only available customers, then once they switch to another mobile platform, the manufacturers are cooked.
Enter the iPhone.
The iPhone’s domination of Japan’s cell phone market disrupted the Galapagos software-based Japanese smartphone market significantly, as Japanese developers designing apps for Japanese consumers using iPhones or Androids are using the same sort of SDK as app developers from other countries. This gives Japanese companies no incentive to develop their own mobile software outside of transportation vehicle interfaces (cars, trucks, trains etc). Just like with German companies (which also rely heavily in the use of fax machines), Japanese companies seem to develop products with a hardware-first approach. I could be way off target in this one, though.
yea true but the iphone seemed quite bad at the time to a lot of people if you remember the era most people wanted physical buttons and most touch screens were bad .we know better now but it really wasn't very obvious at the time
@@belstar1128 *Queue the infamous Steve Ballmer interview.
I'd say their obsession with control (e.g. Nintendo blocking even TH-cam vids of gameplay of their games) resulting in they are intensely closed source and uncooperative, igoring suggestions and feedback.
@@chinesesparrows yea their takes on copyright are the worst. Nintendo rarely interacts with the fans Japanese music labels are also still refusing to upload their stuff to TH-cam while in most countries they started doing this in 2010. I heard about an old Japanese computer that had super good specs for the time. but apparently you needed a lisence to make 3rd party software for it and had a lockout chip similar to the nes. but this was a pc so it really limited the amount of 3rd party support
On top of that lots of Japanese software and websites are geo locked / geo fenced.
I have a set of Japanese Bluetooth headphones with an android app that won't work because it checks in with a server in Japan, that rejects connections from outside Japan.
Edit: The headphones work fine, just not the app stuff.
I’ve sold NEC phone systems for years and I can confirm their software is terrible… no wonder they went out of business
Why be the salesmen everyone hates ?
You drive a Subaru ?
I think hardware companies often write shite software. They see it as just packaging. Apple would be an exception, I guess.
@@TheLucanicLordSamsung Tizen
@lewakar new here ?
I had a NEC android phone before, it was so durable and well-built, screen is great for its time and waterproof. But yea, it was so slow it became useless in a year after. That was the only NEC mobile phone sold in Thailand and they went out of business after, missed opportunity, they could have done it a bit better with software and branding and they might still be around.
Japan really has been in the 2000s since the 80s
And now still in 2000s when its almost 2025
@@鬼塚アレクセイ thank you, that is exactly what the original comment says
@@jewhunterbiden I was about the write this🤣
90s was the best.. now 2020 above is the heaven to get all fancy Japanese gadgets.. with Temu price
@@jewhunterbiden I think his comment still helps clarify the original comment, because "2000s" could mean either the "00s" of the 2000s, or it could be mean the 21st century, or heck even the 3rd millennium.
鬼塚アレクセイ's comment helps clarify that the original comment is referring only to the "00s" of the 2000s
That's why I changed my career in Japan from pure software developer to DX engineer for manufacturers. The closer to hardware the older work culture, but also the more pay and better welfare.
But yes, most system integration, especially outsourced, earns slightly above double-part-timer, works 30+ hour overtime a month, and rests less than 120 days a year, if the employer obeys the law. One of my friends at so-called "black company" running borderline legally works extra 40-100 hours per month.
Despite the distinctive tech otaku culture, actual number of domestic software engineers is in steep decline. Still, overall work environment is ever so slightly better than South Korea (unless you're in Korea's top five online platform companies) and far better than China or Vietnam would offer, so immigrants like me keep flowing in. However, there's a catch. Line gets even lower if a worker can't speak fluent Japanese; more than a half of foreign workers go back home in two years.
you get a job overseas if you can't a job at home... what reason is there to move to Japan for software work?
@@justadude8716 I could get any job in Korea, but any job doesn't mean a good one. Korea is heavily centralized society, economically, politically and culturally. Most fortune flows inner megacorps (chaebol) or big five platforms I mentioned; medium and small enterprises are in extremely harsh environment. Flesh-tearing competitions are in common, and many become unemployed for years to get into chaebol corporations. I disagree with wasting years for big corpo lotteries, so I prepared the second plan since I changed my major from BA to CSE.
Japan, while its work culture is similar with my home country, has a few merits for me. Labor laws are stricter resulting in lower basic work hours while Korea has a lot of excuses and exceptions for software industry. I could earn more in the US, but I would be laid off whenever employer feels like it. Japanese law prevents it, and it's very huge for me as a lone immigrant.
Comparative advantage was my main strategy. Competition is no problem when I can speak business-level Japanese here (earned JLPT N1 before I dropped grad school in Korea); every techie can speak English in some level. I don't have to compete for a position in NTT or LINE-Yahoo! either because there's also a chance to succeed in competent medium businesses. The size of the industry is about ten times bigger than Korea while population is only twice the South, since Japan has been one of the biggest IT hub in Asia-Pacific region, thus more opportunity. Distance from the rest of my family, cultural similarity and social security were in my considerations, too. After all, I couldn't cost my parents' savings either for chaebol preps or US immigration. Physically, legally and culturally, while not optimal, Japan was a decent place for a fresh start.
In the 2000 I imported Japanese domestic market MP3/MD players and cellphones, their proprietary software needed to transfer music was the jankiest and slowest thing I've ever used. Their phones boasted hardware specs years ahead compared to what we had in the west, yet their UI and software were a little better than some $50 flip phones from Walmart; they really aren't good at it.
Reminds me of Sony's SonicStage software
Almost all UI books are in English yet Japan has a serious problem speaking English. Maybe that's why they weren't good at UI
Dude, you've just reminded me of when I bought my MD player in 2002 in Tokyo. I loved that little device but transferring cd to md was so slow I just kept listening to the same 5 albums for years.
Reminds me of early sony mp3 players, even the chinese junk ones had better UI, the sony ones reminds me of UI found on japanese manufacturing machines.
Everyone here seems to suffer of the same PTSD 😂
i live in japan and work in tech.
the average salary for entry level SDE in japan is around 5-6 million yen a year with minimal growth each year.
many of the most talented software engineers i know all transitioned into project management or management roles after gaining a few years of experience.
being a project manager working on software development projects pays more than being a software engineer in japan.
this mindset of rewarding management type roles more than the actual engineers is what will forever hold japan back
This also happens in Brazil though I wouldn't point it out as the main thing holding the Brazilian IT industry back compared to 1st world countries. That said, it is largely the main culprit for making talented software engineers and technicians to try to find better paying jobs offshore and to leave only the absolutely bottom of the barrel people behind that in many cases can barely understand concepts such as automation of repetitive tasks.
That's already a lot more than average fresh grad salary though...
@@kappamaster7179 grad. salary should be even lower.
For reference, I'm a senior software engineer and I make the equivalent of more than 20,000,000 yen. It's also very common here for the starting salary of a new junior to be the equivalent of 10,000,000 - 12,000,000 yen.
@@hadesflames thanks for sharing. however those figures are only true for S&P500 companies in JP. If I'm wrong feel free to correct me
An epoch making Japanese created p2p sotware I remember is winny, that was developed way earlier than bittorrent, was banned, and the developer was prosecuted and punished.
You mean the software that was created after Napster and Kazaa and basically an iteration of WinMX (WinNY).
In Japan, programmers are seen as workers that implement management's ideas, they don't see the potential of programmers' creativity and innovation.
Same in China and anywhere else in Asia
@@kenyup7936 Hard to say about China. While the programmers in China can be treated badly, but China is pretty strong in software. They have their own search engine and nationwide cashless payment and all kinds of ecommerce websites/apps. Since they censor western websites and apps, they basically need to build their own alternative for all those FAANG services.
@@kenyup7936 I don't know why youtube censor my previous comment, I basically said China is actually pretty strong in software. They have their own search engine and nationwide cashless payment and all kinds of ecommerce websites/apps. Since they censor western websites and apps, they basically need to build their own alternative for all those FAANG services.
@@kenyup7936east Asian society generally seem to be very rigid.
@@SET-qe2dc exactly
I agree with MITI that 50 years copyright protection is too long for software. If Office 2003 were free by now maybe Microsoft would have to do something innovative to make people want their latest version.
There is so much after inventing the wheel.
USA USA USA
I get that there would be a certain marketing advantage with there being a free version of old Microsoft software, but anyone looking to penny pinch to that level is already going to be using something like Google Docs, LibeOffice, or Kingsoft/WPS. I guess if you still need (old) VBA compatibility or are stuck with some ancient Access application 2003 still wins but otherwise I think modern alternatives have it beat. I doubt Outlook 2003 even connects to Exchange anymore, and you probably don't want to use it as a regular email client. As much as people bag on how stale Thunderbird is, even that is more modern.
No thanks. Word and excel needs no new inventions. It just needs to work and not be overwhelmingly complicated and packed with useless features no one likes.
As someone who currently runs an M365 shop and has been administering office for the last 25 years.....nah guy. Nah. I mean you could say that OpenOffice has easily surpassed Office 2003, which it absolutely has....that's not really why you kit out with the whole suite though and keep it current. It's free, It's there, yet Office is still a money making whale for MS. There's a lot more in the enterprise space to a software ecosystem than just baseline functionality.
Bought a Brother multi-function printer for like $600, It is a small business level printer. The function is unbeatable for the price but the interfaces is like from late 80's style. The print/scan app for Mac is 90's style and very lack of functionality for the price point.
Bought a Brother MFC6390CW A3 size 17 years ago for Aus$400. Still works a charm even under W11. Few tricks to install software however.
@@davidholder3207 Given how Japanese loves past technology, I don't know why they fail to support older OS. This is same for the Mac side.
My $100 brother mfp is awesome . Software is ok, touch screen, colour display , modern display .
If them being bad at software stops them from becoming absolute dog like HP, then I'm happy for it to remain bad
Wow I was just thinking this exact same question this morning. Many thanks for the upload.
That's a lot of comments...here is my 10 cents worth: Japan's hierarchical power structure is typified by the "team must meet the deadline" attitude of business managers. Of course, these deadlines are often arbitrary or based on competition between managers for promotion, and are simply abusive dictates that often have nothing to do with quality, profitability, or innovation. Any creative individual solutions to "assigned tasks" are destroyed before they can see fruition since the "group think" of the office team, in its unquestioning deadline goal in obedience to the "king" boss and his inflexible "orders", is self regulating. Any "team member" (wage slave) who dares to question the feudal authoritarian system in Japan is quietly ostracized...which is how most foreigners from egalitarian Western cultural backgrounds soon feel. Soon you will find your desk has been moved closest to the toilet! This is also why Japan's economic success is based on the exploitation of its own workers who must rely on reverse engineered Western technology and intellectual property.
That was deep
I literally imagined myself having a great idea, being humiliated by management and getting moved to the desk next to the toilet
This is literally standard protocol for me in workplaces
"Moved closer to the toilet" sounds like an advantage as they seem to excel in giving their workers the shits.
On a side note, when I go camping, my wife insists on a site close to the amenities, lest she gets a 'late night call'
South Koreans : please, hold our Kimchi and SOJU 🍶
Boomer detected
Carlos Ghosn!!
Moonshell was probably one of the greatest pieces of Homebrew ever created. Not only was it all written in Nintendo embedded C++, it supported ACII, UTF-8, UTF-16, and the old Windows ISO text formats. It distinguished between Unix and Windows carriage returns. It supported practically every MIDI format and every popular audio format (wav, mp3, ogg, etc.). It could play a special sized version of MPEG-2, and it also supported lots of image formats. I believe it also originally shipped with its own FAT driver to read files before a public FAT library was created, and long before libNDS.
It was so good, the author made a rewrite Moonshell2 with all the new standard libs which was even better and extended the UI quite a bit with little mini apps that you could play with or add more to. It was almost a functional OS. The author was Japanese and he used to sometimes host the files on his own home network. I think his username was Moonlight.
He disappeared into the shadows after his final Moonshell2 update. Sometimes I wonder where he is and how he's doing.
Competitive software development and innovation thrives in a much more individualistic culture. This could be the key factor the state of this industry in Japan (and most East Asian countries) considering their specific family traditions/relations that extend to how the work environment and corporate culture has evolved.
Except the two other East Asian countries, China and Korea, are doing really well in software, with China being second only to the US producing giants like Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance/TikTok and Korea, to a lesser extent, with Samsung and Kakao (which is currently resisting the Japanese government’s attempt at forcing it to sell Line to a Japanese company). Japan is just arrogant and clinging on to a time where they used to dominate. They still stubbornly use fax machines and retro tech made by Sony, Sharp, Panasonic because they refuse to accept the fact that they got dusted by their neighbors in emerging technologies. All they have left are cars now.
lol @ 11:30 the 80's heavy metal Microsoft logo !!
'Heavy metal'?, I always thought it looked like a pile of ribbons, with their angle cut ends.
I know, man! That's what I was gonna say! They need to go back to that one! Their current logo is more sterile than a castrated bull dumped in a vat of bleach.
Similar to the _Iron Maiden_ or _Metallica_ logos..
@@JonnyInfiniteexactly
I'm actually surprised to hear that Japan, of all places, lagged behind in programming. I realize that's slightly stereotypical, and it makes more sense after hearing the reasons behind it.
But given the meticulous attention to detail and memorization required to be a good programmer, one would think the Japanese tech community would have had a golden era of independent hobby projects spilling into the commercial market, similar to the PC revolution in the United States.
On the flipside, Japan and America did the opposite with their auto markets. America's auto industry is overpriced with terrible quality control. Japan's been killing it with automobiles since the 1980s -- Toyota is literally the Microsoft of all-terrain vehicles.
Again, interesting how different cultures evolve.
in the case of software its just that if you are not first don't bother you can have the best operating system in the world but its never going to be as popular as windows
@@belstar1128 I'd argue that there isn't really any OS better than Windows or Mac OS
All the variations of linux have some fuckery to them that makes it a pain in the ass for the average user to want to use them
Your point is still correct but it made me think of that.
@@dootthedooterI would argue there's no better OS than Linux. Proof of this is that most servers run on Linux, and pretty much anywhere where you want a reliable system you would use Linux. Even developers using Windows use small virtual Linux environments for development because it's just designed better. The difference is the efforts on Linux are not on the Desktop side, so unlike windows or apple that have poured billions of dollars into user interfaces and design, on Linux you got maybe a couple thousands dollars a year of investment by small groups, and a bunch of enthusiasts keeping the desktop going.
The Linux OS is there, it's well designed and reliable, there's just not been much effort for the desktop too have an stellar user experience. All it would need is some investment on the desktop side to become great. Well that an increased interest from application developers
@@dootthedooter You're right, if you're referring to user-friendliness. Unix/Linux as server operating systems are best of class. I personally spent years trying to live with a Linux desktop, but it required a lot of compromises, and when I got a Mac, I was blown away by the smooth UI and integration with BSD. Now I keep a Linux box as a file server and for some legacy uses, but otherwise, the Mac does everything. Whoever decided to integrate BSD (Mr. Jobs, I assume) really made the right decision.
@@VictorRodriguez-zp2do Then I'd argue a difference in perspective lol. For average users, windows is good and they don't need more than that. For more advanced users like devs and engineers, linux is more comfortable to work with (probably, idk, I'm just an average user lol).
That said, linux isn't bad if you get used to it.
Japanese society only has two phases: Everlasting stagnation and rapid progress. You see this factor in every aspect of Japanese society from economy, social development and military.
You could see a modern day Japanese office still use fax machine to send documents because that’s how their grandparents does it and maybe the next time you come back they already invented a supercomputer to handle all information in and out.
Don't look now, but when I was in America 4 years ago, doctor offices were STILL using fax machines to send prescriptions to pharmacies.
@@ebx100 To be fair, faxing conveniently combines scanning, sending, downloading, and printing, without the delays of snail mail. They are only beaten by purely digital, non-phyiscal transfers.
yes i have fax machine used through the internet here in Japan! hang on got a fax coming through !
Haha Japanese thought us Americans were barbarians for debating people who have different opinions instead of just ignoring them.
Fax machines occupy a very interesting legal grey space.
I work in finance and there is usually ALWAYS a fax machine somewhere for legal purposes.
Fax machines are tied to land lines. Land lines are attached to addresses. Faxing a signature is unmatached from a machine standpoint.
Even safer than a phone call now a days due to AI.
I was watching some Japanese TV few days ago at my aunt's house. It was one of those educational / random facts show, and one of the things they mentioned was Digitalization in Japan causing negative impact to their economy. They said the reason for it was that Japan rely on software services from overseas that a lot of money goes out from Japan (Amazon, Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, etc.) Pretty interesting topic.
Yeah, Yamaha also created a quite decent competitor to MP3, VQF, TwinVQ, which was FPU dependent and made heavy use of Real Point Maths to encode which resulted in much smaller files with the same or better quality than MP3. The files at 92Kbps were as good as MP3 at 164Kbps. As such my music collection was back then converted to VQF (which took over a week to do on a P3 500Mhz), but that granted me about 1 week non stop audio capacity on a single CD. So yeah, it did have its advantages. Decoding was also not that bad CPU usage wise, but again relied heavily on Floating Point Maths and could not due to the format nature, use MMX as those are integer based functions. It relied heavily on floating point high precision.
I miss it and do not miss having to convert back to MP3 (well never actually did, my collection ended lost long ago)
If FANUC is an example of Japanese software I can tell you the concept of general purpose computing seems to elude them. Even in the late 1990's FANUC confused the BIOS with the operating system. Horrible systems software from the point of view of the operator.
Whenever I hear "Japanese software" I think of the Fujitsu Horizon scandal, here in the UK. It's been a big news story for the last couple of years, but it was going on long before that.
The Post Office bought some really dodgy accountancy software from Fujitsu. The sensible thing to do would have been to ditch the software for a working alternative. Instead they started blaming the glitches on dishonest employees, and prosecuting them for fraud, theft, etc. None of the victims were told it was a widespread thing. There were thousands of them, some accused of stealing tens of thousands of pounds. They lost their jobs, some of their marriages broke down, a few committed suicide, etc. But eventually they reached a critical mass, and they started talking to each other and clubbing together to get proper legal representation. Then the Post Office had to admit they'd been lying about it for years.
Some of the victims never lived to see their names cleared. Last I remember many were still waiting for compensation. It's been described as the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history.
Sounds like grounds for a gigantic class action suit.
@@ThePallidor Yes, I think that's what happened, but I didn't write it very clearly because I'm too lazy to research the details.
The brits are hilarious.
Take over half the world, yet the post office accountanting error is your "worst miscarraige of justice"
I worked for several American companies that were hired to write the operational software for Japanese industrial equipment. The Japanese software developers were fine when the protocols, models, processes, and user interactions were well-defined, but tended to be very uncomfortable when things departed from their industry experience. I developed tremendous respect for the Japanese project managers responsible for dealing with the US software and application engineers. The constant gaze of their business management was exhausting.
Make TOYOTA Tundra Great Again 😎 Scotty Kilmer
@@KamBar2020lol 😂😂😂😂
Thank you; this is a very interesting video.
I’m not a developer myself, but I launched a SaaS in Japan, Ship&co. I spent months negotiating access to non-public APIs from all major shipping carriers in Japan (the black cat and others), and it was possible. Things take time; the APIs aren’t perfect, but they work.
There are some excellent developers in Japan, both Japanese and foreigners. It’s a shame that very few Japanese-made software solutions are exported or work outside Japan. It’s also a bit disappointing to see some foreigners here taking a negative stance (as seen in the comments below). If you think fax machines and software here aren’t great, create something different-there are tons of opportunities.
I started Ship&co because nothing like it existed here. After a few years and with many large and small Japanese businesses using our app, we still don’t have serious competitors. NTT Data created something somewhat similar with a different model, but we’ve proven that we can offer high-quality software to major companies here in Japan. More and more businesses here are open to using APIs. Go build something-you might create a service that succeeds in Japan and beyond.
Because software developers in purely Japanese companies are treated like dishwashers or construction site workers. Strict rules of everything, no chance to participate in the technical decision-making, managers with no technical experience have superpower over engineers, very strict hierarchy. No way to grow professionally, no room for creativity, no way to share your feedback, no freedom of decision making. In such conditions, it's not possible to grow in your skills and follow the extra high speed IT field evolution.
Of course I'm extrapolating, but I'm summing up my own experience of working in Japan and the experience of others. Surely, there are good companies with good management. But the majority are weird in terms of software engineering processes management.
Speaking as an American who has worked in construction, I think you underestimate how much room there is for ordinary workers to participate in decision-making in this field.
@@alanlight7740he's probably talking about japanese or asian construction workers in general.
I worked at Fujitsu as part of their Worldwide System LSI Team, which was meant to bind their chip making software and methodology. I found their over-compartmentalization and Verilog parser guy: hired to parse Verilog, retired as such, and no one new how his software worked. A manager had his team arrayed in front of his desk in a 2x5 pattern, then arrayed down the hall, then arrayed up and down the floors. No worker would speak if a manager of theirs was in the room.
Didn’t know Ruby started in Japan. Pretty cool
Japanese software industry has been dominated by outsourcing companies who keep Japanese programmer's wages and working conditions bad.
The reason why outsourcing companies are so prevalent in Japan is that companies cannot hire software developers thanks to strict employment protection legislations and life-time employment customs.
I'm scared to ask, but what the hell is "lifetime employment"?
@@electron6825 It means you're being expected to work for a single company throughout your life and switching jobs is frowned upon generally(tho some new companies MIGHT be more open)
@@ashishbarthwal6961for some reason some random indian Kid is always has PhD level knowledge on Japanese culture
'Life time employment' sounds like a good idea for competent programmers, in a 'software defined' future they will be your companies 'crown jewels'.
@@maalikserebryakovnowadays anime is getting popular among teens in india
Strangely when it comes to gaming (which is a type of software) Japan has a bunch of famous companies like: Capcom, From Software, Nintendo, Bandai, Konami, Square Enix, Sony Playstation.
Games are almost always greenfield software. There are no stupid business requirements made up by people who don't understand software, there are no ancient systems that need to be integrated with, and game programming doesn't require the complicated abstractions that information systems do. For example if you're building an ecommerce system you need robust abstractions for things like idempotent payments, error recovery, auditability, etc. and your code needs to be set up in such a way that it can be tested in isolation. For example, if you use Paypal, you need to have a way to run automated tests on your code without needing real Paypal accounts to send money back and forth with.
Worked with Fujitsu / Amdahl at Higashi-Totsuka in the mid 1980s.
Because Japan as whole is bogged down in low-wage bureaucracy. Only those who are passionate innovate, but they can get paid the sane to do much less creative work or just leave Japan.
Make TOYOTA 🗾 Great Again 😎 Scotty Kilmer
I wonder what are the most popular destinations for Japanese Immigrants & which groups are the most likely to emigrate
Places with a lot of Japanese people like America and Brazil
whispering at 18:21
@@Enxuvjeshxuf I thought he had a pet deer
depends if you consider video games to be software
Ot the software that runs the hardware in a TV. Sony's software in there TV's are easy to understand without reading the manual. The symbols on the remote is easy to understand without reading the manual. Sony Playstation is another example of use without reading.
i guess it's all in comparison to amount and prevalence of western companies.
yea but the thing with video games is that there is always demand for more .but with non video game software its not .not a lot of people want to use a new spreadsheet or video editor every month they just want to use what works even if its not the best
You made this comment before watching the whole video 🙂.
Depends if it is used for production
I think if one were to consider the economic value chain, Japan became entrenched in hardware while the U.S. moved along to software and outsourced hardware. For decades, the Japanese industrial approach to solving problems in computing was fundamentally a hardware first one, with wildly powerful and highly customized hardware being the focus. The major industrial giants who played in the computing space all were focused on hardware and hardware design. But the line between hardware and software isn't very clear, and software has a way of eating custom hardware. It's also cheaper to develop, infinitely replicable for no cost, and can get legs into downmarket parts of the supply chain because the up front costs to get into software are fractions of what it takes to get into hardware. In the U.S. and to much of an extent Europe, they got out of hardware as fast as possible, but Japan had so much sunk cost in it they never really made the full pivot. In hardware land, software is also often necessary, but it's a cost center to the development of the product. In software land, it (and the services needed to maintain and customize it) are the product. Once you set up global compatible hardware standards, it's a race to commoditize it and eventually hardware becomes the cost center. It becomes infrastructure needed to host the hardware in the way sewage systems host bathrooms.
In the 2000s, Japan had several large web services that were popular nationally. MIXI for example. These products really focused on keeping the services as Japanese only. Often refusing to offer translations, and putting up barriers for foreigners to use them. Some of the barriers were requiring a Japanese phone number to get an account, or using capta passwords that required people to type in hiragana into the prompts. Whilst American software companies set their goals to be international and universal. There could have been an alternative universe where everyone in the world is using LINE for web-calls. But they have chosen to keep the doors shut.
I remember reading years ago that Japan's cybersecurity minister was a gentleman who wasn't ashamed of not even knowing how to turn on a computer! People said I was exaggerating, that he had a great team and that his job was to coordinate that team so they could get the job done. I laugh about it a lot to this day.
The 'boss' knows the least of everyone, he's in the highest position and completely at the mercy of the information that's passed on to him!
Not only that, but his underlings are completely deferential to his decision making process because not doing so makes one lose face. That's a recipe for disaster unless the person in charge is really, almost supernaturally, insightful about leadership.
One problem in Europe, at least here in Finland, is that all innovative companies get sold to big American tech (sometimes China, Tencent) when they show commercial promise. It's not the lack of innovation or quality, it's that everything gets acquired by big foreign companies. I find it sad. All that education, brainpower, sold for few million dollars that do not benefit us collectively. Sure it makes the founders millionaires, but so what.
same thing in croatia, and probably all over the world. that's how they stay in power, buy everything and sit on it.
the media here celebrates when a company gets sold which makes no sense.
It is a huge luck to the world Linux was not sold to anyone.
@@_Love_And_PeaceLinux is opensource and economicly speaking collective Property and so cannot be "owned" itself, so it can not fall victim to capitalism.
@@HksjJkdkd yes, correct. I cannot thank Linus and the community enough.
Why do you feel something that does not belong to you must benefit, well… let’s say it honestly… you. If you were to fulfill this desire, it would require force, or governmental compulsion, or “market regulating” laws(to sugar coat it). Now I don’t know much, but forced decisions, and compulsion, for airy purposes of “the benefit of all” do sound a lot like coveting ending in theft. You can do that so much until your society transforms into… well look at your neighbors 35 years ago.
The TRON operating system is still going strong in embedded market. It’s used in a lot of consumer products like cameras, printers and the like. Some musical instruments run on it, Roland corporation uses the micro-tron kernel in some of their products (mentioned in some product user manuals). In my experience with some Japanese made systems the UI design is often a week point, they tend to create complicated user interfaces that are not always easy to navigate and that have a more complex structure. To be fair, some western made software can have janky user interfaces too (a certain industry-standard CAD package comes to mind that still requires a command line interface to use).
CAD software is hilarious. It combines some incredibly technologically advanced features with a codebase that has parts that clearly haven't been touched since the 90s. Autocad really shows its age sometimes
Not to mention EDA CAD tools which all are effectively bad GUIs over bad command line programs.
@@mattymerr701 Yeah, AutoCAD is the program I was thinking of. It's software from the darkages of computing. I still have to use it on a regular basis and it sucks. AutoCAD really belongs on the software graveyard, Autodesk should have replaced it 20 years ago. The UI is so obtuse compared to modern software. The DWG format is a 40+ years of legacy piled on top of itself, they should really start with a clean slate and develop a new format build on modern graphics technology like SVG and XML instead of sticking with a graphics model from the early 80's based on pen plotters that have become obsolete a long time ago.
Silicon Valley offers excess compensation when combined with bonuses and stock plans so draws talents from all over the world. 50-75% of the engineers are from Japan, China, Taiwan, and India so the problem is more with company management and incentives than specific culture.
Software Engineer in a "modern" Japanese company in Tokyo here that actually pays pretty well and has good working conditions. I feel most of the problems lie in the management of the organisations.
Often decisions take months due to lack of leadership. Managers are way too cautious in making decision in fear of making the wrong one.
Inability to cut resources if needed, especially when teams are producing literally nothing. I had one team mate who was writing 200 lines of code every 3 months, knowing he won't get any consequences for the slacking.
Generally, the management is mostly occupied by people who happened to be good engineers but not qualified to be a manager, which is basically a completely different job.
I heard "The LAN of the rising sun"
Apparently only paper and faxes, not even wifi.
I see asianometry, i watch it
Dennis
Why you don't understand any ? Watch it as entertainment....
It is interesting that Japanese companies excel at industries where they own the whole stack. (Cameras, video games consoles, automobiles , etc). It seems that solo-software companies (those w/o an OS) like Lotus, Ashon-tate, WrodPerfect) where the apps software are just 1 part of the eco-system did not interest the Japanese companies as much. Like the aforementioned in the video, however, they would rather go for a vertical stack market like IBM did rather than how Microsoft went after the app markwt. The Japanese companies further fell behind when the software industry evolves into services (Google/Amazon/iCloud etc). I think it's the corporate culture/mentality which doesn't want to be reliant on others which stifle the software scene.
Surprised no one mentioned about language. English proficiency is atrocious here, and 99% software are written with Latin characters. Japanese always try to avoid interacting anything that don't have their language support (part of the reason why they are afraid to travel out of country; less than 20% people have passports even though its one of the strongest in the world). Any Japanese that wants to learn programming has to conquer their alphabet-phobia.
Disclaimer: I've lived in Tokyo for more than a decade.
Japan is not a copy cat 😺
Japan doesn't take short cuts.
Japan likes to take the long and lonely road to success.
@@Nerinav1985 Well it's been 40+ years. The success isn't there.
@@Nerinav1985 if you don't change direction, yiu might end up where you're heading
@@Nerinav1985An entire country with a bad case of OCD. 😮
@Nerinav1985
Japanese isn't the lingua franca, nor the lingua technica of the world. Nor, in any likelihood, shall it ever be, as Japan is materially dependent upon technological imports, & as such must sell overseas to make up the gaps not filled by added value... & no one outside of Japan speaks Japanese except as a hobby.
I worked at HP for 4 years, starting in 1979. I remember one division-wide meeting where the presenter talked about a Japanese government program to leapfrog the computer market.
The program's stated goal was to create an industry sea change, including a new performance metric to replace MIPS: LIPS. Yes, instead of rating in millions of instructions per second, they planned to rate their Big New Thing by "Logical Inferences per second." (Very much AI stuff.)
Some of us were genuinely worried the Japanese would make all our development efforts obsolete. We'd been watching Japan putting pressure on the US auto industry; were we next?
I never heard about it again. Ever. It was like it never happened. Obviously nothing came of it, but I wonder how much money was spent (if any) and how far it got (if anywhere).
Coverage of the Fifth Generation was quite prominent in the UK computing press for a time, and the UK responded by creating its own initiative: the Alvey Programme. These efforts were aimed at things like logic programming, expert systems, and artificial intelligence. As far as the Wikipedia article is concerned, it indicates that the effort largely fizzled out, at least from a commercial and industrial strategy perspective. One might say that various technologies benefited from the investment, however. Similar observations can be made about Alvey and similar efforts.
I feel perfectionists would struggle with software development. For a society like Japan where they sell 1000 page books on how to use Facebook I can see why it's hard for them to keep up with Software development.
"1000 page books on how to use Facebook " Oh my, that's meticulously, ridiculously detailed.
My father worked for Mitsubishi building an oil refinery (early 2000s). They gave him a company laptop to write his reports with and two 2-inch-thick paperback books on MS Word and Excel. Lol.
Can you please share the book "1000 pages books on how to use facebook" or is it just a statistics?
@@laviefu0630I’ve seen “how to use facebook” and “how to use whatsapp” books in Germany, too
it feels like the tendency for "customization" mentioned in the video is a symptom of the broader issue of perfectionism.
their meticulousness and almost stubborn insistence on precise details is kinda what makes their food and service industry best in class... but it's really bad when successful software products just requires "good enough (but appealing to the broadest base)" ...
and then the earlier generation's innovation becomes the next generation's dogma.
Japanese corporate structure does not allow for production of software. Many corporations use old computers and floppy disks. The Japanese development environment is isolated from the global environment. Japanese people and programmers find it hard to learn and communicate in english.
When japanese recruiters came to my developing country for software engineers, they only offered 500 dollars per month with 'expenses' included, like housing. I highly doubt those amenities would be up to par. In my country a good software engineer could earn about 2200 dollars monthly. They were hiring for big and legitimate companies though. Those companies paid the recruiters 20000-80000 dollars per worker that they hired. Naturally they were laughed out.
So even today, the fossilized working environment and hilarious salary offers persist?
One of the advanced Asian countries yet a small amount of the population speak English.
Great video. Have you ever considered doing a series on I-mode? For a while, it was the best way to get information with a cell phone, I believe it was an NTT platform? It was hilarious that Japan was once considered a great place to get technology, and mobile devices.
Love and agree with the handsome comment. Secondly and more importantly thanks so much for the various topics you bring us across all the possible fields, seriously for years now there is quite literally no one else on TH-cam that I will drop everything I am doing to instantly consume a video, adore all the research efforts and work you put into these.
Creo que el principal problema aparte que el boom de las pc y del software coincidió con su crisis económica, es que Japón siempre ha sido muy cerrada en cuanto a importación de talentos y para muchos programadores del mundo les era más fácil inmigrar a los EEUU.
Recordar que el desarrollo del software en los EEUU se debe en gran medida a la inmigración de los mejores programadores y emprendedores del mundo, siendo el factor idioma un gran determinante.
In 1994, Japan was living in 2004. In 2024, Japan is still living in 2004. Lucky people 😂
I think there’s no point to focus on Japan’s weak software industry. Every country has a weak software industry compared to the US. The right question to ask is how does US become so strong in software that it monopolizes the world. There used to be Business Objects in France but it got bought by SAP. Germany has SAP that was strong in the 90s but it has since become an also ran. May be you can count Siemens but that’s not a pure software play. IMHO, it’s a combination of historical development, willingness of US companies to take risk and not be afraid of using new unproven software (you did an episode on Oracle and I presume you already know how slow and buggy it was before Oracle 7), and the accidental development of major software platforms like Unix and Windows. For a software industry to prosper, you need to have developers as well as a platform for them to work on. All significant platforms (C/Unix, Windows, iOS, Android) historically are all created in the US.
yea true most of the world can't compete because in software you have to be the first to invent something. because once something is popular people aren't going to stop using it unless it becomes obsolete or the new version are ultra glitchy and bad . most of the times America was first because of its business culture. and in the early days it was just because they were richer than most countries .
A previous US employer of mine offshored some of their software development to Belarus.
US companies receive funds by daddy government, the CIA literally has a fund to "invest" in companies, no other country funds private software companies in the world, the government of the US has a policy of using software to advance in its soft power structures, other countries don't (Except China), this is why software in China is also strong, but nobody talks about that
Android was created in the States, yes, but at its core is simply Linux (developped in Finland) plus Google's services. GNU/Linux systems were developped internationally: to the Finish Linux kernel, the GNU set was added (mostly developped in the USA, though the C library has significant German contributors) and in the periphericals you'll find network code developped by Italians, printer and camera drivers developped by passionate French guys, etc. And of course in userspace lots of open source programs have been created elsewhere: Gnumeric (Mexico), KDE suite (Germany). VideoLan VLC (France), and so on. My guess is the open source development model, being collaborative by nature, lends itself to being more international as you depend less on having lots of talent in a local area to hire from
this is such a good channel, subbed.
Spot on analysis. 40 years later and nothing has changed
In 1995 Bill Gates stopped by our city on his way back from NYC where he announced Win95. I asked him about the Japanese TRON project possibly taking over the U.S. software market. His answer was, "We are friends with the Japanese and look forward to working with them." Uh huh.
In the late 90s I received an urgent call from the manager of the Sony plant that made CDs. We rushed to the plant only to learn that it was equipped with production equipment run by Japanese PLCs. His question, made with a hopeful response was, "Can you help us convert Japanese DOS to American DOS?" Meeting over.
Then in 2008 we worked on a project for Mitsubishi Electric. The person in charge was almost geriatric. He appointed an American who wasn't even close to being competent. We completed the assignment and suggested we demo to the Japan factory live. Two weeks later we were informed that we couldn't do the demo because only 2 people in the 600 person factory had access to the Internet - and they were both in senior management. To top it off, the geriatric U.S. manager suggested we use the software they had just paid for, to resell their waaay over-priced hardware in the U.S. We were stunned. Goodbye to Mitsubishi. Goodbye to Japan. They are their own worst enemy.
Another path on this topic is the contrast of how great the hardware is of Sony, Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Panasonic and more cameras designed and made in Japan. Compared to the software and UI on the same cameras that is horrible. And lack any type of real innovation. A deep dive on that topic would be interesting. A few photography TH-camrs have looked into it. Like Tony Northrup.
It's particularly notorious with Sony: glorious industrial design that puts Apple to shame, great hardware, piss poor software; result: poor value proposition.
Impressed by all the work put in for the historical research.
Were you saying hi to a cat or something at 18:20? :D Great video as always.
The Japanese government has been pushing lots of tech incentives as of late and there is an increasing number of tech startups that are following more in the western style design philosophy, so I expect to see things improve at least slightly going forward. Japan has this tendency of putting things off til the last minute and then going full throttle. Their web design which has been shite for so long as recently been waaay better as of late, even rivaling western websites, so hopefully software will follow suit.
The whole Japanese Game Industry almost collapsed in the mid 2010s. They were still using outdated proprietary engines and software that was becoming harder to run with new innovations to graphics technology that western game engines had come up with. PS3 was notoriously bad to develop for when it first launched and Wii/WiiU wasn't much better. Microsoft Xbox's XNA development environment was much more friendlier and open to use by 3rd party independents. Japanese games were being left behind, looking outdated compared to Western counterparts. It wasn't until Sony and Nintendo's adoption of western game engines, mainly Unreal Engine that they started to make a comeback, but it was already to late, Microsoft had take a bigger portion of the market to make a good foothold.
to the top
Even nowadays it's like this. I have worked as an American in the Philippines for over 6 years now, and the stories I hear from employees about working for Japanese software firms is horrible. Some employees have told me that in one particular firm, they couldn't even listen to music using headphones. You are required to work in silence, no music, no talking, no cell phones (you are required to lock your phone in a locker). Fucking CRAZY!!!!
Almost all Japanese companies have the same corporate environment. Workers are expected to work long hours and leave late in the evening. These Japanese companies are being run by 70 years old conservative men.
😅Japanese propaganda from
Nonsense TH-camrs. Japan is officially the most technologically advanced nation on earth. WHO IS THIS GUY EVEN WHO UPLOADED THIS VIDEO? Seriously youtube isn’t the REALITY.
@@yuzuki7531This video is about software. Who invented Pascal, C, C++, Java, Python? Who invented SQL, Oracle? Who invented the Internet, where are Google, Apple, Meta, NVidia from? Where is this official list that has Japan as number one?
@@BorisBoris-sl1sfYou’re using currently a phone using a Sony Camera sensor. Sorry to say this but america is a gypsy nation. What exactly is an American? There are many colors. Japan is ruled by Japanese only. So what? 😂🎌 we invaded the QR code, Emojis etc. without help from other ethnicities.
@@BorisBoris-sl1sf America is a gypsy nation. Japan is a one typ race. Let’s be fair. And we still make the best games where coding is required. Your phone uses sony cam sensors. Are you Chinese American? 😂🎌
This topic is very interesting precisely because it's so hard that no one tries to tackle it, thanks a lot for your insightful video!
I'm glad ruby got mentioned at the end there, it's always the first thing that comes to mind for me with respect to the Japanese software industry.
Because they don't have a garage at home.
Japan doesn't have a Microsoft or an Oracle, and that's probably due to the history discussed here. But Japan also doesn't have a Google, Facebook, or Netflix, and while they do have an Amazon, I've had the misfortune of seeing under the hood of its software. (Rakuten sucks, inside and out) Likely the biggest software-defined success in Japan is the IP messaging client, LINE, but even that was originally developed in South Korea, and mostly persists because it came into existence at the right time to become ubiquitous in the face of exceedingly high SMS fees, which remain common. Even then, WhatsApp is gobbling up more and more of LINE's market share every day.
More to the point I'm getting at, Japan doesn't have basically *any* venture-backed software startups, certainly not to the extent that the US does. And this is where I think the biggest lag in Japan's software industry comes from. It's not that Japanese companies are too conservative to develop good software- that's actually true no matter where you go- it's that their institutional investors are too conservative to... you know... Invest. Japan famously has massive cash surpluses all over the place. Companies and financial institutions save their profits, rather than re-investing them. This is an exceedingly low-reward practice in a country with negative interest rates, but the institutional culture seems to be that the known loss to negative interest is more palatable than the potential for unknown losses if an investment doesn't pan out.
So there are billions and billions of dollars that get invested into startups in the US, because interest rates are too low to make money on normal financial products, and that's why the US leads the world in software companies today. There are billions of dollars in Japan (or their trillions of yen equivalent) but no appetite to get it out of the negative-interest savings account and gamble that a software startup will work out. This is exactly why the Bank of Japan implemented negative rates in the first place: to coerce institutional investment to happen because the stagnant cash surplus isn't getting the economy anywhere. But it didn't work, because the people who control those surplus accounts are too conservative and risk-averse.
My opinion, as a software engineer living in Japan, is that there's plenty of talent and appetite to develop really good software here, there's just no money. And I don't think that's going to change any time soon.
When Japan threatened US dominance of any field,she was in trouble...
When money seems scarce and hard to get, it's hard to invest. I could see the drain on money leading people to be more scared about money, and invest less, even though it could make more money. The risk is scarier, so you hold your dwindling pennies.
software being so scalable, needs market dominating ambition to sustain the high costs to create and maintain them. it seems in Japanese culture the tech guys aren't allowed to be high status or have much ambition.
I’m pretty sure the Japanese government right now are trying to strong arm Kakao into selling Line to a Japanese company lol. Line isn’t even Japanese
I am surprised because softbank is japanese and they are the biggest investors in tech companies in the world.
The current state of the video game industry is a tempering forge for Japanese software engineers. The tech behind From, Capcom, and Nintendo games are brilliant pieces of engineering; further, they facilitate artists' visions to produce experiences unmatches by a floundering Western industry. Let's see what those engineers do when they retire from video games and work on other products. Many of the West's most famous software engineers made games long ago.
As far as From goes I worry that their games' code bases are effectively built off of the same codebase used all the way back in Demon's Souls with some modifications... but their design team? Flawless and consistently innovative, so maybe it's not all bad news after all.
Western industry is floundering? really? The absolute triple a studios are located in America. The tech that is used is American all the way down to the chips used in the big three consoles. Western and specifically America is definitely the leader for massive productions. Not only that, but in implementing new graphics tech and developing new hardware.
@@richr161 let’s just say despite all that tech Western games haven’t been great for a while
Nah, Japan does not have technical expertise that matches Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2. No game that matches RDR 2 either. You're just a weaboo.
@@duckpotat9818 You're delusional if you think tech from Western games haven't been great. Cyberpunk 2077 finally took RT to the next level. Alan Wake 2 introduced path tracing. And if we go indie, the lighting and physics of small games called LIMBO and Inside were phenomenal when they were first released.
I work for a very large Japanese country in Australia, doing quite bespoke software in a small team (which won't be improved when we build the new system soon as part of a larger team). I'm sure I'm being paid a lot more than they do in Japan, and I'm being paid more than I was in the Australian government, but I was in the lowest paid department in the Australian government, which was no longer using an NEC supercomputer, having long-ago migrated to Cray.
In the words of Dirk Gently, everything is connected to this video.
Excellent episode. I would be very interested to learn the Chinese experience in the commercial software field. Hopefully you will make an episode on this subject 🙏
Bogeyman is pronounced “boogie man”.
The bureaucracy also plays a part. Everything needs to go up the bureaucratic ladder in HQ for approvals. They don’t want to rock the boat and make changes. No ambition to keep up with their competitors on technology.
they excel in hardware and firmware, not software....
18:32 “Do you know how hard is to prove a negative” this sentence nailed it ❤❤❤
Worth mentioning that even as recent as mid 2010s, most Japanese companies refuse to let go of waterfall project management for software development. If you apply for a technical PM position, there's a strict must know waterfall. I even had directly asked during interviews.
To be clear, nothing wrong with waterfall. But most software focused companies use agile for a reason.
Many have failed to understand the importance of software.
Nintendo was successful because they sold software.
The US led the information technology revolutions in the late 20th century. US companies and the government often set global technical standards, making US software products more easily accepted worldwide in the wave of globalization. The US has a highly flexible and market-oriented system of universities and research institutions. So the monopoly effect caused by first-mover advantage and the Matthew Effect are quite pronounced in the software industry.
It's almost impossible to compete in software, because you need to have big base of consumers who use your product to be able to compete. That's why software is almost exclusively dominated by USA. Only exception is China, because they closed themself as much form foreign competition as possible and they have domestic market big enough. But still Chinese software is very popular in China but almost but rarely anywhere else, and if some of thier product has possibility to outcompete American one, USA simply ban it.
There's no problem in Japan itself. Japan is one of the biggest video games producer, so they know how to code. It's just Americans doing everything to keep thier dominance over software, for various reasons.
While US is dominating the space Japan is still way behind overall
By USA, you mean outsourced labours and codes made by third world country people.
Loved these Indian codes and everyone call it American codes🎉
Thats wrong and naiv. There are Tons of Software projects outside of the US. The first computer (Z3) was built in Germany - it never was an 'US' thing. You can also develop Software well in a small team, its sometimes even easier due to leaner development processes in smaller companies. There isnt really "competing" in normal software development, you either have a foot in the door and have a project or not in the beginning😅. The longer your projects run well, the more and better customer relations you get, the more money you can charge - due to the time of your developers becoming more and more valuable. Game development is just a part of all software development projects. Not every software is a video game 😂
Chinese cloud computing is huge in Southeast Asia...GCash, the payment system used everywhere in Southeast Asia is Chinese, e-commerce app Lazada is Chinese, TikTok is Chinese. Even frameworks used for building other software, like Vue 3 is second only in popularity to React now, toppling Angular. Chinese software is heavily used in other parts of Asia.
I'm not convinced that "having a big base of consumers who use your product" is the main reason why it's almost impossible to compete in software. It is certainly a factor into why Japanese software isn't as competitive, but not the reason. If I were to pinpoint the main reason, it's that Japanese research and development into software and technologies such as cloud and AI has drastically lagged behind other countries. For instance, you might say that Tiktok or WeChat are successful because of protectionist Chinese policies and having a large base of consumers, but I think the greater reason is that these applications are genuinely impressive technologies with perhaps some of the best backend technologies (with Tiktok having one of the most efficient recommendation systems) in the world. And I'll extend that point to a lot of US technologies in cloud systems, like TH-cam. I don't think you can say the same about Japanese software technologies. To be clear, I'm not saying their developers are any less competent, I'm saying the research and development has lagged behind. Yes, their video games are impressive, but their backend systems don't work at nearly the same scale or efficiency as Chinese and American systems, so you end up with a slow-to-use Nintendo E-shop, terrible train ticket reservation site, and more inefficient software.
I'm very impressed at the continued quality depth and breadth of these videos!! Bravo!
Excellent outro, gave me a good chuckle. "Do you know how hard it is to prove a negative?"