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Once upon a time, a Japanese megacorp was designing a new factory. The master plans for the factory were stored on a USB thumb drive owned by the Chief Engineer, who was the only person authorized to make changes to the master plan. The Chief Engineer and crew went to inspect another factory for inspiration. There was a direct flight to the city, but by corporate policy they had to use the preferred airline, requiring a transfer. The Chief Engineer didn't want to lug his heavy laptop around, so he checked it in, with the thumbdrive still plugged in. Chief Engineer and crew arrived successfully at the factory. His suitcase did not. Enquiries with the airline told them the suitcase had been shipped to the wrong place and would be returned very soon. And that was the last they or the airline ever saw of it. There was no central server, no versioning, no backups -- the plans were now gone. Fortunately, since this was a Japanese company, the plans were printed out weekly for review at the status update meeting. So the plans were manually reconstructed from paper printouts, page by page, line by line, character by character, and one of the many, many people typing it in was the friend who told me this story. Unsurprisingly, they no longer work at Megacorp. |
> the plans were printed out weekly for review at the status update meeting.
This is so quintessentially Japanese. Have a single point of failure in a rigid chain of command structure, but bake in a ton of paper redundancy. Nonetheless, I bet the lost laptop was an extremely advanced model.
In the early 2000s, my dad worked with some Japanese collaborators. They brought over some impossibly thin laptops that seemed a decade ahead of what you could get in the US at the time…and proceeded to use them to send faxes.