[tivert]

>> From what you wrote none of the factors seem to be specific to software/CS. But then Japan is quite well known when it comes to physical products. So I wonder what’s it about software the Japanese culture inhibits.

> Physical products: you are buying them for their software. That’s why you choose an iPhone over an Android phone. They’re all rectangles with screens.

> ...

> So “well known when it comes to physical products,” that may be, but all products are software products.

You're just plain wrong. Most physical products have no software, so you're not addressing the very real question (which is basically "Why does Japan produce such perfect physical products, but suck so bad at software? Why hasn't the attention to detail transferred?").

As an aside, it's actually really interesting to be how you could so wrong in this particular way. It kind of dovetails with a vague pet theory of mine that (roughly, very roughly) software engineers are sometimes so enamored with computers they can have a weird cognitive distortion where they see computers as everything (so a computer is the solution to every problem, and they're an expert at everything because everything's a computer or should be).

----

As my contribution to answering about physical products. I met a woman once, while I was traveling, who spent a couple months in Japan. She said that Japanese cosmetics are very good and relative cheap because Japanese consumers are very picky and have very high standards. Maybe the reason is Japanese consumers just have higher expectations for physical products, but someone got enured to badly designed software.

[doctorpangloss]

> You're just plain wrong... Most physical products have no software

I'm just trying to be thought provoking. I can't generalize about whole cultures, other than to say, no one culture owns excellence.

Down this thread people are talking about stuff like, I don't know, home goods, or you're talking about cosmetics.

Are cosmetics software? Well the people who sell the most cosmetics have to master digital marketing.

"Chinesium" on Amazon is mastering software. It doesn't look that way. But the reason you are choosing things on Amazon is because of fulfillment software, advertising software, logistics software, that specifically the manufacturers of those products have all mastered. They are really smart sellers. The reason you choose a particular cosmetic is due to mastery of advertising and logistics software. You will never buy a cosmetic that isn't marketed by software.

Sure there's this box of, software on hardware means the thing that draws the pictures on an LCD screen. And indeed a lot of things that don't need LCD screens end up with them, and you know what? Consumers choose them. But that inside-the-box thinking aside, anything that reaches an industrial scale where you are able to buy it in many stores in America depends on mastery of some kind of software. The best of those choices happen to master both the logistics and the end-user software, whatever that may mean.

[dartos]

> But the reason you are choosing things on Amazon is because of fulfillment software, advertising software, logistics software, that specifically the manufacturers of those products have all mastered.

Just tacking on the word “software” to other fields does not mean that the program is the selling point.

Give that same software to a mom and pop shop and they will not become Amazon.

Give it to Walmart even, and they won’t become Amazon.

Software is a tool, not a selling point.

Most people buy from Amazon because they deliver addictively fast. That is, in part, because of their logistics, but also because they are very vertically integrated.

The convenience is what makes you buy. Pretty much all their customers wouldn’t care if Amazon switch to old school paper records if their delivery times didn’t change.

[tivert]

> I'm just trying to be thought provoking.

Being obviously wrong is probably not the way to do that.

> Down this thread people are talking about stuff like, I don't know, home goods, or you're talking about cosmetics.

It's all kinds of products. I have a Zojirushi travel mug and coffee maker that are both ridiculously well made and designed. The travel mug keeps things hot, never leaks and has a spring tensioned juuust right to fling the lid open and lock it behind a stop without bouncing back. The coffee maker has an unusual design that makes it very easy to clean. I've been using both daily for going on ten years. Japanese stationary is very good. Until recently, a Japanese company made the best chalk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagoromo_Fulltouch_Chalk). Back in the day, Sony CRT TVs were the best you could get. That's just the stuff I have personal experience to rattle on about without doing any research.

Japan has a longstanding reputation for producing very high quality products, which you don't seem to be very aware of. I'm kind of wondering if you're trying to make a point when you don't actually know anything about the topic.

> The reason you choose a particular cosmetic is due to mastery of advertising and logistics software. You will never buy a cosmetic that isn't marketed by software.

Like you're trying really, unusually hard to miss the point and reach to pull the discussion back to software. Again, I find that really interesting. At this point, are you just digging in your heels or is something else going on?

And the woman I met wasn't seeking out Japanese cosmetics because of marketing software, for the obvious reason that she was visitor buying things marketed to a domestic audience.

[nuancebydefault]

I don't think he's plain wrong. Almost any non-living product is born out of software. If Japanese products are good, the software taking care of developing, manufacturing, marketing, selling, transporting, maintaining, rma'ing the product must be good.

[neuralRiot]

I might sound unbelievable for our fast-paced world of the west but there are centuries old shops in japan that still manufacture the same products with the same methods, not only in Japan but in various parts of the world, excellence wasn’t born after computers.

[lproven]

ISTM that both sides are right here, but both are deep in the woods and missing the trees.

"This product does not contain machines!" "No, but it is made using machines!"

(Remember the 6 classical machines: screw, inclined plane, wedge, lever, wheel and axle, and pulley.)

Perhaps, just maybe, the real problem here is that the basic machines the world has standardised on are junk, and you can't make junk into something good?

You can use junk to make good things, but you can't make good things out of junk.

Maybe the problem isn't Japan. Maybe the problem is that all modern software is junk, and even Japan can't make that good.

[neuralRiot]

>Perhaps, just maybe, the real problem here is that the basic machines the world has standardised on are junk

I believe most of the world has become complacent with “good enough” and a factory (be it hard or soft ware) that does not churn producs out of the door quickly enough is seen as “unproductive” Probably Japan software industry is trapped between being productive and excellent being neither after all.

[tivert]

> I don't think he's plain wrong. Almost any non-living product is born out of software. If Japanese products are good, the software taking care of developing, manufacturing, marketing, selling, transporting, maintaining, rma'ing the product must be good.

No. For a physical non-software-driven product, those things are pretty much orthogonal.

If a product is good, it's due to the attributes of the product itself, and those are mainly due to the design decisions and priorities of the manufacturer.

All the things you list may make the business more efficient and more successful, but they have little to do with the kinds of products I'm talking about.

[doctorpangloss]

Yeah listen, I own the same Zojirushi crap you do, a lot of it, and it has its own problems. The mugs leak occasionally, the rubber and silicone goods are cumbersome for many people to deal with, there are voids in the lids and interior corners in the rubber goods that are hard to clean, they mold all the same as anything else exposed to water. The boilers develop a lot of scaling issues, they are not easy to clean, the replacement parts are expensive, and you talk to their CS, they will tell you the wrong dimensions for things like screws. And they don’t replace anything for free.

I don’t know why you are being so hostile about my knowledge levels about $5 versus $30 pieces of junk. But I’ll just say that you are buying these things because you can buy it on Amazon, and Amazon wrote all this software to fill in the blanks like returns which Zojirushi would never do, and because Wirecutter told you to, and their affiliate marketing machine is very software enabled. It is actually a good example of my point: can you think of a Japanese brand that in your opinion has great purely mechanical products like mugs but advertises as aggressively as Apple does? What about a brand that can reach people with ad blockers, so therefore it must innovate, like by managing fleets of influencers, digital product catalogs / product syndication, affiliate schemes, etc.?

[tivert]

> I don’t know why you are being so hostile about my knowledge levels about $5 versus $30 pieces of junk.

I'm not being hostile, but I think you're being very non-responsive. At various points I've been trying to figure out why, because it's so baffling. I mean, the question is "Why is Japanese software crap when their physical products are well designed," and you're going on and on about Amazon's logistics software, which is pretty much a non-sequitur.

[doctorpangloss]

The simple answer is that Japanese software isn’t crap. It’s good in a ton of places that matter but might be invisible to consumers. Also in places that are visible: We play tons of video games developed in Japan, Nintendo might be the very best game studio on Earth. LINE was way ahead of its time too, it was a very innovative chat app that was synergistic with cell phone hardware in many ways that mattered like payments security, but maybe there isn’t enough space for chat apps to differentiate themselves and their success is driven by chance.

To me, one reason is that in some markets inside Japan, people do not yet pay for software. For example hardly anyone in Japan pays for Spotify subscriptions. However they do spend in gacha games. So it’s not as black and white as, tangible versus intangible goods. There’s no broad strokes generalization about a cultural difference that is persuasive to me. The article talks about stuff that is basically ancient history or industrial policy, which is also interesting but unpersuasive. I bring up the Amazon logistics software as an example of the possibility that even stoic hardware companies are software companies, and people like Zojirushi, so then it is sequiter to say, we’ll actually Zojirushi is good at software. So really we mean “bad at making globally important social media apps” which is a totally different thing than “bad at software.”

[dartos]

> software engineers are sometimes so enamored with computers they can have a weird cognitive distortion where they see computers as everything (so a computer is the solution to every problem

Does your pet theory extend beyond the adage “to a child with a hammer, everything is a nail?”

I think it’s self evident that anyone who works in a specific field will see the world through the lens of someone who works in that field…