[mechanical_fish]

The glib response is "what 'inefficiencies'?" The U.S. version of the social contract has advantages, but "greater overall efficiency" is not one of them.

U.S. employees are also trained on the job. The difference is that it's a succession of jobs, separated by job searches and interviews – an inefficient and unreliable process.

Statistics show that the average U.S. worker put in 1788 hours per year in 2013. The average for Japan? 1735 hours per year. Neither of these represent world-class efficiencies: The Germans and the Dutch, for example, manage to run their modern economies on less than 1400 hours per worker.

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode%3DANHRS

The USA does have a significantly higher per-capita GDP than Japan, but the Swiss are higher still, and only work 1588 hours per week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

(These are glib analyses, of course, because averages lie in various ways. The fact that Qatar has three times the per-capita GDP of the USA should give one pause; per-capita GDP is not the same thing as "quality of life of the average resident".)

The idea that iPhone manufacturing is somehow "foreign" to Japan is pretty funny. Mobile phones are international products, built with parts and machines and expertise from around the world, certainly including Japan:

http://www.cnet.com/news/japan-manufacturers-said-to-gear-up...

Yes, many phones aren't assembled in Japan these days, but they aren't assembled in the USA either. The Japanese can still field some of the greatest electronics engineers on the planet, but they work on higher-leverage problems than final packaging and assembly.

[patio11]

The biggest part of the reaction to the iPhone among domestic engineers is "#()(#%0) Why, why, why?! We had the screens and the capacitors and the CPUs and the memory and the buttons. Why isn't the iPhone a Sharp or Sony product? Who cares if they're eventually assembled in China, nobody wants that work anyhow [+], but think how much Japan: We've Still Got It karma it would have been worth to create the defining product of our age."

My take on the answer, by the way, is that the iPhone is a 20% hardware 80% software product, and Japanese hardware manufacturers were not well-positioned for that opportunity. That has, sadly, not changed. You would think that Google solving the software problem for them would give them a bigger opportunity, but that hasn't been borne out in practice, to my understanding.

Anyhow, the fact that mobile phones are widely perceived as Chinese is not entirely accidental. Something like 40% of the BOM might be Japanese products, but a Japanese CPU and a Japanese camera and a Japanese gasket plus a Chinese paper box is perceived as a Chinese cell phone. Japanese tech firms have very keen memories of the 1980s and don't want to be the "yellow peril" again, for US politicians/companies to take swings at to protect domestic industries.

Nominating China for the role of punching bag? Triple bonus points. (Japan and China have a... storied relationship.)

[+] Exaggeration for comedic effect. There exist many Japanese folks, including those in industry, who would be happy if a larger portion of the supply chain were purely domestic.

[notastartup]

why is it that Samsung has been able to capitalize on this while Sharp or Sony has not? If this was a 80% software problem, why is Samsung still doing so well, and likely to continue even though their software capacity won't beat any American startup?

[lmm]

I remember the Sharp PDAs you had to import. That was 80% of the iphone right there. But they never seemed to market them (Samsung isn't particularly clever with their marketing but they throw enough money at it to make it work), or even be particularly interested in selling them abroad. I think they must've not been willing or able to do the carrier negotiation - our subsidized phone structures are a bit weird. Or just overestimated the popularity of wifi in the rest of the world based on that in a small, mostly urban country.

Sony on the other hand made some good stuff but was always just too controlling. The hardware was nice but you had to buy overpriced Memory Stick storage because Sony couldn't bear to use a standard format. And in the pre-android days you had to sell your soul to get a dev kit. (I realise Apple gets away with all of this but Sony doesn't have a reality distortion field). I get the feeling Japanese customers are willing to trust Sony in a way that foreign ones aren't.

[patio11]

I have no great answer to this question (I'm only peripherally aware of how Samsung works and the entire Android ecosystem is a bit of a mystery to me), but if you do, you could get a lot of bookings on the Japanese equivalents of MSNBC.

[w1ntermute]

Here's one piece of the puzzle: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/06/apple-samsung-sma...

> It was the same old pattern: when caught red-handed [for patent infringement], countersue, claiming Samsung actually owned the patent or another one that the plaintiff company had used. Then, as the litigation dragged on, snap up a greater share of the market and settle when Samsung imports were about to be barred. Sharp had filed its lawsuit in 2007; as the lawsuit played out, Samsung built up its flat-screen business until, by the end of 2009, it held 23.6 percent of the global market in TV sets, while Sharp had only 5.4 percent. All in all, not a bad outcome for Samsung.

The Koreans are much more ruthless than the Japanese, who have gone soft.