Why is Japan using cassette tapes and faxes?

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34667380

by jsnathan • 11 years ago

72 75 11 years ago

voidz• 11 years ago

The older I get, the more sympathy I have for companies that that stuck with older but working systems that don't come with a mouse and monitor.

Sometimes I feel like we're building a prison for ourselves the way things are headed in the digital world. Where I live, some schools require kids aged 5 to own iPads so they can do homework. It as fun when it was optional, but I really don't want to continue digitizing and feeding the machine my own kids.

I worry about this every day, so my first reaction and general feeling with this article was, cool. Reminds me of walkmans and roll skates. I'm old fashined and have no problem admitting it. I also don't think everyone should feel the same way, it's just how I see things.

stevetrewick2• 11 years ago

I'm the opposite. As a callow youth I favoured functional brutalism in UI. After a lifetime of interacting with actual users, a bunch of HCI classes and having watched those kinds of legacy systems become productivity vampires in too many settings I have no sympathy with my former viewpoint.

laumars5• 11 years ago

It's a common misconception that newer systems bring productivity improvements, but that's not always the case in reality. While there are undoubtedly occasions when newer systems do bring vast improvements, there are also occasions when newer systems are just trying to reinvent the wheel and ultimately end up little better - or sometimes even worse - than the old system (and that's before you factor in training your staff to use the new systems). There are also occasions when the newer system is trying to change a process in ways that meet modern fashions yet fail to meet a company's core business requirements. Both of the last two points are things I've unfortunately seen a few times in previous jobs.

There are generally three points that need to be considered before upgrading an older system:

1. Is the older system still fulfilling the needs? (often jobs change over time and some systems are rigid thus require users to perform additional steps in the modern era to continue to make use of the older system).

2. Is support still available for the older system (eg if it breaks, is hardware available to replace it? Are engineers still available to maintain it? etc)

3. Will the new proposed system fix the aforementioned issues?

Often you'll find that the first two points are still or that the 3rd point isn't true. Sadly it's all too common that the reason someone pushes to upgrade older systems is either down to agism ("it's old. Old is bad!") or because someone needs to justify their own job / bulk out their CV ("I was responsible for migrating Company xyz from product a to product b.").

With the greatest of respect to yourself, as you get older I think you too will start to notice just how often upgrades go wrong and how some businesses would have been better off sticking with the old system. So there does need to be a carefully considered pragmatism with regards to just how robust some older systems can be and whether the upgrade is actually offering any benefit or whether the older system is genuinely just bad / no longer fulfilling the job requirements.

xorcist• 11 years ago

Productivity vampires? Is that really legacy systems you refer to, or is it just yesteryear's fad that's starting to show its true colors?

Some time ago I worked on a modern travel reservation system frontend, to replace an aging 5250-based one. When I finally spent a day with the customer's end users to validate some things and learn how they worked (those things never shine through the specs) it was like a punch to the stomach. They were happy to see me and happy for the system replacement, but they worked with such lightning speed in the old system (where all 24 F-keys were bound and known by heart) they could keep up a conversation with the client while contantly pulling out the information they needed.

Just reaching for the mouse in that situation would have incurred noticeable latency for the customer. A snowball's chance in the proverbial hell would constitute much better odds than my web based system would have to improve their productivity. I didn't stay on that project until the end (for other reasons) so I don't know how it turned out, but it was my first real encounter with "legacy" systems and it humbled me like nothing since.

There are still high cost to maintaining these systems, and their batch-orientedness makes modern always-online mode very difficult. But productivity for end users should be very hard to match, especially since they were built for kilobit lines and megahertz computers in mind.

Eliana• 11 years ago

Couldn't agree more. I love new gadgets and innovation but I too get nostalgic for those items.

adamio• 11 years ago

When I hear older but working systems I think Mainframe. These are many times patched endlessly, by increasingly less skilled people. The most skilled tend towards the new. Implementing new features slows, things break more, and good development practices are lost.

why-el• 11 years ago

Every time I see a sentiment like this (with which I agree completely), I am reminded of this fascinating essay by Bertrand Russell on the virtues of idleness. [1]

[1] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

stevetrewick2• 11 years ago

tl;dr: Super conservative business culture, arguably not news but :

"Japanese companies generally lag foreign companies by roughly five-to-10 years in adoption of modern IT practices, particularly those specific to the software industry," says Patrick McKenzie, boss of Starfighter, a software company with operations in Tokyo and Chicago.

Didn't know it was quite that much lag.

erispoe• 11 years ago

How much is that technology lag, and Japan's conservative take on things in general, responsible for the economic morass they've been in for more than a decade now?

digi_owl9• 11 years ago

Or how about the other way round, given the economic morass they try to get as much bang out of each buck spent as they can?

After all, the reason for said morass was the private debt accrued during the 80s.

song• 11 years ago

5-10 years is very optimistic... I'd have said 10-20 years in most companies I've seen (Sharp is way more than 10 years behind foreign companies for example).

adrianN• 11 years ago

Using old software is not uncommon in many large companies. Not everyone is Google or Microsoft, and at the forefront of technical innovation. Change is expensive in large companies and the value proposition from new software is often vague and hard to quantize in dollars. New software means training people, changing processes to accommodate the new tech and, last but not least, paying money for the software itself. For the management, this is usually seen as a huge cost with little tangible benefit.

blumkvist• 11 years ago

I know of many ad agencies and management consultaincies that use Lotus Notes.

digi_owl9• 11 years ago

Cobol and mainframes anyone?

Mimick• 11 years ago

Japanese people's culture is "If it's working like that, keep it like that".

I once had to make a Japanese website for a cars wholesale company that ship cars for different countries on the world and they used to do a lot of work manually on their old website wanted to update it because they lost contact with the old developer (used to HTML the website).

He was like no-no for everything that will cost money (themes, plugins...), I didn't felt comfortable dealing with him since he said no for a $50 translation plugin and he wanted translation on his website (he will get transitioned text himself somehow, don't like this step step things...) and I'm sure I will charge him more than $50 to write a translation plugin (since I won't put it on an online store).

melling• 11 years ago

HN user patio11 got mentioned.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11

osullivj• 11 years ago

I experienced this myself when I built a new browser based single dealer channel for the interest rate trading business of a large UK bank in 2008-10. Part of the motivation of single dealer channels is to get wholesale bank clients off the people intensive voice & email channels (phone calls to highly paid sales people) and on to self service electronic channels. For instance, for an index tracking block trade, we'd want to deter them from emailing a sales person a spreadsheet, and encourage them to upload via a browser for automated processing. The resistance to changing entrenched manual workflow among Japanese clients was phenomenal, and far greater than in London or New York.

rwmj• 11 years ago

The analysis seems flawed. If "10 year old software" works, why upgrade it? If SMEs are conservative about software practices, the solution would be education of business owners, not trying to create more massive companies.

A010• 11 years ago

This is an example of many other Asia countries as well, even if the host country is "hi-tech" but the excuse is always be "our company isn't hi-tech". If you're not working in trending industries, eg. e-commerce, mobile, finance, banking, etc., you'd expect to be stuck with 10yo technology.

I was using a HP Gen 3 server to query DNS to get here to input this comment.

johan_larson• 11 years ago

It's not just Asia. Here in Canada I recently had to make some changes to my cell phone plan, and I watched the clerk struggle to use a system that was running on Windows XP.

I've also watched bank clerks using systems that were obviously running on 3278 simulators.

Most businesses are no more high tech and up to date than they have to be.

noir_lord• 11 years ago

Couple of smaller local banks here in the UK are using kit I recognise from the 90's.

Co-incidentally the other bank I use with state of the art kit (relatively at least) is worse in every other way.

I don't much care what kit they use as long as they get the important stuff right.

bovermyer• 11 years ago

Japan's big problem here is that they don't see a need for a car when a horse works just fine.

And if that's the world they want to live in, that's fine - no judgment here.

I, however, choose to live with and embrace a culture of advancement and change. That requires living in the USA. Maybe in Europe.

purpled_haze• 11 years ago

Cars are much safer than horses: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=990DE0DC1E...

And they produce more jobs, from all of the people needed to create the plastics, glass, metal, to the engines, etc. and the oil companies, quicky-marts, etc.

However, horses are more environmentally friendly, as long as you don't mind their feces, urine, and gas.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 11 years ago

Horses will get you home automatically if you're drunk, sick or injured.

clock_tower• 11 years ago

And I, for one, prefer a culture of doing what works properly, instead of a culture of chasing shiny new things (which quite frequently turn out to be worthless, or harmful in unexpected ways). I'm currently in the US; maybe I should move to Europe or Japan.

Veratyr• 11 years ago

That requires living in the USA. Maybe in Europe.

That's a very narrow minded view of the world.

Yes there are progressive aspects of US culture but there are also deeply ingrained backwards aspects.

Take banking for example. To pay bond for rent many landlords won't accept anything but checks or money orders. People still "authenticate" their credit card purchases with an easily copied scrawl that is literally on the card. If this somehow doesn't work out, the merchant is responsible. Meanwhile companies like Google and Apple attempt to introduce contactless payments which aren't accepted by merchants due to politics and aversion to change. Meanwhile in Australia, banks are cooperating with Visa and Mastercard, resulting in nearly every credit card having built in contactless payments of some kind and the majority of retailers (most major supermarkets, petrol stations, cinemas, restaurants) accepting them.

For another take transit. It can take over 2 hours to move a paltry 20 miles in the bay area, where a car/bus is the main way to move. Meanwhile you can get from rural Victoria, Australia to the capital city (Melbourne) - a 50 mile journey - in a little over an hour and a half for ~$10 while sitting in comfort on a train. In China you can get from Shanghai to Nanjing (163 miles) in 2 hours, again on a train. In Malaysia you can take a train from the airport to the city by simply touching a modern Visa card to the gate.

Yes the US is a world leader when it comes to developing software and much consumer technology but it's behind in many other areas and it's certainly not unique when it comes to advancement and change.

MichaelMoser123• 11 years ago

I wonder if that's the norm rather than a Japanese peculiarity.

it's a bit like that in Germany too - mostly small and middle sized companies are dominating, and people don't like to upgrade that much over there. The end of support for Windows XP last year used to be a major shocker, so the issue got some media coverage and reports were generally speaking of the danger to smaller firms [1]. Still nowadays only 17% of all installations are running XP (down from 26-30% last year). [2]

[1] http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/windows-xp-eingestellter-suppo...

[2] http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_presse/archive/2015/04/...

digi_owl9• 11 years ago

Yeah, reading about the dominance of the smaller companies instantly brought to mind Germany. Then again the two nations have seemed quite similar for some time.

WBrentWilliams• 11 years ago

I'll leave the article as-is. This isn't the first article to grace HN that stated that Japanese companies tend to be slow adopters. What I want to know is why the highlight on human traffic signalers as an indicator of how "backwards" the culture is technologically.

It seems to me that if the goal is not just public safety, but to put a human face on law enforcement, a human traffic signal is exactly what is required. True, a robot can do the job, but a robot would be ineffective at the task of humanizing the reasons behind the laws and in providing assistance to people who need it.

digi_owl9• 11 years ago

That "traffic light" seems to actually be a watchman for a building site. Thus he is there to either stop people or trucks are needed.

And frankly i would prefer that over automated lights, as the person could compensate for elderly or kids (or other less perfect events).

Its not like they have some lone officer sanding in the middle of the most busy intersection of Tokyo, now it is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibuya#Shibuya_Crossing

Frankly i don't see how an article of this "quality" made it onto BBC.

hcarvalhoalves• 11 years ago

Japan is a place where the future arrived first so now they're stuck with a lot of legacy from the 80/90's "future".

jefurii• 11 years ago

James Fallows of The Atlantic wrote a lot about Japan in the 1990s, and he had this great observation.

In Japan you drive to the station and sit in the car while several people fill your tank, wash your windows, and do other busywork. It seems like a huge waste and makes gas cost more.

We know how to do things better and more efficiently in the US. But in the US those same young people are sitting at home unemployed.

icebraining2• 11 years ago

But is it true? Does it lead to lower unemployment, all else being equal?

Zach_the_Lizard2• 11 years ago

In Japan you drive to the station and sit in the car while several people fill your tank, wash your windows, and do other busywork. It seems like a huge waste and makes gas cost more.

I was just in elementary school in the 90s, so I didn't drive, but I don't recall this sort of service at gas stations in Japan. I do recall gas being much more expensive at Japanese gas stations that what you'd see on American military bases. Am I misremembering? This was in Okinawa.

We know how to do things better and more efficiently in the US. But in the US those same young people are sitting at home unemployed.

We know how to do certain things more efficiently in the US. We are terrible at running our transit systems and intercity rail systems as compared to the Japanese. Japanese roads are generally in better condition than American ones. Our laws have mandated sprawl in many localities decreasing the efficiency of our infrastructure--from sewer lines to roads to transit--causing great environmental and economic harm.

Of course, there is a dark side to Japan. Rampant age discrimination everywhere. Disposable housing. A 'justice' system with a 99% conviction rate. Clinging to fax machines for hotel reservations when a simple Web form would be more efficient.

digi_owl9• 11 years ago

Clinging to fax machines for hotel reservations when a simple Web form would be more efficient.

Frankly i don't know what is more complicated, given that with a web form you have one computer talking to another, several exchanges of data, and computing of same (request form, transfer form, render form, transfer inputs).

It may look simpler once the form is on screen, but the processes behind the scene seems no simpler than fill out a sheet of paper and stick it in the machine.

JoeAltmaier4• 11 years ago

There was some story about the Japanese diplomat to the US before the war, was driving in the hills around San Francisco. He came upon two guys building a road: one in a truck dumping rock, one with a bulldozer. In Japan, that would have been 50 people with baskets and donkeys moving gravel.

He wrote a description back to his bosses, saying something like "It would be suicide to challenge the US industrial machine". Too bad they didn't listen.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 11 years ago

Admiral Yamamoto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto) who was educated in the US, was against Japan declaring war with the USA for similar reasons. He had seen enough of our industrial production to realize we could build ships and planes faster than the Japanese could. His statement, "I can run wild for six months but after that I have no expectation of success." was predicated on this.

greggman• 11 years ago

Or you know, Oregon (and New Jersey?) where it's illegal to pump your own gas so an attendant always has to do it. Nothing special about Japan there.

lefstathiou• 11 years ago

I am very fascinated and curious as to what Japan did / does to mitigate the formation of business conglomerates. I am skeptical but open minded to the fact that this could just be cultural - many US laws and tax policies encourage scale. Googling around now but if anyone has thoughts or a book recommendation please let me know.

icebraining2• 11 years ago

But has Japan mitigated it? The statistic quoted is that 99.7% of companies are SMEs.

But in the US, 98.2% of companies have less than 100 people (ie, they're SMEs): http://www.census.gov/econ/susb/

So, that statistic might not be telling you what you think it's telling you.

JoeAltmaier4• 11 years ago

And 100% of the 150 companies in my local rural village chamber of commerce are guys with a truck and a ladder. In the US, private enterprise is alive and well.

itazula• 11 years ago

Fax machines -- They are single-function machines, and they are easy to use. No viruses or malware. Reminds me of the calculator I sometimes use ...

JoeAltmaier4• 11 years ago

Fax machines were invented before the telephone. Before the telegraph! They were originally a needle on a wax engraving for the send side; a pen on paper on the receive side. They scanned the wax cylinder, and a dot-skip-dot pattern on the receive side rendered the message. And all this was done in China.

Why? Because the character set in Eastern languages was far too large to fit into something like Morse Code. There was no real alternative.

I wonder if fax persists today for some similar reason?

silveira• 11 years ago

Interesting hypothesis. I found little reference to fax being used in China early, only this http://mentalfloss.com/article/33586/idea-fax-machine-has-be....

mrob2• 11 years ago

Something based on Morse code is indeed possible, and it was used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code

reacweb• 11 years ago

fax is still very useful in France if you want to quickly solve an issue with a bank. Most of the banks do not accept documents send by mails, they ask to use post mail. If we insist a bit, they often accept to use fax. My ISP (Free is the best ISP in France) provides a fax number to send and receive pdf documents. It is not as handy as a mail, but it is a lot faster than post mail.

magic_beans• 11 years ago

France is an absolutely perfect example of a country ridiculously behind-the-times when it comes to technology.

digi_owl9• 11 years ago

I wonder how much that has to do with law rather than tech.

Meaning that a faxed document holds more power in court.

jccalhoun• 11 years ago

The fax machine's popularity seems to be an evergreen story for slow news days. I remembered a story about it that mentioned that restaurants in japan still took a lot of orders through fax and in looking for it found lots of articles: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fa... (the one I was looking for from 2013) another from 2012: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-japan-f... and the bbc itself wrote another one in 2012 as well http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19045837

jimpick• 11 years ago

One overlooked reason is that it's just plain harder to build searchable indexable clean databases with the writing system (kanji, hiragana, katakani, romaji and English all in use simultaneously). Manual methods often work better.

agentultra• 11 years ago

I think this article might be over-stating the lack of technological adoption at Japanese companies to the point of characterizing the nation as some backwards Kafka-esque nightmare.

I was just at the Openstack Tokyo Design Summit where there were plenty of Japanese companies sharing their stories of adopting and contributing to Openstack technologies: NTT DoCoMo, NEC, Fujitsu, Yahoo Japan, and others. These are not small companies and many of them are building critical public infrastructure on Openstack.

You can still buy cassette tapes in corner stores in Canada and there are many industries here where people still use fax machines (ie: lawyers, realtors, contractors). I don't think Japan is unique in this regard.

drderidder• 11 years ago

The article is somewhat misleading. Keeping up with software evolution is something large North American companies struggle with as well, and while Japanese companies may be slower to adopt some software trends that are commonplace here, Japan lags in very few areas technologically - and leads in a lot of others. Every time I visit I'm blown away by the innovative application of technology. There are electronically controlled traffic lights aplenty in Japan, ubiquitous high speed internet, and all the accoutrements of modern electronic communication in greater abundance and density than most of North America. The "human powered traffic lights" the writer alludes to are just safety officers who assist traffic and pedestrians at some crossings where construction is underway, usually in addition to to the usual traffic signals; an example of the emphasis on service and attention to detail sorely lacking on this side of the pond. If faxes are still in use it's a result of the fact that practically everybody had one in their house long before most North Americans had ever used one. Having been so widely adopted, it's not too surprising that their use has continued for longer. I think the author went a bit hyperbolic in an effort to make a headline out of something which is actually not that big of a deal, although there are likely just as many if not more opportunities for software modernization in Japan as there are elsewhere.

digi_owl9• 11 years ago

I wonder how much the fax thing has to do with their writing system as well.

deciplex• 11 years ago

Not a whit.

fit2rule• 11 years ago

Old computers never die. Their users do. This is something that the Japanese culture seems to really understand.

It doesn't matter if its fashionable, fast, or efficient. If it works, use it.

unsignedint• 11 years ago

Well, it's a country with the chronic debate of whether résumé should be handwritten or printed. (Yes, really.)

For the worse or the better, it's the country where the posture of commitment counts. There are so many people who take printed out material "cold" or sign of slack, for example.

I can certainly relate to this article when a fairly recent project I worked involved passing around bug report as spreadsheet file instead of a bug tracking system...

gerbilly• 11 years ago

I prefer the security of sending a fax over sending an email.

To eavesdrop on a fax transmission would require you to eavesdrop on a telephone line just at the right time.

It's a point to point communication over a private line, as opposed to email that travels over public trunks, and past At&T 'closets' full of FBI/NSA equipment.

So for sending sensitive documents like passports etc, I'd much rather scan and fax than send an email.

(Now of course, the first thing the office worker does on receiving my fax is surely to scan and email it to some other coworker, but that is beyond my control.)

ksec• 11 years ago

I actually quite like Fax as an idea, Put in the number, and send it over. The problem is Fax is too slow.

Over the years I have been trying, testing and implementing a paperless office. But Not in a tech industry, and you can imagine how hard that is.

Yes we even tried iPad or tablet rather, it didn't work as well. There is digital whiteboard, I dont have the budget to test those out. But I guess it still wont replace stickers and massive whiteboard.

You still draw and sketch or design on a piece of scrap paper. I haven't try the iPad Pro ( its not out yet ), but i am not convinced this will improve my work flow either.

Then I start to question the notion of paperless. And it turns out may be getting rid of paper isn't the solution at all. Pen and Paper is the possibly the easiest form of recording down information. The problem with paper is how we find and file these information later. ( And its environmental issues. )

bramstolk• 11 years ago

Because they lack young people?

If the ageing workforce just keeps doing its thing, without a your person showing them the new stuff, the new stuff does not happen.

Simple demographics.

Why is Japan using cassette tapes and faxes?

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