Why Japan didn’t create the iPod

http://blog.gatunka.com/2008/05/05/why-japan-didnt-create-the-ipod

by chaosmachine • 16 years ago

112 88 16 years ago

blog.gatunka.com

sliverstorm4• 16 years ago

I have always felt English works as a language to interact with computers pretty well, perhaps one of the best or the best. It could be argued this is just because I speak it as a primary language, but this article illuminates exactly why I believe it is a good candidate. Our character set is very small and very simple, which is important. There are sets with fewer (the indigenous Hawaiian language IIRC has 13 letters), but English is also very widespread, and words don't wind up crazy long (like in Hawaiian).

Other European languages with the Latin alphabet could be fair contenders as well because of this, although the ones with accents are a bit more complex, and none of them are as widespread that I am aware of.

So actually really what I'm getting at is not 'go English!' but 'go Latin alphabet!'

asnyder2• 16 years ago

I believe Hebrew would work pretty well too. There are 22 letters, it's also phonetically very similar to Latin characters. Most words are also shorter in Hebrew, but are phonetically equivalent to an English sounding word. For example, "Comment" could be "כמנת", thus 4 characters instead of 6, and are phonetically equivalent.

iskander• 16 years ago

>, it's also phonetically very similar to Latin characters.

The history of alphabets is awesome.

Phoenician -> Aramaic -> Hebrew Phoenician -> Greek -> Latin

xsmasher• 16 years ago

I'm not sure it passes the 8x8 pixel font test, though.

cool-RR2• 16 years ago

I'm a Hebrew speaker, and I really doubt it. Whenever I get some technological appliance that can speak Hebrew, I turn it to English.

One of the big reasons is that Hebrew is right-to-left, which is a nightmare. You can't even type Facebook comments in Hebrew and have them correctly aligned.

allenbrunson2• 16 years ago

I thought conventional wisdom on this subject was that Japanese culture prizes conformity, so their equivalents of Jobs, Woz, Gates, et al would have been strongly discouraged from doing their own thing. The other side of that coin was that they are better at commoditizing technologies first invented in the U.S., like industrial robots, and RAM production.

Does this article mean that my assumptions are out of date?

jbm6• 16 years ago

My sense is that the conditions at small and mid-sized Japanese companies are reminiscent of the early 20th century, and are not compatible with producing innovation at a level necessary to sustain the economy.

Some things that I feel contribute (take them for what they are worth)

a) I haven't met a single female Japanese employee who hasn't been the victim of power harassment or other forms of emotional abuse. I can honestly say that 80% of women I have met at 5 different companies have been on some kind of psychological medication to cope with the stress at work. (Goodbye many useful innovations from female employees.)

b) I have met people who work 15 hour days; albeit where work consists of 6 hours of doing nothing, 4 hours of work, and then another 5 hours of waiting for the boss to leave. (Reasons include saving face - and poor housing conditions.)

c) The best university graduates tend to go directly to big companies; they don't create their own companies, because of the number of practical difficulties. (being accepted for & paying for rental properties, getting loans, etc..)

d) Everything has a big city perspective, since practically everyone has to come to Tokyo to do something important.

I can go through a hundred reasons; but the idea that there is some simple cultural issue that could be chopped away like a Gordian knot to solve the problem is a bit too simplistic.

patio118• 16 years ago

We should talk about hacking Japan some time. Everything insane about large Japanese corporations just spells market opportunity. (In addition to the issues in the above post -- which I partially agree with -- you could pick "Engineers are grossly underpaid relative to skill", "No socially productive work is expected by anyone below the age of about 35", "Some of the best educations in the world are wasted on undifferentiated 'office work'", etc etc.)

phreanix2• 16 years ago

You're going to find this an interesting, albeit long, read.

http://kotaku.com/5484581/japan-its-not-funny-anymore

patio118• 16 years ago

Does this article mean that my assumptions are out of date?

That sort of implies that Japanese were once lockstep conformists. I could take issue with that, at length, but instead I'll refer you to Sugimoto's textbook "An Introduction To Japanese Society".

P.S. One of my favorite Japanese engineers swears blind that the iPod is just a Walkman with a Game Boy in it. I think that is almost as unfair as "Japan just improves on technologies that were invented by white people."

bdr• 16 years ago

Better than what Bill Gates called the iPod: a hard-drive with a headphone jack.

astine• 16 years ago

Fascinating. Makes one wonder about how many changes in ttrends in technology were motivated by seamingly insignificant details about of our cultures. imagine if people had four fingers on each hand, would floating point arithmetic binary be more intuitive?

sliverstorm4• 16 years ago

Before you dream of 4 fingered hands, stop and consider with fewer fingers counting would have been more difficult in the old, old days, and things would probably have progressed a bit slower! :)

bad_user2• 16 years ago

Not necessarily ... we use base 10 because we have 10 fingers, but that's not the only choice humans could've made.

Geometry could've played a role ... angle degrees aren't base 10, which makes measurements of angles / time awkward.

Mayas used base 20. Babylonians used base 60, which is very convenient for angles since it's also divisible with 3 and 4.

Of course, I don't think there were number systems that had a base not divisible by 5 (except those that were baseless), and this probably does have something to do with the number of our fingers.

But I think we would've been just fine with 4 fingers ... we would probably count our feet too ... and base 16 would've had been the norm.

Rauchg• 16 years ago

Not a Japanese speaker, but couldn't romanji be used in replacement?

jbm6• 16 years ago

It's extremely difficult to read Romanji, especially with the sheer number of words that would be represented exactly the same way. It's the same as representing everything in Hiragana or Katakana; one simply cannot read it properly.

dkarl2• 16 years ago

Did the large number of homophones emerge through use of the written language? How do they manage to talk to each other, then? (Honest questions.)

patio118• 16 years ago

Aye du speke Japaneze and lit mii tele u clothes enuff to saund auto iz naught kwaito gud enuff 4 most ppl.

yummyfajitas• 16 years ago

Plenty of non-english speakers find english transliteration good enough (or hindi, or arabic transliteration). It takes getting used to, but once it becomes standard, it works.

I suspect the only reason I had trouble reading your post is because I'm just not used to the spelling system you used. Is there a fundamental reason why romanji can't be used, or are people simply not used to it?

blintson2• 16 years ago

No. Japanese has a LOT of homonyms. Kanji are necessary to tell the difference between all the possible meanings of a given set of sounds^. IANAL^^ but from my experience it seems Japanese is much better for speaking and reading than it is for writing. In speech the homonyms are more useful because it's easier to tell what something means from context. I find that I'm often much terser in Japanese than in English in speaking and vice-versa in writing.

^The number of kanji in use is actually INCREASING because of auto-completion software.

^^(I Am Not A Linguist), actually readability of Japanese could go either way, I'm not sure. On the one hand, the characters are more complex, requiring more space and processing; on the other, they stand for larger chunks of meaning. Has anybody here seen any studies on the reading-comprehension speed of Japanese vs. English?

^^^Also, on readability: Kanji help show the grammatical structure of a sentence somewhat. The same way you read English words by recognizing their shape, you can recognize the structure of a Japanese sentence by it's shape.

teeja• 16 years ago

Good article on a fascinating and complex subject. Thanks.

Simucal• 16 years ago

This reminds me of the recent article talking about one of the major obstacles to China spreading its culture is the complexity of its written language.

Many people think that this fact alone will stop Chinese culture from dominating and spreading in the same way Western/English culture has spread.

sliverstorm4• 16 years ago

Good point. I know tons of nissei (well, the Chinese word for nissei, whatever it is) who can speak Chinese but completely gave up on writing it, and it looks to me sorta like the language is going to die in the US as the generations go on partly because of that. (unless immigration from china stays high)

berntb2• 16 years ago

In a few years we get mobile phone cameras with OCR and reading/translation. (There might be apps for that on the iPhone already?)

Better living through technology. :-)

_delirium3• 16 years ago

As a nitpick, this isn't actually true: "Before the advent of computers, katakana was never used to write entire sentences." There were quite a few books written entirely in katakana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, since it was seen as more accessible to the uneducated poor. Japanese socialists in particular tended to use katakana as an anti-elitist gesture. For a while there was even an active reform movement aiming to abolish kanji entirely, similar to the one in Korea that successfully abolished Chinese characters there in favor of the phonetic Hangul (the Korean switch happened in the 1890s, a time when the Japanese debate was also particularly heated).

w1ntermute• 16 years ago

the one in Korea that successfully abolished Chinese characters there in favor of the phonetic Hangul

That's actually not true. Hanja (the Korean name for Chinese characters) are still used extensively by newspapers, in academia, and in legal professions. As in Japanese, it provides a method of distinguishing between homonyms, which can be particularly important when writing contracts and the like, where precision of meaning is essential.

Just like with Japanese, Korean has a large number of homonyms in its Sino-Korean vocabulary because while Chinese is tonal, Korean is not. Moreover, the more formal Sino-Korean vocabulary is in prominent usage in the aforementioned situations.

While hanja use has certainly declined over the years, and many Korean youth these days are incapable of recognizing even the most basic of hanja (largely because of fluctuating education policy that has at times entirely eliminated hanja education), that was certainly not the case prior to the last 40 or so years.

Ironically, the place where hanja would be the easiest to read/write - on the computer - is the place where it is almost entirely absent. Take a look at the Korean language Wikipedia for an example of this; Hanja are almost always used merely for the purpose of disambiguating a word written in hangul.

_delirium3• 16 years ago

Thanks for the correction! For some reason I had thought the change to Hangul was earlier and more complete than it actually appears to be. The fact that I mostly encounter Korean online, where as you note it's almost exclusively Hangul, might be part of the reason for that perception.

teyc• 16 years ago

The simpler answer is "Steve Jobs isn't Japanese". Any one else remember about the single button mouse on the Mac?

Aside from the snark remark, my perception of the Japanese is that they are willing to put up with difficult equipment.

jbm6• 16 years ago

The single button mouse is not just Steve Jobs; Jef Raskin makes a very strong case for it as well.

wisty3• 16 years ago

Another question - why did the industrial revolution happen in Europe, not Asia? My guess - movable type works better with latin characters than thousands of kanji. Cheap (and more varied) books = cheap knowledge for the masses.

arethuza• 16 years ago

See: http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/03...

sundarurfriend• 16 years ago

That looks like a great book, thanks for the recommendation.

wisty3• 16 years ago

I've read it. GGandS claims Africa and the USA were slowed down by their geography (vertically oriented continents makes sharing crops and hunting technology difficult) and native flora (Eurasian wheat and rice is good, African crops aren't so great, and corn is poor) and fauna (African animals are too dangerous to domesticate, and the good American animals were wiped out roughly the time that humans arrived).

He may mention that the Arab world was delayed by climate change (deforestation, desertification and other reasons?), but I think he says assumes that Europe only beat Asia to the industrial revolution through dumb luck.

Thus my suggestion that latin scrip was far superior from 1400 to about now (when laser printers and LCD screens are replacing green screens, movable type and dot matrix printers.

rythie3• 16 years ago

Yes, Japan didn't create the iPod but it doesn't mean they are behind.

I remember showing my black and white iPod to some people in Japan in 2005 and they had never seen one before. However, if you looked in the shops you could find 100s of better spec'ed MP3 players, much better than the ones in the U.K. at the time and much cheaper. I guess the iPod just looked like a over priced fashion accessory to them.

Then looking at some of the phones people had in 2005 when I was there, people were able to do all sorts of things, like look up train times with complete ease. At the time was very difficult on European phones.

The author of the article seems to think that it's progress to plug your MP3 player or phone into a computer, but it's not. For example look at iTunes, I can only put music on from one machine and can't get it off again (using iTunes at least), it's needlessly tied to a single machine, when I don't want it tied to any machine. Also people don't want to plug their digital camera into a computer to upload pictures, they just want to send them straight to the internet from their phone, the Japanese were doing this long before the iPhone+Twitpic.

I think not requiring a computer as the digital hub is the future, not the past.

rythie3• 16 years ago

Thinking about this a bit more...

Most of Apple's products are mainstream versions of technology that was available before but not suited to normal consumers.

For example, Personal Computers, MP3 players, Smart Phones and tablet PCs all existed long before Apple made products in those areas.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple execs don't go to Akihabara every 3 months, and ask themselves how they can make what they see there, but for Americans and Europeans.

thasmin• 16 years ago

I think that's the point. The Japanese are great at making a product better, but not very good at innovating an existing product. They may have made a music player that has the same specs as the iPod years earlier, but they never would have made the mainstream version.

irons• 16 years ago

Your friends in Japan had never seen an iPod in 2005? Apple claimed the iPod had 60 percent of Japanese market share as early as November of that year.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/nov/16japan.html

It kept the lead until September of 2009, when Sony crowed that the Walkman had outsold the iPod the previous week... because the iPod's share had been cannibalized by the iPhone. Nice work, Sony!

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...

"Better spec'ed" devices that didn't involve a computer necessarily cram more user interface onto a limited surface, which is why almost by definition, those devices were harder to use.

The iPod won not just because its interface was better, but because there was so much less of it. Offloading complex functionality to a general-purpose computing device made the iPod a better music device. There's really no getting around this point, even if the iPod's successors are becoming general-purpose computing devices themselves.

rythie3• 16 years ago

Well they weren't my friends as such just normal non-tech Japanese that I met in various hostels around March 2005. It seemed like it was just getting established at that time, whilst a few had heard of them, the people I had met had never used one. I note that even in the U.K. 2003 very few of my non-tech friends were aware of the iPod still.

The big things at the time in Japan in March 2005 seemed to be the PSP (just released), High Definition TVs (there was one in a shop but were impossible to find in the U.K. at the time) and 100Mbs broadband. Oh yeah and I saw 3D cinema in the World EXPO whilst I was there. Mostly these things are being touted still as new in 2010.

I'd agree that the iPod won because they made a nice device, but I think that's because that is what the American/European markets demand. However there are lots of markets in the world where functionality and price are lot more important than usability, like the massive emerging ones in India and China.

Kadin3• 16 years ago

Most of the cheap iPod-lookalikes don't have anything like the level of integration that the iPod has with iTunes. And that's what set the iPod apart from the beginning, and has probably been the key to its success.

The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, or even the first hard-disk-based player. But its integration with iTunes, along with the scroll-wheel interface (which was pretty impressive when it first came out), meant that it was the first one many people ever considered buying.

As a sidenote, iTunes did actually work with some other brands of MP3 player early on (including, IIRC, the Nomad), but Apple killed this off pretty quickly once they had their own out there. Which sucked if you owned one of those devices (they learned a valuable lesson for dealing with Apple, and iTunes specifically: beware the feature-stealing "upgrade"), but it's pretty clear why Apple did it.

There have always been MP3 players with better spec sheets as standalone devices, but none really that have anything like the software/hardware (and accessory) ecosystem. They're fine if you want to load music onto the player manually via the file browser, but the whole idea of the (HDD-based) iPod was that it would just contain your entire music library, constantly mirrored from your computer, and you'd never have to do anything.

It's always struck me as an example of how a product that's inferior (or at best "minimum viable") but really well-integrated with software can beat out more feature-rich standalone devices that cut corners on integration.

TorKlingberg• 16 years ago

I spent some time living in Japan, and I recognize a lot in this article. When I came to Japan I was surprised by how people are really not computer savvy in general. Most families have a computer, but only one, it's in the kitchen and nobody is very good at using it. This is strange, because people are quite tech-savvy in general and not at all techno-phobic like many non-geeks in the west. Japanese mobile phones have been awesome for years and there are plenty or really cool mobile web services. Non-mobile websites on the other hand frequently look like a mid-90s abdomination, only with more colors and animated gifs. Perhaps that is just a different preference in layout style though.

Computer gaming really doesn't exist in Japan. It's all on consoles, handhelds and phones. Few Japanese have even heard of World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Quake, Counterstrike or Civilization. I think there are some erotic games for PC because the console makers will not give them licenses. So the few who know about computer gaming think it's for perverts.

The authors explanation seems reasonable to me. Japan simply took a different direction towards appliances rather than general-purpose computers, and has continued on that path. Appliances are easy to use, but are far less suitable for hacking.

This means you really don't find many "hackers" in Japan. There are plenty of nerds, but few of them are into programming. Similar to my impression of China, software is seen as a branch of engineering like any other. Software companies will actually hire developers with no programming experience, as long as they have a good engineering degree and seem like a person that would fit into the company. They didn't lie on the CV either, the company fully expect to put them in front of computers with "Perl for beginners".

On a side note, I really don't like the western HR buzzword bingo either, where having exactly the right acronyms on your CV means more than your aptitude and actual ability to program. Is there any country in the world that strikes the right balance in general?

kazuya• 16 years ago

I am here on HN to contribute a different view about this allegedly exotic country, again.

> Computer gaming really doesn't exist in Japan. It's all on consoles, handhelds and phones. Few Japanese have even heard of World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Quake, Counterstrike or Civilization.

Computer gaming does exist. They aren't aware of the titles you mentioned just because they aren't localized. Many Japanese have difficulty with English despite of the amount of education throw in, but that's another story.

> This means you really don't find many "hackers" in Japan.

Hackers do exist. Again just because... well they don't speak English and often not visible to the hacker community at large. However I admit English is lingua franca of programming, and often I have to bridge them.

Re CV, it's not the same CV as in the western, in fact it's almost wrong call it CV. On the contrary, many Japanese job applicants assume the CV same as their counterparts and fail miserably.

ilamont• 16 years ago

I'm kind of surprised hardware and software interface wasn't really addressed in the discussion about the iPod. It compares very favorably with the engineer-designed UIs that many local manufacturers release for consumer electronics in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia, and I think has helped drive its success there, as well as the success of the iPhone/iTouch.

Jun8• 16 years ago

There should be companion pieces: "Why China didn't create the iPod" and "Why Europe (Germany, Finland, Sweden, etc.) didn't create the iPod". Japan and these places are all very tech-savy but their cultures are very different than that in the US, you can almost think of it as different solutions to the same equation.

Simplifying and summing up, I think the arguments go like this: * In Japan, the conformity culture, bureaucracy in big companies, and lack of foreign brain power and venture capital is the problem (The Economist was saying that Japan has the lowest foreign technical investment in developed countries). * In China, the lack of entrenched copyright culture is the problem, in fact, taking a product and hacking to add new features is prized. Also, good product design design and customer feedback is unknown. * Europe does have excellent designers; however, it lacks a start-up worshiping culture, in fact they're given the cold shoulder in government-heavy countries like France. Their modus operandi is to proceed by government-funded huge projects, e.g. Galileo, Airbus. And the foreign brain power is there, too.

So, you see, it's not Japan's fault: US has a unique combination of cultural and other factors that produces things like the iPod. I don't think this is unrepeatable, though.

swernli• 16 years ago

I agree with points in general, but for one detail:

> Europe does have excellent designers; however, it lacks a start-up worshipping culture...

So? The iPod wasn't made by a start-up. The technology wasn't built from an acquisition of a start-up. I dare say it had absolutely nothing to do with start-up. Yes, Apple came from a start-up. But to my mind, the distance between Apple the start-up from a garage and Apple that envisioned the iPod and DRMed iTunes is sufficient to stop assuming only a start-up could've made the iPod.

Big companies make things too.

knweiss• 16 years ago

"Why Germany didn't create the iPod?" is a very good question I've been asking myself, too. Remember that MP3 was even development by Germans (Fraunhofer Institut). But it required an US company to start the digital revolution...

I still remember the end of the 90s when I was standing at the Schneider CeBIT booth talking to the booth personnel about their new niche product: One of the world's first MP3 players (I think it even had a parallel port). Shown in a corner of the booth and nobody was taking notice of the technology - even the Schneider people didn't seem to be interested. I talked to them about the huge potential of this technology and made them aware of the fact the MP3 encoding was about to take off at the universities (everybody in the CS department started ripping&encoding their CD collections). But they simply didn't see it, they didn't believe that MP3 (that they) could change the world with such a product. What a wasted opportunity!

stuartjmoore• 16 years ago

They don't focus on UIs? That's what makes the iPod special. Japanese cell phones are know for their terrible UIs (yet awesome features).

harshpotatoes• 16 years ago

a click wheel scrolling through all 20gb of your music is the king of UI now?

Why Japan didn’t create the iPod

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