Japan: We're losing to Apple, and here's why

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/10/18/japan-were-losing-to-apple-and-heres-why/

by shioyama • 15 years ago

112 76 15 years ago

russell• 15 years ago

He says the problem is design by focus groups. Consumers know exactly what they want, but when a company produces it, they go buy something else more interesting. I've tried using focus groups back in the last century. It doesnt produce anything useful, except when you are looking for flaws in your product.

nobody3141592• 15 years ago

Nonsense - if it wasn't for focus groups we wouldn't have been able to launch our new car with improved whip holder!

arkitaip• 15 years ago

Well, that's better than our focus group; they just want faster horses.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

The problem is that so often users will express their desires not in the most distilled form, they will typically express them in the form of some unimplemented solution that they have arrived at via a process of mental satisficing. They don't know how to design software, or hardware, and they damned sure don't know how it works either. But they sure as hell know that if your product would "just" do this one little thing it would help them out.

The problem, of course, is that you then end up delegating design to people who lack the expertise. You can end up implementing ridiculous features if you just implement suggestions uncritically. For example, if you sell a sports car that people think should be more powerful they could express that by saying it should have a bigger engine, even though there are many ways to approach that problem (EFI programming, turbo chargers, lighter frame, different gear box, etc.) If you end up doing this a lot you end up with a big ball of mud design-wise as everyone's disparate needs and half-thought-out solutions collides with each other.

It takes a lot of effort to take the needs of customers and distill it down into a core set of functions and then tie those functions together in an elegant manner in a cohesive and highly useful design.

If you look at a lot of the "also ran" products from any given genre you will notice a trend towards a chaotic implementation of a laundry list of features whereas the market leaders tend to present a more elegant and cohesive design, even sometimes at the expensive of a handful of features.

umtrey• 15 years ago

Great point. Consumers are also heavily biased towards what they already know or see in similar devices - "oh, if it had a removable battery, I need that" or "I need it to vibrate when I type on it," and so on. They might all be valid desires by the consumer, but it doesn't mean it has to be there. Establishing the correct prioritization of features is the principle goal of these product development teams, and Apple seems to be winning there.

katovatzschyn• 15 years ago

Surely because what a person claims they want often varies drastically from what they actually want.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spagh...

stupandaus• 15 years ago

This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell's piece about New Coke in Blink.

ChuckMcM3• 15 years ago

Should be required reading for marketeers one would think.

Steko• 15 years ago

Fairly mundane observations.

I liked his point that today's Japanese executives are all corporate drones, salarymen that worked their way up through the system and aren't going to boldly design anything.

9999• 15 years ago

That's really not fair. Some of them are competent foreigners that get thrown out when they expose yakuza cronyism.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020365880457663...

teyc2• 15 years ago

What Apple has executed is actualy mass luxury. Its goods are perceived as high value objects, where status is more important than breadth of functionality (more on this later).

Perception is very important. For instance, a discount store would stack up items and use cheap-looking layout to create the perception that they are cost cutters.

Similarly, a luxury item should be perceived as objet d' art where functionality is clear and straighforward.

Viewed from this perspective, an iPod isn't about inbuilt graphic equalizers. It is about frictionless and effortless getting-music-into-your-hands ease. I remembered that even the Queen wanted an iPod. It is obvious one would know how to use one.

It is the same with the iPhone. The less the engineers talk about dual-core, split antenna, the more they focus on how users interact with their devices. Even the app store is actually a luxury bling. It signals all the things are are potentially available "at your service" without actually cluttering up your device.

geon• 15 years ago

You mention two very separate points: perception of luxury and ease of use. I agree that Apple are masters of both, but don't think they have anything to do with each other.

teyc2• 15 years ago

On the contrary. Luxury items have a very clear messaging. "The user is sophisticated, and does not want to feel stupid." "The user is King, and does not want to be bothered with the details of how hard the machine has to work to satisfy His whims".

rayiner• 15 years ago

Apple doesn't really market themselves as a luxury brand. Compare a Mac ad to a Lexus ad, for example.

What you're describing isn't luxury. Having a product where "functionality is clear and straightforward" isn't luxury, and it isn't art. It's good engineering.

jayfuerstenberg2• 15 years ago

Precisely.

For the most part they stripped away the complexity of computers and made the internet a consumer-level technology.

shard• 15 years ago

Apple markets itself as a luxury brand in one of the largest markets in the world: China.

"Apple's image in China now emphasizes not rebellion, but luxury --or as Wolf puts it, "exclusivity." Its gorgeous glass-walled storesare located next to high-end clothing boutiques like Armani, Versace, and BMW Lifestyle."

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/01/red_delicio...

victorbstan• 15 years ago

Great insight into leadership and product decision making strategies, couched in a velour of discontent with the JP status quo.

ChuckMcM3• 15 years ago

For me the meta insight is that this kind of thinking is a huge deal for startups.

So the challenge is that as a team you are putting together something that probably everyone thinks is useless (or at least only marginally useful), and yet to have to stay focussed on the problem(s) you are addressing and take care to address them cleanly and with style.

It is actually in those places where others cannot see that some of the best ideas can be brought to fruition. Of course releasing too early can lead to disaster (ask the Color folks on that one, at least I perceived it as a PR disaster).

rdtsc• 15 years ago

> So the challenge is that as a team you are putting together something that probably everyone thinks is useless

Isn't selection bias a problem with this thinking? Yes companies that are very successful did something outstanding perhaps, going against the flow, but how much do we know about the number of companies that did stuff everyone thought was useless and it was useless and the whole thing flopped?

We hear about the success stories, I want to then also hear about every failed attempt as well, or it not an accurate picture then, is it?

To put it in other words, it is a bit like encouraging people to play the lottery by showing images of winners. "Look these guys flipped a coin, talked to their astrologer and now look, they are winners!". But what about the ones that play and lose?

ChuckMcM3• 15 years ago

Isn't selection bias a problem with this thinking?

It may be, although in my experience 9 - 9.5/10 startups, when measured from concept to death, fail to exit. And many of those were pursuing an idea that clearly wasn't as special as they thought it was for what ever reason (could be early, could be silly, could be too complex)

But to be a startup you have to accept those odds.

ericd• 15 years ago

There are very few companies whose idea I initially thought was useless that have ended up going big - twitter is one of the only ones on that side of the spectrum. Sure, they may have some issues that need to be overcome, but for the most part, the ones that have gone big have a very obvious core appeal. If everyone thinks it's useless despite understanding the crux of the idea, I think that's a really, really good sign that you need to go back to the drawing board.

ilamont3• 15 years ago

Nintendo is an interesting case that may dispel some of the stereotypes about Japanese companies and management styles.

First, the company is quite old (1889, I believe). It started out manufacturing playing cards, yet had a pretty remarkable evolution after its post-war CEO (a member of the founding family, surnamed Yamauchi) took over. While it was a top-down organization, Yamauchi recognized and encouraged some out-of-the box and risky thinking. The company at one point was invested in things like hotels and food, but started to develop a new business in the 1970s around video games. Keep in mind that in 1977 video games were not nearly as popular as they are now, and the nearest product line Nintendo had at the time was toys. Famicom/NES was launched in the mid 1980s, at a time when the videogame market was in a slump (this was post-Atari 2600). It turned out to be a massive hit, that really kept Nintendo on top of the console market until Sony came out with the PlayStation.

The Wii is another example of an innovative approach to product design. It was not designed by focus groups, as the company was worried about leaks. Rather, the design of the console and controller came from an internal group made up mostly of career Nintendo engineers like Shigeru Miyamoto (of Mario Bros. fame). Yamauchi's successor, Satoru Iwata (himself a former game developer) was also on the team. They recognized that they couldn't win the hardware arms race with Sony and Microsoft, a race that focused on specs and pleasing hardcore gamers. They thought of a different set of users, and not only kids and senior citizens waving around a Wiimote. The team even considered how housewives would react to a new console in the living room, and therefore designed a box that was sleek and stylish, and not much bigger than a stack of DVD boxes.

There's a great interview series with the Wii design team, called "Iwata asks". It talks about many of the issues they had to overcome, and the prototyping process. It was published on Nintendo websites all over the world -- I think Iwata wanted to do a little victory lap, and get on record how they came up with the brilliant ideas behind the Wii. You can start reading it here:

http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/wii_console/

dantheman2• 15 years ago

I think Nintendo's success primarily has to do with them employing one of, if not, the best game designers that has ever lived - Shigeru Miyamoto. By trusting and empowering him they are able to have taste, just as Jobs's taste defined Apple, Miyamoto's defines Nintendo.

jbm• 15 years ago

Some of the best graduates from Tokyo University wind up at Nintendo. It was considered one of the best places to get a job.

Nintendo is not a company I would want to emulate. It is getting squeezed by Sony and Microsoft, and even its innovations in terms of casual gaming seem to be on the verge of going away. I consider it a colossal waste, but I guess YMMV.

Disclaimer: I thought the same when the DS came out. I was very very wrong.

stevenj• 15 years ago

In case you haven't read it yet, this is an interesting piece about Miyamoto:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/20/101220fa_fact_...

wh-uws• 15 years ago

With my decidedly limited knowledge of Japanese tech out outside of videogames and some phones,

I would say Shigeru is about as close as Japan has to a Steve Jobs

ilamont3• 15 years ago

I would actually give a lot of the credit for Apple's taste to Jonathon Ive, with the backing, direction, and final approval of Jobs. I think Shigeru and Ive were both masters of design and interface, and besides their influence on the look and feel of the product, could operate at the level of actually engineering/creating.

For the Wii project, some of Miyamoto's ideas didn't make it into the final product. For instance, he wanted to create a low-cost machine in order to devote more effort to the interface, but hardware requirements and costs got in the way:

Originally, I wanted a machine that would cost $100. My idea was to spend nothing on the console technology so all the money could be spent on improving the interface and software. If we hadn't used NAND flash memory [to store data such as games and photos] and other pricey parts, we might have succeeded. ... We set out to design a console that would sell for less than 25,000 yen ($211). It was a tall hurdle. But unless you start off with a target, you can't control costs and you'll inevitably lose money. Also, we thought a low-cost console would make moms happy.

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2006/tc200...

flocial2• 15 years ago

I agree that Nintendo is interesting but their iterations are notoriously slow and they are usually several steps behind the cutting edge. Also, unlike companies like Amazon or Apple they never leverage core competencies or intellectual property to branch out into other areas.

TruthPrevails• 15 years ago

It's the law of nature at play. The infinite cycle of life and death. Old making way for the new. Apple will go weak one day. Some other company will come to the top. This law of nature cannot be challenged. It is inevitable.

flocial2• 15 years ago

I read this article and it was interesting. Sony can still make some beautifully designed products and even beat Apple in certain ways, the Vaio X had similar capabilities to the MacBook Air and still much lighter and well-designed. However, the greater issue is not the "design by committee" problem but the fact that the entire country is simply lost and headless. It's not only business but politics and society in general.

The reason why companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google inspire is because they do things with conviction. They are executing on vision. They don't let internal processes become ritualized. Key executives don't stick around long when the fire goes out in their soul, they move on. In Japan, nobody knows what they want to do. Japanese manufacturers feel the heat from Apple AND Samsung, they're scared of China's growing clout yet they can't figure out what they want to do.

They can't race to the bottom with an aging population with an acquired taste for high median salaries. They've lost the drive and intellectual fortitude to innovate in all but very limited areas. They don't want to relinquish the "made in Japan" brand, even though the Chinese have shown that with the right management in place, they can make products better and cheaper.

I don't know where this paralysis comes from. Maybe the Japanese think all their woes stem from some economic missteps from the bubble era and once these are righted they can happily resume their old formula for success. Maybe over two decades of stagnation and slow decline lead to a death by a thousand cuts along with the false security of high savings.

For whatever reason, Japan is simply ill-prepared to compete on any level in the global economy. Perhaps the greatest Achilles heel for Japanese manufacturers is not so much the core hardware technology but their utter disregard for the software that drives so many electronics. If you go to any electronics store in Japan you'd be amazed by the utterly useless features manufacturers try to differentiate themselves with (this camera can take pictures in the dark while shaken vigorously, this one makes your face look pretty, etc.).

When the iPhone came out I was one of the skeptics who thought the lack of things like TV reception, RFID cards (used for train passes), the lack of emoji (back then), or the ability to render ketai/mobile web sites wouldn't go down well with customers. However, in the greater scheme of things it didn't matter. Now all the feature phone manufacturers are scuttling decades worth of in-house code to work on Android.

shioyama4• 15 years ago

I'm the author/translator of this article. Thanks for your thoughts, which I agree with entirely.

I actually think that although the post I translated is interesting, it is in fact missing the point, in a sense. There's a deeper malaise in this country, and although there are bright spots - I'd point to home-grown companies like Cookpad, for example - the overall picture is bleak.

However, Japan has a track record of suddenly changing directions when nobody expects it. Many people thought that 3/11 would trigger a change, and were disappointed when it didn't, or at least not to a significant degree. But if you look deeper, things are changing.

I'm cautiously optimistic. You really have to be. But it will get worse before it gets better.

rubashov• 15 years ago

The "overall picture is bleak" if you measure societies by flashy, marketable headline developments and gadgets. It is rather good if you more soberly consider household incomes and trade figures. Japan continues to dominate many high tech industries. Look at the 787; over a third of it is made in Japan and it's all the key hi tech bits like the carbon fiber wings.

Japan may indeed be in some sort of withdrawn middle-class ennui. They're still doing better than the US or Europe in most ways that count.

http://www.fingleton.net/?p=919

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

I'm not deeply familiar with the Japanese tech industry, but the paralysis would seem to come quite simply from an entrenched immovable old guard with business practices that were appropriate 60 years and 5-10 generations of tech ago.

Japanese engineers are, as best I can tell, extremely competent, dedicated, and driven. Set them loose on a large scale and you could have an incredible force on your hands.

6ren• 15 years ago

> I'm getting sick of these Japanese who love nothing more than to put their country down.

Sony and many other Japanese companies once pioneered new products - and Sony was the ideal that Steve Jobs said he aimed for. In fact, it's pro-Japanese. Just not its present state.

Christensen (innovator's dilemma guy) thinks that present-day Japan suffers from large companies: the disruptions that are tomorrow's riches start out small and unpredictable. Small is simply not interesting to a big company; unpredictable even less so. In post-war Japan, companies were small: excited about small opportunities; and having little to lose, unafraid of risk. (In contrast, he says, Silicon Valley incumbents often populate their usurpers, such as Fairchild to Intel, when frustrated workers want to exploit something uninteresting to management. This doesn't happen in Japan.)

The enigma here is Apple. The largest company in the world, yet acts like a startup in terms of risky new products in unproven new markets that start out small:

launching a product without consumer research is risky.

jayfuerstenberg2• 15 years ago

Here in Japan, risk is extremely frowned upon. As a result nothing innovate comes about. Only minor improvements over the existing design.

A lot has been written about the cultural views of risk/failure and why nations like the US are kicking butt over Japan and India where you're not allowed to fail.

Japan has shown that it can stage a comeback when the nation as a whole can no longer deny it has been defeated and must reinvent itself to move forward. It happened after WWII and will likely happen in another 10 or 20 years if things continue the way they have.

kstenerud2• 15 years ago

The article kind of misses the point.

The reason why people are leaving the Japanese phones for the iPhone is because Japanese phone interfaces SUCK BALLS. And they have ALWAYS sucked. I suffered through 5 years of one phone after another being such a terrible user experience that I think it scarred me for life. And don't even get me started with Sony, who replaced the perfectly functioning joypad in their phones (which USED to be the best) with that stupid "sony" sidewheel they spent so much money developing and insisted on putting in every product, whether it made sense or not.

The fact remains, emoji ARE important. Easy text input IS important. Being able to pay for stuff at the combini with your phone IS important. It's just that having apps, and a UI that doesn't suck balls is even more important.

iPhone took YEARS to penetrate the Japanese market, precisely because it didn't have the features that customers wanted, and they spoke with their wallets, buying the Japanese models. But now that app and smartphone fever has finally landed, people are more willing to compromise.

But the point is, they SHOULDN'T have to compromise. That's just Apple deciding what people will use, even if it's the wrong thing. It's taking a little bit of good advice to such an extreme that what appears on the surface "visionary" would upon closer inspection reveal itself as insanity. Hubris has a way of creeping up on you when your power remains unchecked for too long.

Yeah, Sony used to be good, but then again they used to make good products. Once their arrogance got the better of them, their products started to suffer. My first Vaio was awesome. Sleek, light, and fast. My last Vaio was practically useless out of the box. It took me 3 HOURS to remove all the crapware they loaded into it, which slowed it down so badly that it was almost unusable. Oh, and it had that stupid useless Sony sidewheel on it, and their incompatible-because-we-said-so memory stick port too. I shudder to think of how the average user would endure with such a monstrosity.

delackner3• 15 years ago

This is so true. Example: My iphone died recently, so while waiting for the 4s to come out I used a 3-4 year old Sony Ericson lying around the office. It has so many buzzword features! It even has dedicated media playback buttons on the outside! Yet how do you call someone? It takes 6 button presses. Press down > click on first name > Call > Voice Call/Video Call/PushTalk > No Message/Create Message > Call/Call with ID/Call with no ID/Country code

That's insane. It is like no one ever tried to make a phone call with their phone when designing it.

Don't get me started on the text editing screen. It is a modal text area that flips between movement within the whole text and movement within the single word you are editing. I love Vim, and I still hate this text entry method.

This whole topic has been covered many times before, but its roots are various and you could write a book on the subject of why most firms (both japanese and non) are just so horrible at consumer software interface design.

Some people suggest that it is just that the Japanese firms were only really good at hardware, but that rings false. I've seen a lot of really horribly designed Japanese computers and mobile phones before the iPhone came out, even just judging the hardware by itself on simplicity and reliability.

ilamont3• 15 years ago

UI design by engineers. It's been a problem for most (but not all) Japanese hardware products I've owned, including every single device with a lens or screen attached.

angus773• 15 years ago

Wow. I've only owned Toshiba phones (on both au and SoftBank) before I got my HTC Desire, and making a call was always a matter of clicking the 電話帳 button and selecting the name. Although I've used other people's phones plenty of times, and it was always pretty much the same. I've never used anyone's Sony Ericsson, though.

aphexairlines• 15 years ago

Sharp 943SH (SoftBank). Press down (this loads the phone book), keep pressing down until you hit the right name (or type part of the name), then press the call button.

delackner3• 15 years ago

(Addendum: Several people pointed out a handy shortcut for japanese feature-phones to access your phonebook: pressing down). This was not immediately obvious to me because the phone I'm looking at has its down button marked "." and its up button marked with a little icon depicting an open book. While I'm embarassed to have not discovered this shortcut, I think it only adds to my general point that a button labelled simply "." was supposed to suggest "phone book" while the "open book" icon leads to an endless labyrinth of options, none of which is just to look at your phone book.

MrScruff• 15 years ago

You always have to compromise. Unless you would argue that Apple has been busy introducing features to iOS that nobody wants. It's always easier to throw in a half implemented feature with a badly thought out interface than take the time and energy to think things through and do it properly. This doesn't just apply to interface design, it applies to everything.

Unfortunately, doing things properly takes time and sometimes you succumb to the pressure to just get something out there. But your customers will feel the lack of time, energy and thought you've put into it. And most of the time you'll end up having to go back and do it properly at a later date.

kstenerud2• 15 years ago

In this case, it's a problem of Apple being a regional company. They think only in regional terms, completely ignoring what people in other countries consider to be important.

And their market penetration suffers heavily as a result. If that's not enough reason to stop forcing compromise on your customers (ESPECIALLY with so many competitors in the space), I don't know what is.

They always seem biggest before they fall.

BadassFractal• 15 years ago

I wonder is part of their failure is from listening to people's reason, such as focusing on the nitty gritty features (see emoji, typing with one hand and so on) rather than on the big picture of the device and how it fits into one's lifestyle.

It's known that humans are ultimately emotional beings, they think with their feelings regardless of how rational they believe they are. The iPhone is the ultimate user experience, titillating the senses and the emotions more than any PDA out there with 1000s of convenience features. It's similar to BMW, Steve Jobs' source of inspiration for his marketing strategies. You want the device on a primal level, it's sexy, it's a status symbol, the release of every iPhone is a cultural event, a celebration of incredible UX.

I never ever get that emotional involvement when looking at the latest super-souped-up swiss-knife phone from Japan.

bluedanieru2• 15 years ago

One thing he didn't mention that I've noticed is that many Japanese companies, particularly in the consumer electronics space but in other industries as well, maintain completely separate product lines outside Japan vs. what they sell here. This is (or was) especially striking with phones where you simply couldn't buy made-for-Japan mobile phones outside Japan, and likewise you couldn't find non-Japanese phones in Japan. This is why it was such a shock that the iPhone was a success here, and the entire emerging smartphone market caught Docomo and AU completely flat-footed.

There is a particularly irritating component of Japanese nationalism which holds that Japanese are unique, as in physiologically unique, among the world's population (down to having different immune systems, in fact). In seems natural for a Japanese company that it would essentially have to act as two companies, one for exported products and another for domestic ones. It's very inefficient. It's also remarkably stupid as the iPhone demonstrates - what sells anywhere else will also sell here, and vice versa (I would always get comments on my phone when I went overseas and had to tell people the model was only available in Japan, to their disappointment).

Contrast this with most other large manufacturers where they will have more-or-less the same products globally, with some localization.

Actually the solution for Japan is rather obvious and I suspect many know it: stop acting as though you're an alien race crash-landed on planet Earth a thousand years ago. Start treating the global market the same as the domestic one, and Japanese the same as Korean, Swedish, Canadian, whatever. This will be a hard lesson for the Japanese national psyche to digest, and I don't know that they're up for it. It's entirely plausible they'll spend the next 50 years making stunning breakthroughs in the fields of (nursing home) robotics and new delivery mechanisms for god-awful Japanese broadcast television.

paperwork• 15 years ago

So why would an international company have separate product lines like you mention? It is hard to believe that international businessmen would forgo the opportunity to profit abroad, simply because something is made for the local market. Could it be that Japan only products are more experimental, and when the prove successful, they are rolled out to rest of the world?

bluedanieru2• 15 years ago

In the case of mobile phones, if they were in fact experiments they must have considered every experiment a failure, as virtually none of what you saw in the Japanese domestic market informed the design of overseas products. Yet they continued with the same basic design principles year after year. Look some of them up if you like, and you will see what I mean.

They don't see themselves missing out on any opportunity, because they are already certain that their domestic market is fundamentally quite different than every other market in the world, and must be treated as such. This is something fully within the sphere of consensus for them. They aren't behaving like rational actors, but rather like normal humans whose cultural attitudes prevent them from even examining many of their beliefs. Bring it up and you will likely be treated to an expert display of confabulation and rationalization. You can do this with any people on Earth depending on the topic, but the Japanese happened to have picked an unfortunate one.

This is why people think Japanese are xenophobic. They're not, not really. Not any more than most other cultures. But they do tend to think they are very different from everyone else in the world, for better and for worse. This essay is itself a good example, being more nihonjinron navel-gazing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron

bane• 15 years ago

I've had a feeling for a long time that Japan (not South Korea or China or other regional countries) is on the verge of a massive cultural shakeup.

I can't quite pin it down, but when you peel back the vast homogeneous conformist mass consumer oriented society, there's a really wonderfully quirky, genuinely interesting underground scene that's so vibrant, so full of energy, that it seems like it's about to burst into the mainstream in the same way the beatnick and then hippy movement did in the West.

Steve Jobs came out of that movement, who's to say we aren't about to see the birth of the next Steve Jobs in Japan? Only his parents were in a banjo kettle drum band in Osaka that played basement coffee houses and did cosplay on the weekends to super indie Manga series that explores the meaning of identity as a pop star with only digital, manufactured fans.

In the States Vietnam was the flashpoint that really caused people to gel around the question authority hippy movement, perhaps some current or future event will cause the same with the Japanese youth.

greggman• 15 years ago

Did anyone bother to do some fact checking? As far as I can tell Android phones are massively outselling iPhones in Japan. Look at any best selling list for phones In Japan before the 4S shipped. Check again in month once the upgraders have upgraded.

Japan: We're losing to Apple, and here's why

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