I think they are failing because sometime in the mid-Nineties, in the effort to compete with lean and hungry overseas companies, they lost their legendary reputation for quality and customer service, as they tried to respond to changing circumstances.
A couple of examples of my own:
Around 1996, I bought a cassette recorder made by Aiwa, which had been a fairly upscale electronics brand. It looked nice from the outside, but when I examined it closer after buying it, I realized it was a fairly crude, generic cassette recorder of the time, made in China, probably the generic output from a factory there that Aiwa had slapped their name onto.
It failed in less than a month. I brought it to the store for a replacement and that one failed too within thirty days, exactly the same way the first one did. Obviously, Aiwa had not done extensive testing on this model, and I think probably didn't even design or supervise its manufacture.
In the early 2000s, I bought a Sony Palm OS PDA. It was very advanced and had great features that I loved. But it failed in two weeks due to bad connection to the lamp that lit the LED display. After a few minutes' search on the Internet, I saw this was a well-known problem with this device, caused by a design flaw.
I took it back to the store, and got a replacement that failed exactly the same way in two weeks. The store wouldn't give me another, so I had to rely on Sony's warranty service.
It was my worst-ever warranty experience. After a long conversation with customer service reps in India, I was able to convince them it was actually failing. They sent me a box to return it in. It took almost a month to come back, only to fail with the same problem about three months later.
I went through the whole process again, waited another month. This time the repaired (or replaced) device came back rattling around in a box with no packing material. It too failed, several days after the one-year warranty expired.
I think the decline of the Japaneses electronic giants has been caused by a combination of several things. Japanese technology companies built their reputations during the late Sixties and Seventies, at the start of the Japanese economic boom, when they had a highly skilled workforce willing to work at relatively low wages, compared to the US or Europe. They had already sharpened their quality and innovative abilities in the intense domestic Japanese market, which was extremely competitive and where the consumers were very picky about quality. That market was protected, so there was almost no competition from overseas.
When they moved into Western markets, they were the young, scrappy underdog taking on dinosaur companies like RCA and Phillips, that could not respond fast enough to compete effectively against them. They were also aided by the low value of the yen relative to the dollar, which made their products a very good value.
So all of these things have changed. Complaints of unfair trade eventually forced Japan to open their domestic market to overseas competition. As the article pointed out, now Japanese companies are the dinosaurs in their domestic market, competing against Apple and Samsung. Meanwhile, the yen is very high against foreign currencies, which hurts them badly in export markets.
The Japanese labor market has also changed. Younger Japanese are much less willing to work with the dedication their parents and grandparents had. Wages have gone up, and are equal to or higher than those in the US and Europe, and like those countries, they have tried to cut costs by shifting manufacturing overseas, which has resulted in a decline in quality.
Also, the Japanese population is declining, with fewer and fewer young workers, and those coming into the job market have been conditioned to expect comfortable, high-paying, lifetime office jobs, not manufacturing jobs.
Meanwhile, the inefficiencies of the lifetime employment system in Japanese companies have made it very difficult to adapt to changing circumstances by laying off workers, even as that system is starting to break down.
It's like a perfect storm of bad news for Japanese companies, but in many ways it is very similar to what happened to electronics giants in the US thirty years earlier as they tried to defend against Japanese competition and eventually failed.
> Younger Japanese are much less willing to work with the dedication their parents and grandparents had.
I have a few "salary man" friends in Japan, and they work really really hard. Like "hard to imagine anyone working harder".
However, if my experience working in (non-tech) companies in Tokyo has taught me anything, it's that people have to work so hard because of some startling inefficiencies (and some serious peer pressure) and a great resistance to integrating technology into the work flow (e.g. this is the first year I received internet in the office).
This sounds hard to believe as Japan has produced some amazing technological innovation, but there is a really strange mindset in the higher ups concerning digital conveniences, and they appear to be influencing protocol. For example, ATMs have working hours, and some are not available on weekends at all, and others have higher fees the later in the evening it is (and this is a cash dominate society).
Ah, a japanese friend of mine used to joke that it was little dwarves working in the ATM that gave out the money. The extra fee in the evening was just overtime pay :-)
That's not entirely untrue, as you can indeed ring a bell and someone comes from behind the ATM to help you. Why I was not allowed to withdraw money on Sunday even if I did not need help is beyond me and so every monay I stood in the queue before the ATMs of people who couldn't get their money on Sunday either.
Also, I pay 0,68€ with debit or credit card in Europe whereas I had to lug around coins and stuff in Japan. Very cash-centric.
I've noticed that even in the USA, it is much more common for smaller "Mom & Pop" shops and restaurants owned and operated by Asians (not just Japanese, but Chinese, Filipinos, etc) to be cash-only, or if they do accept debit/credit cards they have very high minimum purchase requirements.
I get the reasoning behind why they do this (to avoid the handling charge overhead), but I've always wondered why the decision to do so seems to be far more prevalent with some cultures than others and I've always wondered if it is really a net negative for them as there are quite a few places I would otherwise go to frequently but avoid (because I know that as someone who prefers not to carry around a lot of cash that paying will be a bit of a pain in the ass at those places). Presumably I'm not the only one who makes this choice regularly.
>Wages have gone up, and are equal to or higher than those in the US and Europe, and like those countries, they have tried to cut costs by shifting manufacturing overseas, which has resulted in a decline in quality.
It didn't hurt their auto manufacturing industry. Japan has moved some manufacturing to America and their cars still remain at the top of any car site list just as they have always been.
>Complaints of unfair trade eventually forced Japan to open their domestic market to overseas competition.
The complaints were true just as the ones leveraged against China now.
While you may have given a very detailed response, the truth was that Japanese never cared about as much about software as they should have.
The situation has become so dire in Japan that Sony is making phones, at least on par with Samsung, but cannot sell them in their own country due to perception. It's a consequence of a reputation that has been degrading for a decade.
I'd argue that Japanese culture has changed dramatically in the "Nintendo" era. It's one that left behind the tradition of their own culture to adopt Western values while many Western tech companies today base their values upon that same tradition.
This makes me wonder if it's a hardware vs software problem. Hardware is universal, the same design can appeal to any culture. Cars are still generally hardware products, and even though they're run by software under the hood, the interfaces are still very hardware oriented (though high-end cars are moving toward software interfaces).
Consumer electronics, like smart phones, tablets, media players? The hardware is being commoditized, the interface is heavily touch/software oriented, fewer physical buttons, etc. I wonder if the Japanese aren't at some cultural/linguistic innovation disadvantage there, at least relative to the very software-oriented US.
Wages for doctors and bankers are even lower in Japan compared to the USA. Wages for food workers and janitors are much higher.
Nevertheless, the top majors at the U of Tokyo are all various forms of Engineering while the top majors at Harvard and its ilk are Economics, Political Science, and Psychology. That tells you a lot about what the smartest young people think is valued in their society.
I was just responding to his sentence that said wages for engineers are as high as the United States and Europe. This is false, at least for software engineers. When I worked in Tokyo I was shocked at how little my co-workers were paid. I am not qualified to comment on the rest of his post.
Comments
I think they are failing because sometime in the mid-Nineties, in the effort to compete with lean and hungry overseas companies, they lost their legendary reputation for quality and customer service, as they tried to respond to changing circumstances.
A couple of examples of my own:
Around 1996, I bought a cassette recorder made by Aiwa, which had been a fairly upscale electronics brand. It looked nice from the outside, but when I examined it closer after buying it, I realized it was a fairly crude, generic cassette recorder of the time, made in China, probably the generic output from a factory there that Aiwa had slapped their name onto.
It failed in less than a month. I brought it to the store for a replacement and that one failed too within thirty days, exactly the same way the first one did. Obviously, Aiwa had not done extensive testing on this model, and I think probably didn't even design or supervise its manufacture.
In the early 2000s, I bought a Sony Palm OS PDA. It was very advanced and had great features that I loved. But it failed in two weeks due to bad connection to the lamp that lit the LED display. After a few minutes' search on the Internet, I saw this was a well-known problem with this device, caused by a design flaw.
I took it back to the store, and got a replacement that failed exactly the same way in two weeks. The store wouldn't give me another, so I had to rely on Sony's warranty service.
It was my worst-ever warranty experience. After a long conversation with customer service reps in India, I was able to convince them it was actually failing. They sent me a box to return it in. It took almost a month to come back, only to fail with the same problem about three months later.
I went through the whole process again, waited another month. This time the repaired (or replaced) device came back rattling around in a box with no packing material. It too failed, several days after the one-year warranty expired.
I think the decline of the Japaneses electronic giants has been caused by a combination of several things. Japanese technology companies built their reputations during the late Sixties and Seventies, at the start of the Japanese economic boom, when they had a highly skilled workforce willing to work at relatively low wages, compared to the US or Europe. They had already sharpened their quality and innovative abilities in the intense domestic Japanese market, which was extremely competitive and where the consumers were very picky about quality. That market was protected, so there was almost no competition from overseas.
When they moved into Western markets, they were the young, scrappy underdog taking on dinosaur companies like RCA and Phillips, that could not respond fast enough to compete effectively against them. They were also aided by the low value of the yen relative to the dollar, which made their products a very good value.
So all of these things have changed. Complaints of unfair trade eventually forced Japan to open their domestic market to overseas competition. As the article pointed out, now Japanese companies are the dinosaurs in their domestic market, competing against Apple and Samsung. Meanwhile, the yen is very high against foreign currencies, which hurts them badly in export markets.
The Japanese labor market has also changed. Younger Japanese are much less willing to work with the dedication their parents and grandparents had. Wages have gone up, and are equal to or higher than those in the US and Europe, and like those countries, they have tried to cut costs by shifting manufacturing overseas, which has resulted in a decline in quality.
Also, the Japanese population is declining, with fewer and fewer young workers, and those coming into the job market have been conditioned to expect comfortable, high-paying, lifetime office jobs, not manufacturing jobs.
Meanwhile, the inefficiencies of the lifetime employment system in Japanese companies have made it very difficult to adapt to changing circumstances by laying off workers, even as that system is starting to break down.
It's like a perfect storm of bad news for Japanese companies, but in many ways it is very similar to what happened to electronics giants in the US thirty years earlier as they tried to defend against Japanese competition and eventually failed.
> Younger Japanese are much less willing to work with the dedication their parents and grandparents had.
I have a few "salary man" friends in Japan, and they work really really hard. Like "hard to imagine anyone working harder".
However, if my experience working in (non-tech) companies in Tokyo has taught me anything, it's that people have to work so hard because of some startling inefficiencies (and some serious peer pressure) and a great resistance to integrating technology into the work flow (e.g. this is the first year I received internet in the office).
This sounds hard to believe as Japan has produced some amazing technological innovation, but there is a really strange mindset in the higher ups concerning digital conveniences, and they appear to be influencing protocol. For example, ATMs have working hours, and some are not available on weekends at all, and others have higher fees the later in the evening it is (and this is a cash dominate society).
Ah, a japanese friend of mine used to joke that it was little dwarves working in the ATM that gave out the money. The extra fee in the evening was just overtime pay :-)
That's not entirely untrue, as you can indeed ring a bell and someone comes from behind the ATM to help you. Why I was not allowed to withdraw money on Sunday even if I did not need help is beyond me and so every monay I stood in the queue before the ATMs of people who couldn't get their money on Sunday either.
Also, I pay 0,68€ with debit or credit card in Europe whereas I had to lug around coins and stuff in Japan. Very cash-centric.
I've noticed that even in the USA, it is much more common for smaller "Mom & Pop" shops and restaurants owned and operated by Asians (not just Japanese, but Chinese, Filipinos, etc) to be cash-only, or if they do accept debit/credit cards they have very high minimum purchase requirements.
I get the reasoning behind why they do this (to avoid the handling charge overhead), but I've always wondered why the decision to do so seems to be far more prevalent with some cultures than others and I've always wondered if it is really a net negative for them as there are quite a few places I would otherwise go to frequently but avoid (because I know that as someone who prefers not to carry around a lot of cash that paying will be a bit of a pain in the ass at those places). Presumably I'm not the only one who makes this choice regularly.
I find that type of stuff fascinating. I wonder what they think of our movie pricing (cheaper during the day)?
In Japan, movie tickets are cheaper in the evening. (20:00 onwards iirc)
>Wages have gone up, and are equal to or higher than those in the US and Europe, and like those countries, they have tried to cut costs by shifting manufacturing overseas, which has resulted in a decline in quality.
It didn't hurt their auto manufacturing industry. Japan has moved some manufacturing to America and their cars still remain at the top of any car site list just as they have always been.
>Complaints of unfair trade eventually forced Japan to open their domestic market to overseas competition.
The complaints were true just as the ones leveraged against China now.
While you may have given a very detailed response, the truth was that Japanese never cared about as much about software as they should have.
The situation has become so dire in Japan that Sony is making phones, at least on par with Samsung, but cannot sell them in their own country due to perception. It's a consequence of a reputation that has been degrading for a decade.
I'd argue that Japanese culture has changed dramatically in the "Nintendo" era. It's one that left behind the tradition of their own culture to adopt Western values while many Western tech companies today base their values upon that same tradition.
This makes me wonder if it's a hardware vs software problem. Hardware is universal, the same design can appeal to any culture. Cars are still generally hardware products, and even though they're run by software under the hood, the interfaces are still very hardware oriented (though high-end cars are moving toward software interfaces).
Consumer electronics, like smart phones, tablets, media players? The hardware is being commoditized, the interface is heavily touch/software oriented, fewer physical buttons, etc. I wonder if the Japanese aren't at some cultural/linguistic innovation disadvantage there, at least relative to the very software-oriented US.
Wages for engineers in Japan are nowhere near equal to those in the USA.
Wages for doctors and bankers are even lower in Japan compared to the USA. Wages for food workers and janitors are much higher.
Nevertheless, the top majors at the U of Tokyo are all various forms of Engineering while the top majors at Harvard and its ilk are Economics, Political Science, and Psychology. That tells you a lot about what the smartest young people think is valued in their society.
I was just responding to his sentence that said wages for engineers are as high as the United States and Europe. This is false, at least for software engineers. When I worked in Tokyo I was shocked at how little my co-workers were paid. I am not qualified to comment on the rest of his post.