While it's certainly interesting to read about this sort of thing - and I'm interesting in all the computer history - it's worth pointing out that some very large percentage of all computer systems, from every country and every era failed.
So it would be a mistake to read too much into this project being Japanese, or indeed criticize their goals and failures. Like all of their contemporaries they boldly went where no-one had gone before, and like the vast majority of their contemporaries (and most everyone since) discovered limitations in both the technology of the day, and their own abilities.
The important thing is not that they failed. The important thing is that they tried.
Not to disagree with you or the commenters pointing out other Japan-specific factors, but I think there is one more possible explanation for the project's failure: its top-down, government-bureaucrat-led nature. I've lived in Japan for forty years and have worked at a national university for the past twenty. The government regularly launches initiatives, sets goals, and promotes catch phrases that are supposed to lead to greater progress and prosperity. But, because the initiators and funders are often only tenuously connected to the complex and dynamic reality, the projects become rigid and wasteful, and eventually wither and die, more often than not.
> The government regularly launches initiatives, sets goals, and promotes catch phrases that are supposed to lead to greater progress and prosperity.
Some stuff has worked pretty well. I registered for a MyNumber card after years of dragging my feet. Now I can check how much tax I've paid, how much I have in my retirement fund, health insurance things, and a bunch of other stuff from my phone in like 10 seconds all from a single app. Previously I'd need to take a half day off, bring my wooden stamp to the appropriate government office, and wait for 10-30 minutes in order to make sure my stuff is in order.
I'm actually amazed how well it works.
Japan also builds infrastructure really fast.
It's not perfect, and some things lag behind other countries, but some things blow some other countries out of the water. If anything, I'd say the government moves pretty quickly with a lot of decisions (one consequence of being what's effectively a one party state, I suppose). Companies, particularly big ones, are more risk-averse.
For tech and immigration Japan has it all figured out.
No illegal immigration because illegal
No cheesing population growth because over time - a long time - it will repair itself
No high tech because it's not a good thing per se - fax machines and such
Basically the difference between a short term gains company versus long term gains. And look at many of their businesses, many proud to be 1000+ years old and such. Now that's long term gains.
And so the MyNumber as in my view a poor decision. In USA We have had something like MyNumber for a very long time, but because now it's been hacked, now it is called EveryonesNumber. So now I can check how much tax my neighbor has paid, how much my neighbor has in their retirement fund, my neighbor's insurance, a bunch of other stuff in like 10 seconds for like 400 million neighbors.
I've lived in Taiwan for a while, not nearly as long as you have in Japan, but long enough that I have a couple observations I'd be interested in your take in, about "old hats" such as yourself.
The first is that the folks that immigrated decades ago tend to hold on to the perception they had upon arrival to the country, and the various impressions, for the rest of their lives there, and these impressions inform all future observations they have about the country. For example in Taiwan a lot of older American immigrants will talk about things like crime or the police as if it was still the KMT era when Taiwan was basically a different country, and their thoughts are really strange to hear when considering modern taiwanese police (who are basically teddy bears) or crime rates (extremely low).
The second is that, having spend decades in the country to which they immigrated, which is probably longer than they lived in their origin country, they seem to view everything that strikes them as odd, inefficient, or bad, as unique to their new home country. In this case such as your perception of Japan as being lead top-down by bureaucrats, when that description to me applies to basically every liberal democracy on earth. Thus:
> The government regularly launches initiatives, sets goals, and promotes catch phrases that are supposed to lead to greater progress and prosperity. But, because the initiators and funders are often only tenuously connected to the complex and dynamic reality, the projects become rigid and wasteful, and eventually wither and die, more often than not.
imo, this is true for most government-led initiatives in nearly every country on earth. Not that I'm arguing against government-lead initiatives because they do result in sometimes incredible things like train infrastructure, spaceships, the internet, medical breakthroughs etc, but for the most part it seems politicians make big pitches to get elected and then just maintain status quo.
Obviously Japan has some uniquely bureaucratic things about the culture as a whole (lol faxes), but on the other hand this doesn't seem to be an obstacle considering they have some of the safest pedestrian-friendly streets in the world, some of the best public transit, an excellent healthcare system, low crime rates, low homelessness, low unemployment, etc. On the ground they're doing much better than many countries.
What do you think? You probably know much more about such things given your time in Japan as well as the fact that you work at a university.
Thanks for the thought-provoking comments and questions! I'm away from my computer right now—in a coffee shop at Ueno Station in Tokyo, in fact. I'll reply again at length tonight or tomorrow.
Regarding old-timers: I’m sure the people you met in Taiwan are, as you said, several decades behind in their perceptions of the country where they live, but I really don’t know how typical that is. Among the long-term foreign residents of Japan that I know, there are several broad categories: those who have completely assimilated into the country and language; those who have settled down here with an identity divided between Japan and their home country; and those whom I think of as typical expats—living and working here, but knowing little of the language, having a social life that revolves around embassies, foreigners’ clubs, and international schools, and definitely not expecting to stay for the rest of their lives. I fall somewhere between the first and second categories. But even the more expat types here are not likely to have the same out-of-date perceptions that you have noted in Taiwan: Japan, while having changed a lot over the decades I’ve been here, has not undergone a similar transformation in government or social conditions.
As far as the tendency to overgeneralize based on one’s local experience—well, I am certainly guilty of that, and, as a sibling comment notes, most people are. Regarding government-led reforms in Japan, as several sibling commenters also noted, some have been quite successful. Most of my direct experience has been with government initiatives in education, and I have seen directly how those top-down programs can lead to waste and failure. Some prominent examples: The abandoned attempts to reform the main university entrance examination for English [1] and to reduce the number of classroom hours in primary education (“yutori education,” [2]), and the only partially successful G30 program aimed at “globalizing” university education [3]. I have heard complaints from scientist colleagues about similarly misguided government initiatives aimed at promoting specific areas of scientific research. The Fifth Generation Project would seem to be an example of that.
Enjoy the rest of your stay in Japan. I was in Ueno yesterday to lead some students on an excursion around Ameyoko and then to Asakusa. I’m teaching a class this semester on 19th-century foreign descriptions of Japan, based on a book I edited a few years ago [4]. We will be contrasting those writings with tourists’ descriptions today in social media, and I wanted the students—who themselves come from more than a dozen different countries—to spend some time observing first-hand today’s tourists and the places they visit. It was fun. This afternoon, I will lead another short excursion to Shinjuku, Kabukichō, and Shin Ōkubo.
> The second is that, having spend decades in the country to which they immigrated, which is probably longer than they lived in their origin country, they seem to view everything that strikes them as odd, inefficient, or bad, as unique to their new home country.
I would bet that people that never emigrated are even worse about that.
I cant help but say: Americans tend to see high crime rates even when sitting in the safest city in the world. It seems like Americans almost culturally see it as a duty to be afraid.
Pretty easy! I have plenty of immigrant friends that never learned mandarin and they've been getting by for anywhere between 6-14 years without issue. I recommend learning mandarin of course but for any given thing you need to do there's usually an English escape valve e.g. the English speaking counters at the tax office.
Japan has stagnated and had debt problems over those 40 years. May I ask you if you saw these as they began to accrue and if you think there is a long term strategy to address them?
Seems to me as an alien to the culture, that Japan is uniquely happy to continue on conservatively (culturally) without giving in to medium term fixes(e.g. immigration) but with no long term plan for the economics or population. Is this because of a different cultural view on those things and whether they are successes, or failures?
I’m afraid issues like debt and macroeconomics are outside my expertise. I can only describe my own personal experience: I worked as a freelance translator and copywriter in Japan from 1986 to 2005, and almost all of my clients were Japanese companies. While that period saw the rise and bursting of the bubble economy and what has since been called the Lost Decade (or Decades), I personally felt no effect. My income grew steadily throughout that period, and I experienced no impact from the bursting of the bubble. Superficially, the Tokyo and Yokohama areas where I have lived never looked like they were suffering from economic stagnation. Just yesterday, on the train from Tokyo to Yokohama, I was struck by several large new office buildings going up just north of Shinagawa and the many construction cranes visible elsewhere.
>So it would be a mistake to read too much into this project being Japanese,
As a Japanese(-American) I can tell you why this project failed and more broadly why Japan's computer industry has failed outside of vidja gaemz (and that too is on its way out).
So why did the Japanese fail? It's very simple: Lack of cooperation. The article describes the project "was a collaborative effort of the Japanese computer industry" but the results could not put any more mud on that thought.
Japanese companies HATE cooperating, they will not create nor utilize common standards nor share knowledge with each other. Japanese companies will strive at every turn to create a captive market, hoping that once you've set foot in their little quagmire you will stay stuck with them.
If you ever wondered why Canon camera lenses do not work on Nikon cameras and vice versa, why Kenwood microphones do not work with ICOM radios and vice versa, why Sony insisted on Memory Stick over SD card, why Toshiba threw out NAND flash technology, and so on then this is why. Try naming even a single international industrial standard to come out of Japan, you probably can't and I don't blame you. Sharing is not in Japan's DNA.
Contrast the US computer industry where our companies besides Apple can and will cooperate to create and utilize common standards and push the market wider and forwards. PCI is a foremost example, but the very foundation of the industry is built on IBM PC-compatibles.
All this means Japan will always be stuck with a bunch of small, individual pies nobody will care about, losing to the rest of the west who cooperate (and nowadays China who force entire industries at gunpoint) for a much bigger pie. You can't win when you're all trying to drag each other down in a zero sum game.
>and nowadays China who force entire industries at gunpoint
China's software sector was arguably at its most innovative when it was in what can only be described a state of perpetual warfare. During the so called "QQ-360 wars" companies didn't just not cooperate, they pulled stuff like this:
"Qihoo, in turn, updated its software to strip away access rights for key components of QQ, while essentially labeling the program spyware. (The jury's still out on whether Qihoo is right.) In response to Qihoo partially disabling QQ, Tencent then forced Chinese users to choose between using QQ or using 360--you can't use both. This is akin to Apple saying you can't view Google websites on your Mac because some Android phones have multitouch. To add PR-based insult to software-based injury, users of the older web-based QQ found their interface replaced with a letter about Qihoo's alleged misdeeds, creating the impression that Tencent had blocked Web QQ on all machines just to spite 360 users."
The Chinese tech sector was full of mutual sabotage like this and while it was at times annoying for users, the absurd level of competition arguably benefited the ecosystem overall. I'd argue Japan if anything doesn't compete enough, there's often not strong enough of a focus on growth and clawing market share back.
This reminds me of electronic payment systems like SUICA and ICOCA.
Once upon a time: The Kanto region had SUICA which was introduced and pushed by JR East. The Kansai region had ICOCA which was introduced and pushed by JR West.
Yes, the two JR companies are affiliated and work together...ish.
No, the two payment systems are NOT compatible with each other. It's only since the last 10 years or so that SUICA and ICOCA coverage has overlapped enough that holding just one or the other has become practical; you needed both if you did any amount of travelling between the regions.
Or monopoly. Suica is a JR East product, so baked in interop across Japan would mean near total domination for small electronic payments by JRE. That's bad.
Although, in hindsight, that wouldn't have been as terrible as it sounds. VISA payWave would have been even more DOA than it is today in Japan if it was done that way.
What ended up happening is that actually universal payment systems like credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, and JCB) and digital wallets (PayPay, Alipay, Apple Pay, Google Pay) were ultimately successful in carving up the formerly cash-dominated pie, forcing SUICA and ICOCA to open themselves up to broader interoperability including beyond just JR offerings.
Also, note that JCB is the only Japanese one of those universal payment systems. All the others are either American or Asian ex-Japan (PayPay which is South Korean, Alipay which is Chinese).
That's a strange timeline. Suica transit and payment started in 2001, flip phone integration in 2004, Android in 2010. PASMO-Suica interop started in 2007, expanding to 10 cards across regions in 2013. Apple Pay with NFC launched in 2016, iPhone 7 with FeliCa launched in 2016, PayPay was 2018. Those all came after success of Suica and its slowly expanded mutual interoperations.
JCB is also a card brand, not a payment system. System is more like payment networks like CARDNET.
> Japan's computer industry has failed outside of vidja gaemz
Worth noting that the big video game companies in Japan—Nintendo, Sony, Square Soft, etc. are atypical Japanese companies too, run a bit differently than the others. Which is no doubt a big reason for their success.
You might well be 100% right. I'd like to see the Japanese succeed, actually.
However, it was simply not possible for anyone to succeed at AI in the early 80's. It took some Nobel-prize-winning software, a change of approach, and a massive increase in compute power to finally break through.
I think that we also needed a much larger training corpus than was available in the 1980s. Back then the largest textual data sets were orders of magnitude smaller.
The SD Card was developed by two Japanese companies (Panasonic and Toshiba) and Sandisk.
VHS is another Japanese standard, adopted by multiple manufacturers.
Then there's the MSX standard...
Japanese industry is no doubt somewhat different and may have its issues. But I don't think it's as simple a picture as you paint... some external factor is often required to force large companies to cooperate. Those factors may be more common outside Japan, but I don't see that the fundamental issues are very different.
>The SD Card was developed by two Japanese companies (Panasonic and Toshiba) and Sandisk.
Yes, but that is after Toshiba threw away NAND flash technology saying Intel invented it (yes, really...) and Sandisk went and picked up free real estate. Not to mention Panasonic and Toshiba basically got roped into marketing what was Euro-American tech: MMC, SD card's predecessor, was invented by Sandisk and Siemens.
Sony meanwhile never got on board until the bitter end with MemoryStick.
>VHS is another Japanese standard, adopted by multiple manufacturers.
VHS is actually an exception and exemplifies what happens IF (and that's a big if) Japanese companies can be convinced to work together on something bigger than anything they could individually achieve.
There are other examples like Nintendo and the wider Japanese video game industry sharing and protecting patents for each other, or Nissin (Cup Noodle!) giving away their trade secret to kickstart the instant noodle market and improve food supply in the immediate post-war era.
Sadly, these things don't happen that often.
>Then there's the MSX standard...
That's actually a Microsoft invention which was co-marketed with ASCII Corp.
If it wasn't obvious by now, what seemingly "Japanese" international standards we do get are usually not Japanese at all having leadership or core involvement from the rest of the west.
eg: Blu-Ray involved Phillips and HD-DVD involved Warner Brothers, among others.
This actually goes to a sibling comment[1] I made here, which is that stagnant or failing Japanese companies are very likely to explode into success if unshackled from Japanese culture.
Japanese are amazing inventors and innovators, but Japanese are also horrible pioneers and trailblazers.
Sorry, but I am skeptical of your argument that Japanese companies are any less cooperative or more avaricious than companies from other countries.
I am aware of several examples that directly contradict your argument:
- JIS screwdrivers.
- Really, JIS anything.
- MSX computers.
- FourThirds/MicroFourThirds.
And there’s a practical reason for camera brands to have different mounts: different camera systems have different flange distances! You’ll even see multiple mounts within the same brand as the line evolves, as seen with the transition from Minolta/Sony A mount to E mount.
OT but flange focal distance is overmystified. It's just a mechanical interfacing spec.
You can't drill a hole on the sensor and mount lens body on it, and lenses must be placed at exactly focal distance away for parallel beams to converge on film or farther for diverging beam(from non-infinitely-far objects), so body designers pass a distance measurement from film to a known feature(mounting ring top surface) to be able to design a lens barrel. That's the flange-focal distance, sort of a "design length of body" to subtract from your overall lens barrel length.
It's actually possible to drill a hole on the PCB and woodscrewing lens directly on in cases with webcams and CCTV cameras, and in those cases the distance is 0.
For the case of 35mm SLRs, Nikon/Canon/Pentax etc. all have 45mm flange distances, give or take a couple of millimeters. That's basically the minimum to have room to swing the mirror and for a couple of shutter curtains.
So all of them having completely incompatible mounts is because they wanted to compete based on lock-in to a complete system, rather than compete for bodies and lenses separately.
Even worse, the fact that their flange distances are all within a couple of mm makes passive adapters impossible, since just the bayonet part of the mount is longer than that.
The Pentax followed the distance of the M42, which was pretty much an open standard by then, and many manufacturers at the time released lenses in K bayonet. The other camera makers diverged from the standard.
JIS isn't relevant outside of Japan, though. Everyone cares about ISO (USA) and standards like RoHS (Europe), nobody even knows what a JIS is.
>there’s a practical reason for camera brands to have different mounts
The reason is irrelevant, it's a camera and a lens and the fact they are incompatible is inexcusable. Japanese ham radio takes this further; when I said Kenwood microphones don't work with ICOM radios I mean they could use the same number of wires and perhaps even the same connector but they keep the wiring positions proprietary.
So you want to use your Kenwood gear with ICOM? Or Yaesu? Well too fucking bad bud, either get out some wire cutters and a soldering iron or buy into one of the ecosystems like a good Nippon-jin.
Imagine if Logitech, Corsair, Steelseries, and Razor all used USB for their peripherals but the wiring is unique to each of them, and imagine if mobos brands like ASUS and MSI partnered with specific peripheral brands and only featured USB ports compatible with them alone.
That's the Japanese ham radio scene and yes it fucking sucks; and yes, they are getting eaten alive by cheap Chinese ham radio equipment that doesn't do that proprietary shit.
If ham radio is too niche for you, don't worry: It expands to stuff like household appliances too. If you buy a Panasonic microwave oven or fridge and it breaks down you bet your ass you will need to buy replacement parts and perhaps even the repair labor from Panasonic.
We all love to complain about walled gardens and planned obsolescence here in the Anglosphere, but Japan is several orders of magnitudes worse. They make Apple look like a paragon of standards compliance and interoperability.
Essentially all medium to high-end ham radio brands are Japanese. Cheap Chinese radios only dominate at the low end, and often have emission issues. I doubt the Japanese manufacturers are interested in competing here...
Chinese radios do not dominate in Japan, I suspect almost nobody in Japan uses a non-domestic radio. Possibly the primary reason being that they generally have not passed the local emission certifications (which is annoyingly required for all ham radios).
I don't see the incompatible microphone thing as an issue unique to Japan. Pretty much every 1980s computer had weird propriety interfaces. I suspect it was competition that forced them to standardize. You can find similar issues more recently (Apple/Lightening port, Dell/IBM laptop chargers, docking stations etc.)
If you want to point to issue with ham radio in Japan, I'd go with the certification issue, which helps lock non-domestic players out of the market...
Japanese corporate culture has historically been defined by extreme loyalty - salarymen were recruited directly from university and were promised a job for life. Promotion was overwhelmingly from within and based substantially on seniority, with a steep power gradient.
If you were trying to design a system to produce proprietary silos, you'd struggle to beat large Japanese corporations circa 1980.
The lore I've heard is that hire-for-life system was supposed to create psychological safety as a response to excessive siloing habits exhibited by WWII veterans, after surviving in reverse order of their individual bus factors - e.g. skilled maintenance crews, medics, were more likely to be spared in last-ditch assaults, which happened a lot in the war.
IMO, that after series of economic downturns and corporate restructurings during 80s-00s in turn created excessively risk-averse Japanese corporate culture; now that they can be fired, psychological safety was gone, and now maintaining hire-for-life eligibility was seen as crucial. It may have been implicitly reinterpreted as eliminating others is a must for survival.
That's clearly one of major contributing factors to counter-productive behaviors causing stagnation of traditional Japanese tech companies; outright refusing sales, exports, opportunities, that may affect internal politics and justify job terminations.
It sucks to watch a lot of cutting edge technologies slowly evaporating from such fear of terminations. Hopefully someone figures a way out.
The only realistic solution I've seen so far is placing Japanese companies under foreign control.
Kioxia is an absurd example. It went from being Toshiba's rejected-and-dejected NAND flash division to a world leading company literally overnight once it was bought out by an American investment firm (Bain Capital).
On that note, Toshiba proper is in the process of getting bought out and chopped up by Japan Industrial Partners, which is really just a front for an American investment firm (Bain & Company) among others. Olympus also suffered the same fate several years ago.
Another is Sharp, which managed to claw back from bankruptcy once China/Taiwan (Foxconn) bought them out.
Yet another is Nissan, which became relevant on the world stage after getting effectively bought out by France (Renault, Carlos Ghosn). Nissan probably would have gone even bigger if Ghosn and Renault had succeeded in totally taking them over.
Even 7/11 (Seven & i Holdings) which was a rare reverse success story of Japanese management bailing out a failing American business is now in dire straits and risking a hostile takeover from a Canadian business (Couche-Tard).
Japan has the technology, engineers, and designers; what Japan doesn't have is an appropriate culture.
There is one thing that I've seen and heard Japanese and Korean companies having over Western ones: a lack of infighting and turf wars. Everybody pulls in the same direction for the most part. That part of their culture is a really strong suit - it's not only the capable individuals.
If I didn't know better I would think you were trolling. Japanese companies absolutely have infightings and turf wars the likes of which make western ones look like child's play.
Toshiba literally hated their NAND flash division (former Toshiba Memory, now Kioxia) despite being one of their only consistently valuable assets.
Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) despises Sony Music Entertainment Japan (SMEJ) because SIE perceives SMEJ with its subsidary Aniplex to be encroaching upon their core business of video games.
Subaru for the longest time brushed away their team working on EyeSight, now a standard feature and widely heralded, because they perceived the guys working on it as infatuated dead weights.
ANA and JAL loathe each other (also with a healthy mix of commercial vs. governmental rivalry due to their history) and will drag each other down at every turn.
I can go on but I think you can get the idea: Japanese companies really do not like playing together.
Yeah until we got a sort of core dominant systems, late 90s? There were a lot of creative attempts at new systems and ideas. They were either going to surpass the existing systems or fall on their face entirely.
I remember when this project was announced and I rolled my eyes. It has nothing to do with which country or who announced it, it was a typical grandiose announcement around things that are difficult to accomplish, probability of success was low.
Its not a coincidence that the Japanese Economy imploded around the same time. If your country has 40% of global corporate market cap value and then it drops to 8% after an asset bubble bursts, how many ambitious long term projects you can sustain drops too. The US came really close to following the same trajectory with the 2008 bubble bursting. If the banks hadn't been kept afloat and there were alternatives to Wall St a large chunk of the tech sector would have tanked or moved out. There is no global tech leadership possible, if there is no global Finance domination.
>a large chunk of the tech sector would have tanked or moved out
Where exactly would the tech sector have moved to? There's no other country that's really able to absorb high-skill immigrants the way American can and put them to work in that field.
>Entire generations of Indian, Korean, Chinese, Canadian, and European origin founders and executives helped build the US tech industry.
Yes, but they would not have built such companies if they were stuck in their own countries. There's a reason they left those countries. Europe, for instance, is notorious for being extremely unfriendly to startups.
>Look at Flipkart and Ola in India and ByteDance in China for example
I've never even heard of the Indian companies here. As for ByteDance, TikTok is likely to be banned in the US and maybe elsewhere because it seems to be a tool for the CCP. It would be difficult to impossible for any Chinese tech company to achieve the status of Google or Microsoft for this reason. Companies in these countries may be able to do well inside their own countries, but they can never achieve real global dominance.
Pay and upskilling. But domestic tech salaries have risen across Asia now, and the US has gotten much harder to immigrate to.
Most people who joined the tech industry in the US from China and India in the 2000s felt they were getting a bum deal at the time in those countries because of a lack of domestic options, but that's changed since 2008 - especially after the 2008-10 layoffs (I remember those - they were scary, lots of my middle school friends had to move back to China and India because their parents lost their H1B or EB1/2 sponsor).
The next generation of Chinese and Indian startups are now being founded by former diaspora members after the hiring freezes during COVID.
> I've never even heard of the Indian companies here. for ByteDance
That's on you tbh. Not everyone is expected to follow every industry trend per country, but these are all unicorns or exited unicorns that were founded by cohorts in the late 2000s who had the option to move abroad but chose to remain in their own countries.
ByteDance for example had PMF in China well before it entered America as "TikTok", and Flipkart generated $7B a revenue a year - which isn't shabby by Indian or even American standards.
> Companies in these countries may be able to do well inside their own countries, but they can never achieve real global dominance
First, Big Tech (FAANG) is not representative of the tech industry as a whole, and does not have strong PMF in plenty of markets and sectors abroad.
Secondly, this also underestimates the fact that most tech companies have strategy and R&D making parts of their organizations abroad now.
Plenty of NLP work that became LLMs came out of research done in Microsoft China and India, Google Pay's development org is largely in India, Apple's R&D labs in China and India played a major role in developing the manufacturing process and chip design respectively for the iPhone, etc.
>First, Big Tech (FAANG) is not representative of the tech industry as a whole, and does not have strong PMF in plenty of markets and sectors abroad.
It's not? Android is the most popular OS in the world with Apple and Microsoft making up the bulk of the rest.
>As of September 2024, Android, a mobile OS that uses the Linux kernel, has 45.38% of the global market and is the world's most widely used operating system. This is followed by Windows with 25.61%, iOS with 18.39%, macOS with 5.53%, and Desktop Linux with 1.64%.
In the US, iMessage and FB Messenger are fairly prominent messaging services.
Yet in Japan+Taiwan+Thailand it's Line, in Korea it's KakaoTalk, in Vietnam it's Zalo, in China it's WeChat, etc.
Furthermore, the entire publicly listed tech industry globally generates around $6T in revenue, but FAANG represents only $1.4T in revenue. The other $4.6T are spread across multiple decently large companies globally.
In addition, the stereotypical big tech companies are NOT market leaders in plenty of very large market tech sectors. For example, Cybersecurity, ERP, Payment Processing, CRMs, etc.
Big Tech is big, but the world is big as well. There are plenty of markets where a regional competitor or a specialized player can outcompeting big tech. For example, look at Coupang and Flipkart decimating Amazon in SK and India.
>In the US, iMessage and FB Messenger are fairly prominent messaging services.
>Yet in Japan+Taiwan+Thailand it's Line, in Korea it's KakaoTalk, in Vietnam it's Zalo, in China it's WeChat, etc.
Notice how none of those companies in the second line have anything close to a globally dominant position? They're only popular locally. LINE is probably the best here since it's dominant in more than 1 country, unlike the others. Meanwhile, people all around the world use Facebook (though this is falling off lately admittedly). If you want to chat with friends in another country, FB Messenger is probably the go-to chat app for this; your friends in Europe or the US aren't going to be using LINE or KakaoTalk if you live in Japan or Korea, and pretty much no one outside the US/Canada uses SMS messaging (and thus iMessage) for talking to friends/family.
>Furthermore, the entire publicly listed tech industry globally generates around $6T in revenue, but FAANG represents only $1.4T in revenue.
MAMAA (because of Microsoft) builds the infrastructure most of the tech industry is built on. This infrastructure isn't going to come from China; no one in the western-aligned nations would trust infrastructure tech from there.
>look at Coupang and Flipkart decimating Amazon in SK and India.
Inside their own countries, sure, just like KakaoTalk dominating Korea. But just like KT, they have no exposure outside their countries. Amazon is huge not just in the US, but many other countries: Canada, various European countries, Japan, etc.
I think GP's point is that LINE or KakaoTalk or whatever aren't the only ones that are failing to reach global audience, but FAANG is too and "people are stupid they don't understand" or something.
I kind of agree with him, there definitely are region-dependent lunch combo of dominant players rather than there's the single universal set. You seem to have an impression that FB Messenger is globally dominant, and frankly a lot of people do feel that way, my hunch is that's where disagreement is.
I wouldn't say FB Messenger is globally dominant at all. However, for a messaging platform that has global reach, I think it's easily #1 (WhatsApp (also owned by FB) is probably #2). This doesn't mean most people use it, by a long shot; most people mostly only communicate with people inside their own countries, which is why WeChat, KakaoTalk, etc. are dominant inside their own countries.
My broader point is that US big tech companies have global reach, and also tend to set standards. I think the chat stuff is really a red herring; there's far more to tech than chat apps, and those tend to be very regional/national as we've discussed.
And my point is that the people within BigTech who lead product lines that have eaten the world would have not been in the US if there was an extended tech recession in the late 2000s.
The product leaders for Google Docs/Spreadsheet/Slides, Google Chrome, Google Pay, Azure, etc were all on EB1/2s or still in the process of naturalizing in the late 2000s, and if there was an extended tech recession in the US, they absolutely would have returned to India or China.
Same with startups - Zoom, Rubrik, Cohesity, Nutanix, Databricks, Datadog, Spotify, etc would have not moved to or get founded in the US if there was an extended tech recession in the 2008-12 period as the founders were all in the process of naturalizing at the time.
As I've already shown you, multiple startups in Asia have already been founded by alumni from American BigTech during the 2008-12 layoffs and hiring freezes, and already a new generation of startups are getting funded due to the COVID era layoffs and hiring freezes.
> However, for a messaging platform that has global reach
And that's the issue I'm getting at. WhatsApp has strong PMF in Europe and South Asia because the founding team and later leadership at Meta were immigrants from Ukraine and India respectively who were able to execute fairly successful growth strategies in Europe, South Asia, ASEAN, and parts of South America due to domain experience.
Yet they were unable to crack other large markets.
PMF requires domain experience, knowledge, and localization, and a lot of that comes from immigration.
I wouldn't call Israel Europe - it's a night and day difference from Europe, plus that undercuts the Sephardim, Mizrahi, Druze, and Israeli Arab contributions to Israel.
Also, buses actually works in Europe :p
But yes, the startup scene is strong in Israel, and that's thanks to the Israeli diaspora in SV and Boston funding startups in Israel in the 2000s - especially Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Networks and much of the team at Akamai.
If you happen to click the link at the bottom of the page "HOME PAGE OF applet-magic" like I did, you get one of the fake virus web sites. Just do Ctrl-Alt-Del (on Windows), select Task Manager, sort on Name if you have to, right click on Google Chrome (or whatever your web browser is), and choose End Task. Or just cold start your computer.
But hey lets keep web sites with links like that off Hacker News, what do you say?
It's a long expired domain that originally belonged to that SJSU professor, I doubt he will ever update the links on these articles. That doesn't negate the value of the article itself.
Ebola doesn’t live very long outside the host, so I think you could probably have them put the hundred dollar bill aside for a day or so and then come back and grab it.
That page did absolutely nothing with JS off; just shows a blank page. Now I know it's not worth turning JS on for either, like the majority of the stuff I come across.
I gotta side with anigbrowl - the Wikipedia page[1] on the Fifth Generation Project is a much better read than this article. I'd encourage anyone interested in this topic to give it a look. For even more detail, consult the Feigenbaum & McCorduck book[2] mentioned by AlbertCory. It's a very interesting story.
Wow. This is amazing. I can't say how happy I am that you posted this. I've never seen this site before... and I explicitly went looking for something like this a while back, and somehow did not find this. I've been fascinated by the FGCS stuff for a long time, and had always thought there must be an archive of that body of knowledge somewhere, but other than a few books on Concurrent Prolog I had not managed to scare up much of it.
Now, I find that more or less all of it is online and available? All the Technical Reports, all the Technical Memoranda, and even the software? Amazing. Now if only I read Japanese...
This project was attempting to spin up relatively exotic hardware and software concurrently. The Lisp folks had less exotic software already more or less established but attempted to spin up corresponding hardware. The 5th generation project failed faster due to its greater ambition. Both failed ultimately due to commodity hardware greatly outpacing the ability of exotic hardware to keep up.
As for "The important thing is that they tried" : would you give them credit for "trying" to invent real-time, neuron-by-neuron brain imaging, in 1982? And giving billions of taxpayer Yen to the effort? How about quantum computers?
Or would you have been justified in saying that there are projects with a better prospect of success right now, and we shouldn't waste the taxpayers' money on things guaranteed to fail?
As for "The important thing is that they tried" : would you give them credit for "trying" to invent real-time, neuron-by-neuron brain imaging, in 1982? And giving billions of taxpayer Yen to the effort? How about quantum computers?
For me, I'd say:
1. Yes
2. Taxation is theft
3. Yes
Or would you have been justified in saying that there are projects with a better prospect of success right now, and we shouldn't waste the taxpayers' money on things guaranteed to fail?
See again: taxation is theft. But regardless of how you fund research, it remains the case that "you don't know what you don't know" and "hindsight is 20/20". I'm certainly not going to slag the Japanese for the effort they put into the 5th gen project just because things didn't work out as favorably as they might have.
And also, while the project might not have met their immediate goals and is deemed a "failure" that doesn't necessarily mean that the research they did is value-less. Speaking for myself, I actually recently went on a bit of a buying binge, buying a bunch of books on the 5th gen project (read that Feigenbaum & McCorduck book ages ago) and related ideas (eg, concurrent prolog). Because I have a hunch there's a kernel of something useful there still waiting to emerge. Now my research may lead me nowhere, but that's OK. And at least in my case I'm spending only my own money.
Let me just repeat: So what ARE your limits? Or are there any?
So I guess you're saying there are no limits? Every project should be funded to the max?
and since you're against taxation, does that mean ordinary people are to be compelled to "voluntarily" fund them? Or where is the money supposed to come from?
and since you're against taxation, does that mean ordinary people are to be compelled to "voluntarily" fund them? Or where is the money supposed to come from?
Honestly, not interested in going any deeper on this topic here on HN. It won't lead to anything productive and will just start a flamewar. In the off chance that you are actually especially interested in hearing my opinion(s) here, drop me an email at prhodes@fogbeam.com and we can continue there. If not, then I'm satisfied to drop this here.
I offered to continue the dialog. You decided to go for the "zinger" approach. I think that tells us both all we need to know about the merits of me continuing this little dialog with you. Have a nice day.
IIUC, the Fifth Generation Computer project was more of James Bond style hallucination than something worthwhile. The project was supposed to produce a completely novel tech stack from hardware to user interface, one such that leapfrog and obsolete all conventional computer systems: it would run on custom AI-optimized parallel CPU designed for a futuristic post-C parallel programming language for all-custom AI inference OS and applications. It was of course all proudly national made with all kinds of scientific theories and inputs from scholars worldwide incorporated into it.
It's like trying to make Star Wars technologies happen by sheer cash flow and technological optimism. All fever dreams.
1. It hasn't really required or designed new computer architecture. Instead it repurposed hardware that was designed and tuned over years by the game industry.
2. It's more empirical. Little to no theory building and more "throwing stuff at the wall to see what fits"
3. Not really "proudly national made" right? I don't think Washington minds being world leading on AI, but from where I'm standing it doesn't seem to be something that's been championed nationally.
The fifth generation story was hyped to the gills in European (and I assume US) AI research circles at the time to increase public funding. It was a bit funny as we were all knees deep into 'nouvelle AI' as a reaction to the crafted reasoning/logic from before, so a thin line had to be walked between 'we need to fund this emergence/embodied/subsymbolic research because the logic/symbolic reasoning stuff is a deadend' and 'those Japanese with their logic/symbolic reasoning approach are going to eat our lunch if you do not give us more money'. Good times were had.
Very interesting story (more context in the related wikipedia entry). Makes you wonder where we are today in terms of computing "generations".
> It seemed that logic programming was a key missing connection between knowledge engineering and parallel computer architectures
This is still missing. And both ingredients, "logic programming" and "parallel computing" are rather arcane and underdeveloped, so many decades later.
The current AI hyperventilation illustrates the impact quite nicely (algorithms and models have no connection to "ground truth", they need expensive and hard to use HPC hardware etc.)
On the other hand we had in the meantime the internet and mobile revolutions. While those are not so fundamental from a pure computing perspective, they have increased the utility of the digital domain tremendously.
It is conceivable that a fifth generation architecture is lurking somewhere in the chaotic mess that is the current technical landscape. E.g. the internet does enable a certain form of massive parallel processing on commodity hardware. And overtures toward "logic programming" are even long-time W3C standards...
But in the end we know by now painfully well that digital technology is not progressing monotonically. By its nature it gets embedded deeply into societies and thus its state reflects progress (or regression) of society as much as technical breakthroughs.
The modern take on "logic programming" is just database query, and that can definitely be parallelized. The issue there is that non-trivial logical inference over a knowledge base (the kind of thing that was popular wrt. expert systems and "fifth generation" proposals) turns out to be computationally challenging unless you heavily restrict the kinds of "inferences" that can be done. I'm not sure that this was clearly understood back in the 1980s or so.
Some of my first work (as a very junior programmer and researcher) in the UK was in part funded and instantiated in the reaction to the 5th generation initiatives. The research community in the UK reacted to what was called "the Alvey report". It led to an explosion of inter uni collaborative projects, the newer GEC 400 (?) Series computer was often deployed in this work. I think it wound up almost exclusively in defence deployment like AWACS roles in the nimrod project. It had a bit of an overheating problem and led to many fine "halt and catch fire instruction" jokes.
The idea that both the 5th generation projects in Japan would work and that without the alvey projects we'd somehow "lose the race" was compelling pressure to seek funds and do things. It didn't turn out that way.
The GEC Series 63 [1] was used in the Alvey programme. I was a founder of a startup that used a 63/40 to provide a (pre-internet) online service over X.25 links. It was a bit too different to a VAX to be able to easily port standard AI software to it.
The GEC 4000 series was what was used for the Nimrod AEW and for other real-time applications as well as for X.25 networking around the UK.
It's like binary system was "invented" like 300 years before it actually has been used, most likely the Japanese idea will actually happen at some point, just that when they were trying to develop it, the technology was not advanced enough for it.
I agree with your assessment. Through the 1980's, corporate Japan seemed to be on a more cooperative path. However, there were major changes during that decade. It's difficult to pinpoint any particular cause, but I think it can be linked to the decline of MITI's influence. MITI was a key to Japan's dominant role leading up to the 1990's.
I believe that MITI's success made it a political target, and politics can kill anything. My friends from MITI tended to share a similar opinion.
If only the Japanese had been willing to make some of our companies' devices for cheap, then they would have found out that we'd be perfectly willing to ship them all of our IP for the promise of a good quarterly earnings call, regardless of what it'd do to our nation's economic and political future.
There’s a somewhat heterodox theory that rather than some kind of AI moonshot, the Fifth Generation project was an attempt to build an alternative interaction model to Latin alphabet keyboards feeding teletypes. The idea (supposedly) was that ideographically centered Japan could not compete in a software market dominated by alphanumeric text I/O; “smarter” systems that could leverage arbitrary natural language (written or spoken) would level the playing field.
> The Japanese Fifth Generation project was a collaborative effort of the Japanese computer industry coordinated by the Japanese Government
> In a sense, Japan's ability to stay the course in pursuit of a long-term payoff-- usually considered one of the country's strongest assets-- turned into a liability.
Japan is an expert at public-private partnerships. Their entire economic development story was based on the government and private enterprises working together. They didn't take an ideological approach to development. They ignored both the neoliberal route and the socialist route.
Well, they’re certainly very good at favoritism, which is basically what the keiretsu-led model ended up being. And favoritism and picking winners only really works as long as you’re able to pick the right winners.
This model works well to supercharge initial growth if done correctly, but eventually you can’t really become richer through exports alone and have to pivot towards more consumption, which can be difficult to pull off.
While it's certainly interesting to read about this sort of thing - and I'm interesting in all the computer history - it's worth pointing out that some very large percentage of all computer systems, from every country and every era failed.
So it would be a mistake to read too much into this project being Japanese, or indeed criticize their goals and failures. Like all of their contemporaries they boldly went where no-one had gone before, and like the vast majority of their contemporaries (and most everyone since) discovered limitations in both the technology of the day, and their own abilities.
The important thing is not that they failed. The important thing is that they tried.
Not to disagree with you or the commenters pointing out other Japan-specific factors, but I think there is one more possible explanation for the project's failure: its top-down, government-bureaucrat-led nature. I've lived in Japan for forty years and have worked at a national university for the past twenty. The government regularly launches initiatives, sets goals, and promotes catch phrases that are supposed to lead to greater progress and prosperity. But, because the initiators and funders are often only tenuously connected to the complex and dynamic reality, the projects become rigid and wasteful, and eventually wither and die, more often than not.
> The government regularly launches initiatives, sets goals, and promotes catch phrases that are supposed to lead to greater progress and prosperity.
Some stuff has worked pretty well. I registered for a MyNumber card after years of dragging my feet. Now I can check how much tax I've paid, how much I have in my retirement fund, health insurance things, and a bunch of other stuff from my phone in like 10 seconds all from a single app. Previously I'd need to take a half day off, bring my wooden stamp to the appropriate government office, and wait for 10-30 minutes in order to make sure my stuff is in order.
I'm actually amazed how well it works.
Japan also builds infrastructure really fast.
It's not perfect, and some things lag behind other countries, but some things blow some other countries out of the water. If anything, I'd say the government moves pretty quickly with a lot of decisions (one consequence of being what's effectively a one party state, I suppose). Companies, particularly big ones, are more risk-averse.
For tech and immigration Japan has it all figured out.
No illegal immigration because illegal
No cheesing population growth because over time - a long time - it will repair itself
No high tech because it's not a good thing per se - fax machines and such
Basically the difference between a short term gains company versus long term gains. And look at many of their businesses, many proud to be 1000+ years old and such. Now that's long term gains.
And so the MyNumber as in my view a poor decision. In USA We have had something like MyNumber for a very long time, but because now it's been hacked, now it is called EveryonesNumber. So now I can check how much tax my neighbor has paid, how much my neighbor has in their retirement fund, my neighbor's insurance, a bunch of other stuff in like 10 seconds for like 400 million neighbors.
I've lived in Taiwan for a while, not nearly as long as you have in Japan, but long enough that I have a couple observations I'd be interested in your take in, about "old hats" such as yourself.
The first is that the folks that immigrated decades ago tend to hold on to the perception they had upon arrival to the country, and the various impressions, for the rest of their lives there, and these impressions inform all future observations they have about the country. For example in Taiwan a lot of older American immigrants will talk about things like crime or the police as if it was still the KMT era when Taiwan was basically a different country, and their thoughts are really strange to hear when considering modern taiwanese police (who are basically teddy bears) or crime rates (extremely low).
The second is that, having spend decades in the country to which they immigrated, which is probably longer than they lived in their origin country, they seem to view everything that strikes them as odd, inefficient, or bad, as unique to their new home country. In this case such as your perception of Japan as being lead top-down by bureaucrats, when that description to me applies to basically every liberal democracy on earth. Thus:
> The government regularly launches initiatives, sets goals, and promotes catch phrases that are supposed to lead to greater progress and prosperity. But, because the initiators and funders are often only tenuously connected to the complex and dynamic reality, the projects become rigid and wasteful, and eventually wither and die, more often than not.
imo, this is true for most government-led initiatives in nearly every country on earth. Not that I'm arguing against government-lead initiatives because they do result in sometimes incredible things like train infrastructure, spaceships, the internet, medical breakthroughs etc, but for the most part it seems politicians make big pitches to get elected and then just maintain status quo.
Obviously Japan has some uniquely bureaucratic things about the culture as a whole (lol faxes), but on the other hand this doesn't seem to be an obstacle considering they have some of the safest pedestrian-friendly streets in the world, some of the best public transit, an excellent healthcare system, low crime rates, low homelessness, low unemployment, etc. On the ground they're doing much better than many countries.
What do you think? You probably know much more about such things given your time in Japan as well as the fact that you work at a university.
Thanks for the thought-provoking comments and questions! I'm away from my computer right now—in a coffee shop at Ueno Station in Tokyo, in fact. I'll reply again at length tonight or tomorrow.
Looking forward to it! - posted from a coffee shop next to Kodemmacho Station near Akihabara, ironically, just popping by after Japan burn ;)
Thanks again for the questions!
Regarding old-timers: I’m sure the people you met in Taiwan are, as you said, several decades behind in their perceptions of the country where they live, but I really don’t know how typical that is. Among the long-term foreign residents of Japan that I know, there are several broad categories: those who have completely assimilated into the country and language; those who have settled down here with an identity divided between Japan and their home country; and those whom I think of as typical expats—living and working here, but knowing little of the language, having a social life that revolves around embassies, foreigners’ clubs, and international schools, and definitely not expecting to stay for the rest of their lives. I fall somewhere between the first and second categories. But even the more expat types here are not likely to have the same out-of-date perceptions that you have noted in Taiwan: Japan, while having changed a lot over the decades I’ve been here, has not undergone a similar transformation in government or social conditions.
As far as the tendency to overgeneralize based on one’s local experience—well, I am certainly guilty of that, and, as a sibling comment notes, most people are. Regarding government-led reforms in Japan, as several sibling commenters also noted, some have been quite successful. Most of my direct experience has been with government initiatives in education, and I have seen directly how those top-down programs can lead to waste and failure. Some prominent examples: The abandoned attempts to reform the main university entrance examination for English [1] and to reduce the number of classroom hours in primary education (“yutori education,” [2]), and the only partially successful G30 program aimed at “globalizing” university education [3]. I have heard complaints from scientist colleagues about similarly misguided government initiatives aimed at promoting specific areas of scientific research. The Fifth Generation Project would seem to be an example of that.
Enjoy the rest of your stay in Japan. I was in Ueno yesterday to lead some students on an excursion around Ameyoko and then to Asakusa. I’m teaching a class this semester on 19th-century foreign descriptions of Japan, based on a book I edited a few years ago [4]. We will be contrasting those writings with tourists’ descriptions today in social media, and I wanted the students—who themselves come from more than a dozen different countries—to spend some time observing first-hand today’s tourists and the places they visit. It was fun. This afternoon, I will lead another short excursion to Shinjuku, Kabukichō, and Shin Ōkubo.
[1] https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210903/p2a/00m/0na/02...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutori_education
[3] https://kobe-cufs.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/2523/files/nenpo59-0...
[4] https://www.gally.net/jatsi/index.html
> The second is that, having spend decades in the country to which they immigrated, which is probably longer than they lived in their origin country, they seem to view everything that strikes them as odd, inefficient, or bad, as unique to their new home country.
I would bet that people that never emigrated are even worse about that.
I cant help but say: Americans tend to see high crime rates even when sitting in the safest city in the world. It seems like Americans almost culturally see it as a duty to be afraid.
>Americans tend to see high crime rates
A small rise in crime is reported as a crime wave, because that grabs the attention of the older people that still consume news.
Or political hacks complain about high crime when it is down. Refuting this isn’t effective.
Topic change, but how manageable is living in TW nowadays as somebody who knows 0% of any Chinese (Simp./Trad.)?
Pretty easy! I have plenty of immigrant friends that never learned mandarin and they've been getting by for anywhere between 6-14 years without issue. I recommend learning mandarin of course but for any given thing you need to do there's usually an English escape valve e.g. the English speaking counters at the tax office.
Japan has stagnated and had debt problems over those 40 years. May I ask you if you saw these as they began to accrue and if you think there is a long term strategy to address them?
Seems to me as an alien to the culture, that Japan is uniquely happy to continue on conservatively (culturally) without giving in to medium term fixes(e.g. immigration) but with no long term plan for the economics or population. Is this because of a different cultural view on those things and whether they are successes, or failures?
I’m afraid issues like debt and macroeconomics are outside my expertise. I can only describe my own personal experience: I worked as a freelance translator and copywriter in Japan from 1986 to 2005, and almost all of my clients were Japanese companies. While that period saw the rise and bursting of the bubble economy and what has since been called the Lost Decade (or Decades), I personally felt no effect. My income grew steadily throughout that period, and I experienced no impact from the bursting of the bubble. Superficially, the Tokyo and Yokohama areas where I have lived never looked like they were suffering from economic stagnation. Just yesterday, on the train from Tokyo to Yokohama, I was struck by several large new office buildings going up just north of Shinagawa and the many construction cranes visible elsewhere.
>So it would be a mistake to read too much into this project being Japanese,
As a Japanese(-American) I can tell you why this project failed and more broadly why Japan's computer industry has failed outside of vidja gaemz (and that too is on its way out).
So why did the Japanese fail? It's very simple: Lack of cooperation. The article describes the project "was a collaborative effort of the Japanese computer industry" but the results could not put any more mud on that thought.
Japanese companies HATE cooperating, they will not create nor utilize common standards nor share knowledge with each other. Japanese companies will strive at every turn to create a captive market, hoping that once you've set foot in their little quagmire you will stay stuck with them.
If you ever wondered why Canon camera lenses do not work on Nikon cameras and vice versa, why Kenwood microphones do not work with ICOM radios and vice versa, why Sony insisted on Memory Stick over SD card, why Toshiba threw out NAND flash technology, and so on then this is why. Try naming even a single international industrial standard to come out of Japan, you probably can't and I don't blame you. Sharing is not in Japan's DNA.
Contrast the US computer industry where our companies besides Apple can and will cooperate to create and utilize common standards and push the market wider and forwards. PCI is a foremost example, but the very foundation of the industry is built on IBM PC-compatibles.
All this means Japan will always be stuck with a bunch of small, individual pies nobody will care about, losing to the rest of the west who cooperate (and nowadays China who force entire industries at gunpoint) for a much bigger pie. You can't win when you're all trying to drag each other down in a zero sum game.
>and nowadays China who force entire industries at gunpoint
China's software sector was arguably at its most innovative when it was in what can only be described a state of perpetual warfare. During the so called "QQ-360 wars" companies didn't just not cooperate, they pulled stuff like this:
"Qihoo, in turn, updated its software to strip away access rights for key components of QQ, while essentially labeling the program spyware. (The jury's still out on whether Qihoo is right.) In response to Qihoo partially disabling QQ, Tencent then forced Chinese users to choose between using QQ or using 360--you can't use both. This is akin to Apple saying you can't view Google websites on your Mac because some Android phones have multitouch. To add PR-based insult to software-based injury, users of the older web-based QQ found their interface replaced with a letter about Qihoo's alleged misdeeds, creating the impression that Tencent had blocked Web QQ on all machines just to spite 360 users."
The Chinese tech sector was full of mutual sabotage like this and while it was at times annoying for users, the absurd level of competition arguably benefited the ecosystem overall. I'd argue Japan if anything doesn't compete enough, there's often not strong enough of a focus on growth and clawing market share back.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/china/2010/11/10/the-secret-win...
This reminds me of electronic payment systems like SUICA and ICOCA.
Once upon a time: The Kanto region had SUICA which was introduced and pushed by JR East. The Kansai region had ICOCA which was introduced and pushed by JR West.
Yes, the two JR companies are affiliated and work together...ish.
No, the two payment systems are NOT compatible with each other. It's only since the last 10 years or so that SUICA and ICOCA coverage has overlapped enough that holding just one or the other has become practical; you needed both if you did any amount of travelling between the regions.
Japan seriously hates cooperation.
Or monopoly. Suica is a JR East product, so baked in interop across Japan would mean near total domination for small electronic payments by JRE. That's bad.
Although, in hindsight, that wouldn't have been as terrible as it sounds. VISA payWave would have been even more DOA than it is today in Japan if it was done that way.
What ended up happening is that actually universal payment systems like credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, and JCB) and digital wallets (PayPay, Alipay, Apple Pay, Google Pay) were ultimately successful in carving up the formerly cash-dominated pie, forcing SUICA and ICOCA to open themselves up to broader interoperability including beyond just JR offerings.
Also, note that JCB is the only Japanese one of those universal payment systems. All the others are either American or Asian ex-Japan (PayPay which is South Korean, Alipay which is Chinese).
That's a strange timeline. Suica transit and payment started in 2001, flip phone integration in 2004, Android in 2010. PASMO-Suica interop started in 2007, expanding to 10 cards across regions in 2013. Apple Pay with NFC launched in 2016, iPhone 7 with FeliCa launched in 2016, PayPay was 2018. Those all came after success of Suica and its slowly expanded mutual interoperations.
JCB is also a card brand, not a payment system. System is more like payment networks like CARDNET.
JCB has its own payment network in Japan. In other countries they piggy back off AmEx or Discover/Novus.
> Japan's computer industry has failed outside of vidja gaemz
Worth noting that the big video game companies in Japan—Nintendo, Sony, Square Soft, etc. are atypical Japanese companies too, run a bit differently than the others. Which is no doubt a big reason for their success.
You might well be 100% right. I'd like to see the Japanese succeed, actually.
However, it was simply not possible for anyone to succeed at AI in the early 80's. It took some Nobel-prize-winning software, a change of approach, and a massive increase in compute power to finally break through.
The only thing we needed was the compute. Everything else had been discovered by the 80s.
I think that we also needed a much larger training corpus than was available in the 1980s. Back then the largest textual data sets were orders of magnitude smaller.
Using neural nets. The approach taken towards AI in the 80’s was much less compute intensive.
Neural nets with hidden layers is literally older than the Apollo 11 landing. That doesn't make sense but it is.
Read TFA. The Fifth Generation Project involved expert systems & prolog, not neural nets.
You mention SD Cards.
The SD Card was developed by two Japanese companies (Panasonic and Toshiba) and Sandisk.
VHS is another Japanese standard, adopted by multiple manufacturers.
Then there's the MSX standard...
Japanese industry is no doubt somewhat different and may have its issues. But I don't think it's as simple a picture as you paint... some external factor is often required to force large companies to cooperate. Those factors may be more common outside Japan, but I don't see that the fundamental issues are very different.
>The SD Card was developed by two Japanese companies (Panasonic and Toshiba) and Sandisk.
Yes, but that is after Toshiba threw away NAND flash technology saying Intel invented it (yes, really...) and Sandisk went and picked up free real estate. Not to mention Panasonic and Toshiba basically got roped into marketing what was Euro-American tech: MMC, SD card's predecessor, was invented by Sandisk and Siemens.
Sony meanwhile never got on board until the bitter end with MemoryStick.
>VHS is another Japanese standard, adopted by multiple manufacturers.
VHS is actually an exception and exemplifies what happens IF (and that's a big if) Japanese companies can be convinced to work together on something bigger than anything they could individually achieve.
There are other examples like Nintendo and the wider Japanese video game industry sharing and protecting patents for each other, or Nissin (Cup Noodle!) giving away their trade secret to kickstart the instant noodle market and improve food supply in the immediate post-war era.
Sadly, these things don't happen that often.
>Then there's the MSX standard...
That's actually a Microsoft invention which was co-marketed with ASCII Corp.
If it wasn't obvious by now, what seemingly "Japanese" international standards we do get are usually not Japanese at all having leadership or core involvement from the rest of the west.
eg: Blu-Ray involved Phillips and HD-DVD involved Warner Brothers, among others.
This actually goes to a sibling comment[1] I made here, which is that stagnant or failing Japanese companies are very likely to explode into success if unshackled from Japanese culture.
Japanese are amazing inventors and innovators, but Japanese are also horrible pioneers and trailblazers.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41876563
Sorry, but I am skeptical of your argument that Japanese companies are any less cooperative or more avaricious than companies from other countries.
I am aware of several examples that directly contradict your argument:
- JIS screwdrivers.
- Really, JIS anything.
- MSX computers.
- FourThirds/MicroFourThirds.
And there’s a practical reason for camera brands to have different mounts: different camera systems have different flange distances! You’ll even see multiple mounts within the same brand as the line evolves, as seen with the transition from Minolta/Sony A mount to E mount.
OT but flange focal distance is overmystified. It's just a mechanical interfacing spec.
You can't drill a hole on the sensor and mount lens body on it, and lenses must be placed at exactly focal distance away for parallel beams to converge on film or farther for diverging beam(from non-infinitely-far objects), so body designers pass a distance measurement from film to a known feature(mounting ring top surface) to be able to design a lens barrel. That's the flange-focal distance, sort of a "design length of body" to subtract from your overall lens barrel length.
It's actually possible to drill a hole on the PCB and woodscrewing lens directly on in cases with webcams and CCTV cameras, and in those cases the distance is 0.
For the case of 35mm SLRs, Nikon/Canon/Pentax etc. all have 45mm flange distances, give or take a couple of millimeters. That's basically the minimum to have room to swing the mirror and for a couple of shutter curtains.
So all of them having completely incompatible mounts is because they wanted to compete based on lock-in to a complete system, rather than compete for bodies and lenses separately.
Even worse, the fact that their flange distances are all within a couple of mm makes passive adapters impossible, since just the bayonet part of the mount is longer than that.
The Pentax followed the distance of the M42, which was pretty much an open standard by then, and many manufacturers at the time released lenses in K bayonet. The other camera makers diverged from the standard.
>several examples
JIS isn't relevant outside of Japan, though. Everyone cares about ISO (USA) and standards like RoHS (Europe), nobody even knows what a JIS is.
>there’s a practical reason for camera brands to have different mounts
The reason is irrelevant, it's a camera and a lens and the fact they are incompatible is inexcusable. Japanese ham radio takes this further; when I said Kenwood microphones don't work with ICOM radios I mean they could use the same number of wires and perhaps even the same connector but they keep the wiring positions proprietary.
So you want to use your Kenwood gear with ICOM? Or Yaesu? Well too fucking bad bud, either get out some wire cutters and a soldering iron or buy into one of the ecosystems like a good Nippon-jin.
Imagine if Logitech, Corsair, Steelseries, and Razor all used USB for their peripherals but the wiring is unique to each of them, and imagine if mobos brands like ASUS and MSI partnered with specific peripheral brands and only featured USB ports compatible with them alone.
That's the Japanese ham radio scene and yes it fucking sucks; and yes, they are getting eaten alive by cheap Chinese ham radio equipment that doesn't do that proprietary shit.
If ham radio is too niche for you, don't worry: It expands to stuff like household appliances too. If you buy a Panasonic microwave oven or fridge and it breaks down you bet your ass you will need to buy replacement parts and perhaps even the repair labor from Panasonic.
We all love to complain about walled gardens and planned obsolescence here in the Anglosphere, but Japan is several orders of magnitudes worse. They make Apple look like a paragon of standards compliance and interoperability.
Essentially all medium to high-end ham radio brands are Japanese. Cheap Chinese radios only dominate at the low end, and often have emission issues. I doubt the Japanese manufacturers are interested in competing here...
Chinese radios do not dominate in Japan, I suspect almost nobody in Japan uses a non-domestic radio. Possibly the primary reason being that they generally have not passed the local emission certifications (which is annoyingly required for all ham radios).
I don't see the incompatible microphone thing as an issue unique to Japan. Pretty much every 1980s computer had weird propriety interfaces. I suspect it was competition that forced them to standardize. You can find similar issues more recently (Apple/Lightening port, Dell/IBM laptop chargers, docking stations etc.)
If you want to point to issue with ham radio in Japan, I'd go with the certification issue, which helps lock non-domestic players out of the market...
What do you attribute this to?
Japanese corporate culture has historically been defined by extreme loyalty - salarymen were recruited directly from university and were promised a job for life. Promotion was overwhelmingly from within and based substantially on seniority, with a steep power gradient.
If you were trying to design a system to produce proprietary silos, you'd struggle to beat large Japanese corporations circa 1980.
The lore I've heard is that hire-for-life system was supposed to create psychological safety as a response to excessive siloing habits exhibited by WWII veterans, after surviving in reverse order of their individual bus factors - e.g. skilled maintenance crews, medics, were more likely to be spared in last-ditch assaults, which happened a lot in the war.
IMO, that after series of economic downturns and corporate restructurings during 80s-00s in turn created excessively risk-averse Japanese corporate culture; now that they can be fired, psychological safety was gone, and now maintaining hire-for-life eligibility was seen as crucial. It may have been implicitly reinterpreted as eliminating others is a must for survival.
That's clearly one of major contributing factors to counter-productive behaviors causing stagnation of traditional Japanese tech companies; outright refusing sales, exports, opportunities, that may affect internal politics and justify job terminations.
It sucks to watch a lot of cutting edge technologies slowly evaporating from such fear of terminations. Hopefully someone figures a way out.
>Hopefully someone figures a way out.
The only realistic solution I've seen so far is placing Japanese companies under foreign control.
Kioxia is an absurd example. It went from being Toshiba's rejected-and-dejected NAND flash division to a world leading company literally overnight once it was bought out by an American investment firm (Bain Capital).
On that note, Toshiba proper is in the process of getting bought out and chopped up by Japan Industrial Partners, which is really just a front for an American investment firm (Bain & Company) among others. Olympus also suffered the same fate several years ago.
Another is Sharp, which managed to claw back from bankruptcy once China/Taiwan (Foxconn) bought them out.
Yet another is Nissan, which became relevant on the world stage after getting effectively bought out by France (Renault, Carlos Ghosn). Nissan probably would have gone even bigger if Ghosn and Renault had succeeded in totally taking them over.
Even 7/11 (Seven & i Holdings) which was a rare reverse success story of Japanese management bailing out a failing American business is now in dire straits and risking a hostile takeover from a Canadian business (Couche-Tard).
Japan has the technology, engineers, and designers; what Japan doesn't have is an appropriate culture.
It's frustrating watching as a Japanese-American.
There is one thing that I've seen and heard Japanese and Korean companies having over Western ones: a lack of infighting and turf wars. Everybody pulls in the same direction for the most part. That part of their culture is a really strong suit - it's not only the capable individuals.
>a lack of infighting and turf wars.
If I didn't know better I would think you were trolling. Japanese companies absolutely have infightings and turf wars the likes of which make western ones look like child's play.
Toshiba literally hated their NAND flash division (former Toshiba Memory, now Kioxia) despite being one of their only consistently valuable assets.
Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) despises Sony Music Entertainment Japan (SMEJ) because SIE perceives SMEJ with its subsidary Aniplex to be encroaching upon their core business of video games.
Subaru for the longest time brushed away their team working on EyeSight, now a standard feature and widely heralded, because they perceived the guys working on it as infatuated dead weights.
ANA and JAL loathe each other (also with a healthy mix of commercial vs. governmental rivalry due to their history) and will drag each other down at every turn.
I can go on but I think you can get the idea: Japanese companies really do not like playing together.
VHS, CD, DVD, Blu-ray, MIDI, JAMMA, SD card,
Yeah until we got a sort of core dominant systems, late 90s? There were a lot of creative attempts at new systems and ideas. They were either going to surpass the existing systems or fall on their face entirely.
I remember when this project was announced and I rolled my eyes. It has nothing to do with which country or who announced it, it was a typical grandiose announcement around things that are difficult to accomplish, probability of success was low.
Its not a coincidence that the Japanese Economy imploded around the same time. If your country has 40% of global corporate market cap value and then it drops to 8% after an asset bubble bursts, how many ambitious long term projects you can sustain drops too. The US came really close to following the same trajectory with the 2008 bubble bursting. If the banks hadn't been kept afloat and there were alternatives to Wall St a large chunk of the tech sector would have tanked or moved out. There is no global tech leadership possible, if there is no global Finance domination.
No, the Japanese implosion came at the end of the 80's and early 90's. That book is from 1982.
GP is saying the USian tech industry nearly shared the same fate after our bubble burst in 2008
>a large chunk of the tech sector would have tanked or moved out
Where exactly would the tech sector have moved to? There's no other country that's really able to absorb high-skill immigrants the way American can and put them to work in that field.
> Where exactly would the tech sector have moved to
It would have been much more decentralized.
Entire generations of Indian, Korean, Chinese, Canadian, Israeli, and European origin founders and executives helped build the US tech industry.
Heck, a lot of prominent Chinese and Indian startups got their start due to the GFC era layoffs and hiring freezes in the tech industry.
Look at Flipkart and Ola in India, ByteDance in China, and Coupang in SK/US for example
COVID and the recent layoffs had a similar impact on the startup scene as well.
>Entire generations of Indian, Korean, Chinese, Canadian, and European origin founders and executives helped build the US tech industry.
Yes, but they would not have built such companies if they were stuck in their own countries. There's a reason they left those countries. Europe, for instance, is notorious for being extremely unfriendly to startups.
>Look at Flipkart and Ola in India and ByteDance in China for example
I've never even heard of the Indian companies here. As for ByteDance, TikTok is likely to be banned in the US and maybe elsewhere because it seems to be a tool for the CCP. It would be difficult to impossible for any Chinese tech company to achieve the status of Google or Microsoft for this reason. Companies in these countries may be able to do well inside their own countries, but they can never achieve real global dominance.
> There's a reason they left those countries
Pay and upskilling. But domestic tech salaries have risen across Asia now, and the US has gotten much harder to immigrate to.
Most people who joined the tech industry in the US from China and India in the 2000s felt they were getting a bum deal at the time in those countries because of a lack of domestic options, but that's changed since 2008 - especially after the 2008-10 layoffs (I remember those - they were scary, lots of my middle school friends had to move back to China and India because their parents lost their H1B or EB1/2 sponsor).
The next generation of Chinese and Indian startups are now being founded by former diaspora members after the hiring freezes during COVID.
> I've never even heard of the Indian companies here. for ByteDance
That's on you tbh. Not everyone is expected to follow every industry trend per country, but these are all unicorns or exited unicorns that were founded by cohorts in the late 2000s who had the option to move abroad but chose to remain in their own countries.
ByteDance for example had PMF in China well before it entered America as "TikTok", and Flipkart generated $7B a revenue a year - which isn't shabby by Indian or even American standards.
> Companies in these countries may be able to do well inside their own countries, but they can never achieve real global dominance
First, Big Tech (FAANG) is not representative of the tech industry as a whole, and does not have strong PMF in plenty of markets and sectors abroad.
Secondly, this also underestimates the fact that most tech companies have strategy and R&D making parts of their organizations abroad now.
Plenty of NLP work that became LLMs came out of research done in Microsoft China and India, Google Pay's development org is largely in India, Apple's R&D labs in China and India played a major role in developing the manufacturing process and chip design respectively for the iPhone, etc.
>First, Big Tech (FAANG) is not representative of the tech industry as a whole, and does not have strong PMF in plenty of markets and sectors abroad.
It's not? Android is the most popular OS in the world with Apple and Microsoft making up the bulk of the rest.
>As of September 2024, Android, a mobile OS that uses the Linux kernel, has 45.38% of the global market and is the world's most widely used operating system. This is followed by Windows with 25.61%, iOS with 18.39%, macOS with 5.53%, and Desktop Linux with 1.64%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
Depends segment to segment and sector to sector.
Take instant messaging as an example.
In the US, iMessage and FB Messenger are fairly prominent messaging services.
Yet in Japan+Taiwan+Thailand it's Line, in Korea it's KakaoTalk, in Vietnam it's Zalo, in China it's WeChat, etc.
Furthermore, the entire publicly listed tech industry globally generates around $6T in revenue, but FAANG represents only $1.4T in revenue. The other $4.6T are spread across multiple decently large companies globally.
In addition, the stereotypical big tech companies are NOT market leaders in plenty of very large market tech sectors. For example, Cybersecurity, ERP, Payment Processing, CRMs, etc.
Big Tech is big, but the world is big as well. There are plenty of markets where a regional competitor or a specialized player can outcompeting big tech. For example, look at Coupang and Flipkart decimating Amazon in SK and India.
Big Tech is big, but it is not an end-all.
>In the US, iMessage and FB Messenger are fairly prominent messaging services. >Yet in Japan+Taiwan+Thailand it's Line, in Korea it's KakaoTalk, in Vietnam it's Zalo, in China it's WeChat, etc.
Notice how none of those companies in the second line have anything close to a globally dominant position? They're only popular locally. LINE is probably the best here since it's dominant in more than 1 country, unlike the others. Meanwhile, people all around the world use Facebook (though this is falling off lately admittedly). If you want to chat with friends in another country, FB Messenger is probably the go-to chat app for this; your friends in Europe or the US aren't going to be using LINE or KakaoTalk if you live in Japan or Korea, and pretty much no one outside the US/Canada uses SMS messaging (and thus iMessage) for talking to friends/family.
>Furthermore, the entire publicly listed tech industry globally generates around $6T in revenue, but FAANG represents only $1.4T in revenue.
MAMAA (because of Microsoft) builds the infrastructure most of the tech industry is built on. This infrastructure isn't going to come from China; no one in the western-aligned nations would trust infrastructure tech from there.
>look at Coupang and Flipkart decimating Amazon in SK and India.
Inside their own countries, sure, just like KakaoTalk dominating Korea. But just like KT, they have no exposure outside their countries. Amazon is huge not just in the US, but many other countries: Canada, various European countries, Japan, etc.
I think GP's point is that LINE or KakaoTalk or whatever aren't the only ones that are failing to reach global audience, but FAANG is too and "people are stupid they don't understand" or something.
I kind of agree with him, there definitely are region-dependent lunch combo of dominant players rather than there's the single universal set. You seem to have an impression that FB Messenger is globally dominant, and frankly a lot of people do feel that way, my hunch is that's where disagreement is.
I wouldn't say FB Messenger is globally dominant at all. However, for a messaging platform that has global reach, I think it's easily #1 (WhatsApp (also owned by FB) is probably #2). This doesn't mean most people use it, by a long shot; most people mostly only communicate with people inside their own countries, which is why WeChat, KakaoTalk, etc. are dominant inside their own countries.
My broader point is that US big tech companies have global reach, and also tend to set standards. I think the chat stuff is really a red herring; there's far more to tech than chat apps, and those tend to be very regional/national as we've discussed.
And my point is that the people within BigTech who lead product lines that have eaten the world would have not been in the US if there was an extended tech recession in the late 2000s.
The product leaders for Google Docs/Spreadsheet/Slides, Google Chrome, Google Pay, Azure, etc were all on EB1/2s or still in the process of naturalizing in the late 2000s, and if there was an extended tech recession in the US, they absolutely would have returned to India or China.
Same with startups - Zoom, Rubrik, Cohesity, Nutanix, Databricks, Datadog, Spotify, etc would have not moved to or get founded in the US if there was an extended tech recession in the 2008-12 period as the founders were all in the process of naturalizing at the time.
As I've already shown you, multiple startups in Asia have already been founded by alumni from American BigTech during the 2008-12 layoffs and hiring freezes, and already a new generation of startups are getting funded due to the COVID era layoffs and hiring freezes.
> However, for a messaging platform that has global reach
And that's the issue I'm getting at. WhatsApp has strong PMF in Europe and South Asia because the founding team and later leadership at Meta were immigrants from Ukraine and India respectively who were able to execute fairly successful growth strategies in Europe, South Asia, ASEAN, and parts of South America due to domain experience.
Yet they were unable to crack other large markets.
PMF requires domain experience, knowledge, and localization, and a lot of that comes from immigration.
Basically, except it's not that "people are stupid", it's more that a lot of people on HN are myopic and think the tech industry is just 5 companies.
Israel is a definite exception. It is very startup friendly. Just a small market compared to Europe, let alone the US.
I wouldn't call Israel Europe - it's a night and day difference from Europe, plus that undercuts the Sephardim, Mizrahi, Druze, and Israeli Arab contributions to Israel.
Also, buses actually works in Europe :p
But yes, the startup scene is strong in Israel, and that's thanks to the Israeli diaspora in SV and Boston funding startups in Israel in the 2000s - especially Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Networks and much of the team at Akamai.
I was explicitly comparing against Europe. I wasn’t calling Israel part of Europe.
Forgot to add: you add valid points to the conversation though, thank you!
No worries!
The ability to run a trillion dollar deficit cannot be downplayed.
When the Netherlands has too much debt politicians and civil servants alike go into panic mode.
That’s unlikely for 2008. Tech companies and large corps in general had massed a huge amount of cash after the dotcom meltdown.
anyone know of discussion on whether the Plaza Accord had had any effect on the japanese bubble?
tbh the Wikipedia article is a lot better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
If you happen to click the link at the bottom of the page "HOME PAGE OF applet-magic" like I did, you get one of the fake virus web sites. Just do Ctrl-Alt-Del (on Windows), select Task Manager, sort on Name if you have to, right click on Google Chrome (or whatever your web browser is), and choose End Task. Or just cold start your computer.
But hey lets keep web sites with links like that off Hacker News, what do you say?
It's a long expired domain that originally belonged to that SJSU professor, I doubt he will ever update the links on these articles. That doesn't negate the value of the article itself.
A hundred dollar bill crawling with Ebola virus is still worth a hundred dollars, yes. But I would really prefer if nobody tried to hand it to me.
Ebola doesn’t live very long outside the host, so I think you could probably have them put the hundred dollar bill aside for a day or so and then come back and grab it.
That page did absolutely nothing with JS off; just shows a blank page. Now I know it's not worth turning JS on for either, like the majority of the stuff I come across.
The title is somewhat intriguing but the content is extremely light, and on top contains this:
Recently came across this video which goes into history of Japanese computers by Asianometry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEtgzO-Im8w
I gotta side with anigbrowl - the Wikipedia page[1] on the Fifth Generation Project is a much better read than this article. I'd encourage anyone interested in this topic to give it a look. For even more detail, consult the Feigenbaum & McCorduck book[2] mentioned by AlbertCory. It's a very interesting story.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Artificial-Intellige...
One of the researchers involved (I think) also maintains a "Fifth Generation Computer Systems Museum": https://www.ueda.info.waseda.ac.jp/AITEC_ICOT_ARCHIVES/ICOT/...
As the OP article mentions much (most? all?) of the software developed in the project was freely released (under an MIT-like license? https://www.ueda.info.waseda.ac.jp/AITEC_ICOT_ARCHIVES/ICOT/... ) and it seems to be available for download (in source form) from here: https://www.ueda.info.waseda.ac.jp/AITEC_ICOT_ARCHIVES/ICOT/... most of it would only run on the prototype computer they wrote, but some of it was ported to Unix.
Wow. This is amazing. I can't say how happy I am that you posted this. I've never seen this site before... and I explicitly went looking for something like this a while back, and somehow did not find this. I've been fascinated by the FGCS stuff for a long time, and had always thought there must be an archive of that body of knowledge somewhere, but other than a few books on Concurrent Prolog I had not managed to scare up much of it.
Now, I find that more or less all of it is online and available? All the Technical Reports, all the Technical Memoranda, and even the software? Amazing. Now if only I read Japanese...
This project was attempting to spin up relatively exotic hardware and software concurrently. The Lisp folks had less exotic software already more or less established but attempted to spin up corresponding hardware. The 5th generation project failed faster due to its greater ambition. Both failed ultimately due to commodity hardware greatly outpacing the ability of exotic hardware to keep up.
Related. Others?
Fifth-Generation Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36080365 - May 2023 (1 comment)
The Fifth Generation Computing Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569098 - July 2019 (49 comments)
'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16630174 - March 2018 (47 comments)
The Fifth Generation Computer Project in Japan - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8256961 - Sept 2014 (3 comments)
It's somewhat appalling that they don't mention that there's a book with this title:
https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Artificial-Intellige...
As for "The important thing is that they tried" : would you give them credit for "trying" to invent real-time, neuron-by-neuron brain imaging, in 1982? And giving billions of taxpayer Yen to the effort? How about quantum computers?
Or would you have been justified in saying that there are projects with a better prospect of success right now, and we shouldn't waste the taxpayers' money on things guaranteed to fail?
So what ARE your limits? Or are there any?
As for "The important thing is that they tried" : would you give them credit for "trying" to invent real-time, neuron-by-neuron brain imaging, in 1982? And giving billions of taxpayer Yen to the effort? How about quantum computers?
For me, I'd say:
1. Yes
2. Taxation is theft
3. Yes
Or would you have been justified in saying that there are projects with a better prospect of success right now, and we shouldn't waste the taxpayers' money on things guaranteed to fail?
See again: taxation is theft. But regardless of how you fund research, it remains the case that "you don't know what you don't know" and "hindsight is 20/20". I'm certainly not going to slag the Japanese for the effort they put into the 5th gen project just because things didn't work out as favorably as they might have.
And also, while the project might not have met their immediate goals and is deemed a "failure" that doesn't necessarily mean that the research they did is value-less. Speaking for myself, I actually recently went on a bit of a buying binge, buying a bunch of books on the 5th gen project (read that Feigenbaum & McCorduck book ages ago) and related ideas (eg, concurrent prolog). Because I have a hunch there's a kernel of something useful there still waiting to emerge. Now my research may lead me nowhere, but that's OK. And at least in my case I'm spending only my own money.
Let me just repeat: So what ARE your limits? Or are there any?
So I guess you're saying there are no limits? Every project should be funded to the max?
and since you're against taxation, does that mean ordinary people are to be compelled to "voluntarily" fund them? Or where is the money supposed to come from?
and since you're against taxation, does that mean ordinary people are to be compelled to "voluntarily" fund them? Or where is the money supposed to come from?
Honestly, not interested in going any deeper on this topic here on HN. It won't lead to anything productive and will just start a flamewar. In the off chance that you are actually especially interested in hearing my opinion(s) here, drop me an email at prhodes@fogbeam.com and we can continue there. If not, then I'm satisfied to drop this here.
You made some nonsensical statements on HN, and now you're dropping out rather than trying to defend them. Got it.
I offered to continue the dialog. You decided to go for the "zinger" approach. I think that tells us both all we need to know about the merits of me continuing this little dialog with you. Have a nice day.
IIUC, the Fifth Generation Computer project was more of James Bond style hallucination than something worthwhile. The project was supposed to produce a completely novel tech stack from hardware to user interface, one such that leapfrog and obsolete all conventional computer systems: it would run on custom AI-optimized parallel CPU designed for a futuristic post-C parallel programming language for all-custom AI inference OS and applications. It was of course all proudly national made with all kinds of scientific theories and inputs from scholars worldwide incorporated into it.
It's like trying to make Star Wars technologies happen by sheer cash flow and technological optimism. All fever dreams.
Kinda similar to the current AI bubble, don’t you think?
Nah the AI hype doesn't seem similar
1. It hasn't really required or designed new computer architecture. Instead it repurposed hardware that was designed and tuned over years by the game industry.
2. It's more empirical. Little to no theory building and more "throwing stuff at the wall to see what fits"
3. Not really "proudly national made" right? I don't think Washington minds being world leading on AI, but from where I'm standing it doesn't seem to be something that's been championed nationally.
That's not to say it's not a bubble
The fifth generation story was hyped to the gills in European (and I assume US) AI research circles at the time to increase public funding. It was a bit funny as we were all knees deep into 'nouvelle AI' as a reaction to the crafted reasoning/logic from before, so a thin line had to be walked between 'we need to fund this emergence/embodied/subsymbolic research because the logic/symbolic reasoning stuff is a deadend' and 'those Japanese with their logic/symbolic reasoning approach are going to eat our lunch if you do not give us more money'. Good times were had.
Very interesting story (more context in the related wikipedia entry). Makes you wonder where we are today in terms of computing "generations".
> It seemed that logic programming was a key missing connection between knowledge engineering and parallel computer architectures
This is still missing. And both ingredients, "logic programming" and "parallel computing" are rather arcane and underdeveloped, so many decades later.
The current AI hyperventilation illustrates the impact quite nicely (algorithms and models have no connection to "ground truth", they need expensive and hard to use HPC hardware etc.)
On the other hand we had in the meantime the internet and mobile revolutions. While those are not so fundamental from a pure computing perspective, they have increased the utility of the digital domain tremendously.
It is conceivable that a fifth generation architecture is lurking somewhere in the chaotic mess that is the current technical landscape. E.g. the internet does enable a certain form of massive parallel processing on commodity hardware. And overtures toward "logic programming" are even long-time W3C standards...
But in the end we know by now painfully well that digital technology is not progressing monotonically. By its nature it gets embedded deeply into societies and thus its state reflects progress (or regression) of society as much as technical breakthroughs.
The modern take on "logic programming" is just database query, and that can definitely be parallelized. The issue there is that non-trivial logical inference over a knowledge base (the kind of thing that was popular wrt. expert systems and "fifth generation" proposals) turns out to be computationally challenging unless you heavily restrict the kinds of "inferences" that can be done. I'm not sure that this was clearly understood back in the 1980s or so.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41872982
Some of my first work (as a very junior programmer and researcher) in the UK was in part funded and instantiated in the reaction to the 5th generation initiatives. The research community in the UK reacted to what was called "the Alvey report". It led to an explosion of inter uni collaborative projects, the newer GEC 400 (?) Series computer was often deployed in this work. I think it wound up almost exclusively in defence deployment like AWACS roles in the nimrod project. It had a bit of an overheating problem and led to many fine "halt and catch fire instruction" jokes.
The idea that both the 5th generation projects in Japan would work and that without the alvey projects we'd somehow "lose the race" was compelling pressure to seek funds and do things. It didn't turn out that way.
The GEC Series 63 [1] was used in the Alvey programme. I was a founder of a startup that used a 63/40 to provide a (pre-internet) online service over X.25 links. It was a bit too different to a VAX to be able to easily port standard AI software to it.
The GEC 4000 series was what was used for the Nimrod AEW and for other real-time applications as well as for X.25 networking around the UK.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEC_Series_63
It's like binary system was "invented" like 300 years before it actually has been used, most likely the Japanese idea will actually happen at some point, just that when they were trying to develop it, the technology was not advanced enough for it.
I agree with your assessment. Through the 1980's, corporate Japan seemed to be on a more cooperative path. However, there were major changes during that decade. It's difficult to pinpoint any particular cause, but I think it can be linked to the decline of MITI's influence. MITI was a key to Japan's dominant role leading up to the 1990's.
I believe that MITI's success made it a political target, and politics can kill anything. My friends from MITI tended to share a similar opinion.
hmmm
> MITI bureaucrats attempted to deny fledgling Sony the $25,000 the company needed to license transistor technology from Western Electric.
If only the Japanese had been willing to make some of our companies' devices for cheap, then they would have found out that we'd be perfectly willing to ship them all of our IP for the promise of a good quarterly earnings call, regardless of what it'd do to our nation's economic and political future.
What would have been the expected 5th gen computer? An OS with natural language prompt instead of command prompt? So, we finally made it with LLMs.
There’s a somewhat heterodox theory that rather than some kind of AI moonshot, the Fifth Generation project was an attempt to build an alternative interaction model to Latin alphabet keyboards feeding teletypes. The idea (supposedly) was that ideographically centered Japan could not compete in a software market dominated by alphanumeric text I/O; “smarter” systems that could leverage arbitrary natural language (written or spoken) would level the playing field.
The Japanese made Topre switches and they have already greatly increased my happiness.
don't aim at some far goal, aim at being prepared for whatever comes next.
> The Japanese Fifth Generation project was a collaborative effort of the Japanese computer industry coordinated by the Japanese Government
> In a sense, Japan's ability to stay the course in pursuit of a long-term payoff-- usually considered one of the country's strongest assets-- turned into a liability.
Japan is an expert at public-private partnerships. Their entire economic development story was based on the government and private enterprises working together. They didn't take an ideological approach to development. They ignored both the neoliberal route and the socialist route.
Well, they’re certainly very good at favoritism, which is basically what the keiretsu-led model ended up being. And favoritism and picking winners only really works as long as you’re able to pick the right winners.
This model works well to supercharge initial growth if done correctly, but eventually you can’t really become richer through exports alone and have to pivot towards more consumption, which can be difficult to pull off.
come to think of it, early ARPA was pretty much about picking the right winners