In Japan's case, they kicked the ball into their own net 25 times.
Because of the Keiretsu market power coupled with Japanese culture (social status, financial risks, career risk, labor mobility rates and bankruptcy laws) very few startups existed, especially in this space even though the capital requirements are far lower.
This left all the market power in hands of Sony, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Sumitomo, etc about 30 companies. And in the case of the major hardware vendors they also owned content libraries and firms eg - sony / sony music, bmi, toshiba warner brothers etc. they were extremely protective against piracy and especially digital piracy - this killed them.
We see the same in US, look how much innovation happened in virtually unregulated tech and software but not highly regulated Detroit autos - DOT, DOT, NLRB, OSHA, etc.
This is a weird point to do here, but in my opinion startups aren't the end all be all of innovation: they are needed in a system where incumbents are mostly static, but in different configurations the role of a startup can be accomplished inside behemoths or through joint ventures, or other settings.
To back my point, the Walkman didn't come from two guys in a garage. The GUI wasn't invented by Apple, linux wasn't born out of VC investment, NFC payments weren't brought to market by drop out college hippies.
Absentee leadership with no understanding or care to monetize it - including the pricing on the first Xerox Computers.
Also many deca billion dollar spinouts from Xerox Parc:
1. SGI / silcon graphisc based on Jim Clarke's work on 3D chips.
2. 3Com / ethernet based on Bob Metcalfe's work.
3. Adobe based on John Warnock and Charles Geschke on vector graphics and printing.
etc.
> Absentee leadership with no understanding or care to monetize it
Its not that. Its that pushing digital photography and other stuff and monetizing them would kill their existing business. However you look at it, its a risk.
Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but I feel like it should have been fairly obvious that computers were the future, and their existing business (photocopiers) wasn't exactly going to die, but it was going to become less important as digital documents because normal. We still have photocopiers today, after all, though now they're integrated with digital printers and scanners: people still use paper documents, just in different ways than merely copying them. Someone more far-sighted should have seen this, and seen the value of their PARC work. Obviously, someone there at Xerox did, or else why did PARC exist in the first place? So somehow, they managed to have the vision to enable spending tons of money on this research center and the brilliant minds there, but then the higher-ups were too stupid to actually do anything with all that research. It really doesn't make sense to me.
> Someone more far-sighted should have seen this, and seen the value of their PARC work
Even if someone sees that and is somehow able to sell it to the board, that would also need to be sold to the shareholders. And there comes the real challenge. Its not easy to go to shareholders and say that you are going to start a new product line that will kill the profits of another, but ask the shareholders to trust you, because this is going to be the 'thing' of the future. On one side billions of dollars of investments in stocks, backed by a gigantic market held by a flagship product. On the other side predictions of future.
The investors and even the markets wouldnt like that. In a sense, capitalism hampers innovation by providing the wrong incentives.
In the case of Kodak (my father used by an engineer there and his neighbor at time Kodak also in charge of digital cameras and was warning about digital cameras in the 1970s) and other incumbents like this ,for the current Csuite there is NO incentive to cannabilize the product and take risks and lose revenues (think film, processing, etc) to prepare for the future.
Kodak with digital cameras.
Nokia with smart phones.
etc.
What this comes down to is simply economics and incentives, and how those economics and incentives are changed within and from outside by other forces. That is it.
even the concept of "Galapagos effect"is easily explained by government created market distortions.
1. Japan was a closed country for~250 years, until the US "Gunboats of democracy" opened up Japan under Commodore Perry threatening to flatten Japanese cities. Prior to that there was restricted trade/trading posts with the Dutch, Portuguese, and then Germans.
2. With the US military threats, Japan side the treaty with the US and realized pandora's box was open, they say the Western operations, war and colonies and said, time to get moving. Thus, German and Prussia in particular suited Japan well culturally and in many aspects - so this tight tie up, creating or promoting trading companies or families (Zaibatsu) & forming their own colonies, China, Taiwan, Korea, etc.
3. There are many other factors within the run up to WWII and after but Japan was a major innovator, especially after WWII as central control imploded - think Honda, Sony, etc. the issue is that as PCs came into play Japan was highly centralized again & there were numerous issues of lacking vc or risk capital, social risks, financial risk, labor mobility ,etc. And even today most software devs cannot hardcore sell - imagine 1970, 1980, 1990s.
4. The native ERP market was highly customized (mostly SAP) using SIer's and they wanted it specific to their unique workflows - the old 80% of what I want is not enough - funny enough that is a competitive advantage again.
5. At same time, most of foreign program work was either L10N or integration ,sintalls, support/maintenance for the foreign software vendor - Oracle, SAP, MSFT, etc.
6. Btw the time we got to 1990s, Japan had many innovations in software, BUT this ran into a wall - it had a horrible startup ecosystem and so it was occupied by ossified rent-seeking incumbents like Sony, who fought their own engineers. Sony was the original Apple, Akio Morita the original Steve Jobs, including taking the most important case, Sony vs Universal Studios to the US supreme court and winning. Ipod, imac, etc. are simply the 2.0 or 3.0 version of the sony innovation products. I have interviewed a dozen of these engineers and managers going back to 2006. And also other interviews state side of how products like Slingbox/Slingmedia were just sony products and so on.
7. At this point the social risk, the financial risk, the career risks and labor mobility of joining a startup or high grow firm in nascent industry are greatly reduced, more programming resources than ever, smart hard workers, it is just the opportunities -- opportunities that were artificially restricted by ossified rent seeking incumbents using regulator capture.
Therapy or coaching are presented as the two choices.
But are these appropriate and is there another way?
1. Therapy: Tissues, tears, talking and thorazine.
2. Coaching: Most often asking questions to "lead you to the answer", though in some cases it has slowly evolved to providing some frameworks/models but still almost never resolving to ROI, payout models or physics.
If your computer crashed due to a corrupted file or OS issue would you call a shaman, stoic or therapist to talk about how to reframe the pain or anger of lost time or a coaching to ask questions of how you feel about it, and what resources do you have to fix it or have it fixed?
What about office politics? A toxic client, coworker or executive? A narcissist at home or in the family. And so on.
I find these approaches brittle, inefficient,incomplete, and often non-repeatable aka laden with heavy technical debt.
The paradigm shift is to understand that all of these issues relate to applied psychology bounded by economics (and ultimately by physics), and that psycheis the superpower with repeatable patterns that are computationally deterministic.And that they form a complex system comprised of modules, functions, algorithms, elements and primitives.
Then it is simply a matter of determining your goal/s or objectives, how you will move towards them or resolve them,
such as pain killer, problem slayer, directed problem solving, etc. and while learning simple but very powerful psyche models & psyche functions/forensics that give repeatable results in anticipating, avoiding and/or resolving issues, and moving towards your goals.
Even if you are autistic af, it doesn't matter if you can read an error code or exit code.
The key is this is applicable across all industries, functional areas, and tasks, such hire, fire, promote, love, hate, divorce, stop divorce, sell, buy, negotiate or sue.
It's a leap of faith until the first time it is used and the effortless results come in. And then seen as transparent and repeatable.
