推薦閱讀: Why Apple Isn’t Japanese (Newsweek)只有放第一頁

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Why Apple Isn’t Japanese
Once a technology leader, Japan is now struggling to find its
place in the digital age. (原文網址)


Ever heard of DoCoMo? probably not, unless you happen to live in Japan. NTT DoCoMo is one of the world's biggest wireless phone companies. It operates in a ferociously competitive market, boasts about 50 million customers and has been known to produce cutting-edge technology. By all rights it ought to be a star performer in the increasingly global business of wireless communications. Yet DoCoMo's brand is still virtually unknown outside its home country.

This is one story that could have had a very different ending. At the turn of the century DoCoMo executives announced that they were setting out to conquer the world. Their company's star mobile Internet application, known as i-mode, was leading the pack in its home market, and DoCoMo planned to leverage that success into a bid to dictate wireless Internet standards around the world. The company went on a buying spree, trying to gain footholds by purchasing stakes in overseas companies—stakes that soon made for painful losses, and not much else, when the New Economy bubble popped soon thereafter.

The would-be worldbeater proved tone-deaf. DoCoMo managers were so enraptured with their state-of-the-art Internet service that they failed to notice that the long and intricate menus favored by Japanese consumers didn't score with foreign customers who were looking for more direct and intuitive interfaces. One reason for the failure to communicate: not a single person in the senior management of the company was non-Japanese. "With the right approach they could have become a Google," says Gerhard Fasol of the Tokyo consultancy Eurotechnology Japan. "They had the chance—but they blew it."

The fall of DoCoMo is only the most recent story in a long tale of Japanese innovation failures over the past two decades—a huge irony, given that Japan is a technological powerhouse. If you exult in brilliantly bizarre gadgetry, engineering wonkery and prodigious feats of craftsmanship, you'll feel right at home. It's also an extremely sophisticated business environment. The Japanese domestic market is big and nuanced; Japanese consumers are notoriously finicky and demanding.

On the face of things, it would all seem to add up to an entrepreneurial paradise, a playground of creativity and innovation. Japan spent $130 billion on research and development last year (more as a percentage of GDP than the United States or the EU, putting it in third place globally behind Sweden and Finland). It registers, far and away, more patents than any other country—even more than the United States, with more than twice the population.

So you'd think Japan would be confident about its technological future, but you'd be wrong. These days, big business, academia, think tanks, government and the media, as well as the average Japanese salaryman, are all brooding about the state of their economy in the digital era. The educational system is going down the tubes, it's said, generating math and science scores that increasingly lag behind other OECD countries. The government is gridlocked, stalling urgently needed economic reform. Managers are mired in old mentalities, while imaginative newcomers can't find the space or the capital to develop their ideas. It's a syndrome that's sometimes summed up in a single, angst-ridden question: how come we weren't the ones who invented the iPod?