ESP – Product Engineering – Platform and Software Products

Tatsuo Tanaka in his paper “The Competitiveness of Japan’s Software Industry” attempts to clearly bring out reasons why Japan has not been able to lead the pack in the manner it does in the manufacturing industry. Tanaka’s research indicates that Japan excels in producing custom and embedded software, but lags when dealing with packaged business and online software.
Japan’s area of strength has always been hardware and considering that embedded software is incorporated in hardware is an obvious reason for its quality to match the hardware. Japan’s focus on custom software can be attributed to the reason that most Japanese company’s handover software development to subsidiaries to develop software for in-house use, and that ends up being customized with specific extensions.  Besides, the tendency to form long term business partnerships with their customers result in software being developed customized to that particular customer. If there were indeed short term relationships, companies would try to generalize on the product that they developed so that the initial investment is not wasted and moulded for newer and newer customers, besides inculcating the use of standardized third-party software in the products that they develop. As the global market is more inclined towards business/general purpose software, companies in Japan which concentrate more on custom software are not in a position to compete in the software export market.

Software products offered by organizations in Japan are developed in bits and pieces (modules) by various subsidiaries who may in turn request the services of other first tier contractors who in turn may forward that to other contractors. Despite intense quality focus (as is the norm in Japan), the end product would contain software developed using varied technologies, processes and standards with pieces involving very less generalization.
The need is to develop a process model which is going to help make Japanese products viable globally – the technical aspect of which involves the strategies for internationalization and subsequent localization. To quote from a communication with an Infosys employee who has spent a major part of his career interfacing with Japanese customers – “The American and European markets have products which are widely used. The product companies in Japan too have their own products which are in the same space. However, they lack competiveness in terms of features. The problem is that most software products are mangled to meet Japan specific requirements like specific encoding types (SJIS, EUC etc), specific hardware platforms, specific cultural expectations etc. What is required is a methodology which can be used to guide these Japan specific products to compete globally with established products and at the same time maintain their very Japan characteristics- and this includes aspects like product positioning, differentiation etc in addition to internationalization and localization”

Considering the effort and investments that have already gone into making some of the products, and the fact that these products have done exceedingly well in the domestic market, Japanese customers typically would expect the effort to ‘globalize’ their software to be minute and there lies the challenge. Though such projects are often driven by a set of initial requirements, it is important to look beyond just what has been specified. The base requirement of "internationalization" would mean a lot of proactive contribution based on experience of how products work across continents, countries and cultures and there is a possibility that the current product would need a "re-architecting" to achieve this flexibility. With years of experience in developing customized software for the domestic market, it is important that a good case study is prepared in a way that could convince the customer of the need to adapt to the change. One related challenge is to get customers to adapt to new technology. In a product that we were expected to globalize a couple of years ago, it required a lot of effort to convince the customer of the need to use the latest technologies available with .NET. The customer insisted on using C++/MFC and Visual Basic simply because most of the company's resources worked on these technologies in supporting their other legacy customized products. Their C++ based products having been highly successful in the domestic market, it required a lot of convincing to explain the advantages of using .NET technologies in the context of this product and the global market.

There seems to be a wind of change blowing across the Japanese software industry and a realization that custom products for the domestic market will not provide a wide market share in the face of alternatives available with software from companies out of Japan, whose products have modern features. Such companies are able to access a wider market across geographies because I18N is an inherent characteristic of their software thus allowing them to build on their initial investment. In the face of the changing world it has become inevitable that the Japanese software industry is now retrospecting on how it has to position itself in the global market. We have often interacted with Japanese Fortune 500 companies who want us to contribute to help place their software in the global market and such requests are increasing ever year.