PACIFIC REPORT : Japan Turns Fanciful in the Evolution of Computers
Two years ago Hideji Takemasa, a 34-year-old designer at NEC Corp., was asked to design an anti-gravity personal computer for a futuristic exhibit on space travel. He came up with a totally new concept: A computer built into a soft rubber wristband with a reduced-size keyboard and a built-in laser scanner.
The idea was fanciful, but a Tokyo-based executive of 7-Eleven stores saw the model and asked NEC to design one to replace the calculator-like bar-code readers currently used for tracking inventory. The new models would allow store workers to take inventory with the scanner while leaving their hands free to stock shelves.
Now, the long-haired, jeans-clad Takemasa heads a seven-member design team that has spent the past year and a half designing a whole line of “wearable” personal computers with everything from hand-held “eyeballs” that record images to goggles that are essentially three-dimensional computer screens. “The idea is to take the computer out of the office and have some fun designing computers that match the human body,” he says.
The NEC effort is a light-hearted look at the future evolution of the personal computer; it’s far from clear how many of the designs will make it to the marketplace. Nevertheless, the effort to build dozens of personal computers shaped differently for different functions, gives insight into Japan’s approach to technological development and suggests that Japan’s apparent inability to crack the American personal computer market may be misleading as to their future strength in selling products.
While American computer companies are focusing on the Holy Grail of developing super-fast, easy-to-use computers, Japanese companies are busily spinning the still-evolving technology off into a range of products aimed for mass markets, some of which have failed but others of which have taken off to become large new business.
Take computer games. American companies developed game software to run on cheap personal computers. That market has grown little. The real growth market was created by Nintendo, which built a multibillion-dollar company by manufacturing computers custom-designed to run game software.
The approach is partially a result of Japan’s traditional focus on hardware rather than software to solve problems. American software companies, for example, have developed dozens of sophisticated word-processing programs that all run on personal computers. Japanese companies have also improved the software for word processing, but their primary focus has been to develop easy-to-use dedicated word processors where the software is built into the system and require fewer steps for users to operate. Today, specialized word processors outsell personal computers in Japan.
“Dedicated machines are an easy product sell,” says Bill Smale, partner of Smale/Brooks Ventures K.K., a Tokyo-based consulting company that helps Japanese firms find technology partners in America. “People are more willing to buy products if you don’t have to fiddle around too much to learn to use it.”
Japan’s success in these niche areas doesn’t change the fact that the country has a dismal record in penetrating the American personal computer market. But even that could change. The laptop and notebook computer business--now the only high-growth area in personal computers--is on the way to being completely dominated by Japanese manufacturers. Japanese companies are today the only significant source for the liquid crystal screens used in laptops, and they have proven themselves successful at miniaturizing electronic components to create compact products.
Toshiba is the market leader in the burgeoning laptop field. Citizen Watch Co. makes Compaq’s laptop computer, and Sony will build the Apple laptop to be announced later this month.
But the effort to spin off products from the personal computer technology may be the big growth area. Not all of Japan’s spinoff products will be successful.
Sony’s Discman, a compact disc that reads text and pictures from discs much like the music discs, has done poorly because of a lack of software. Fujitsu has taken the first step of putting the technology together in an impressive multimedia machine, the FM Towns. It offers English lessons, for example, complete with verbal cues, visual scenes and text. But the software is unimpressive, and the machine is not selling well.
Still, Fujitsu and Sony have committed themselves to improving the quality and reducing the cost of their products. “Once a good, cheap products is out there, good software will be developed for it,” says Tatuzumi Furukawa, general manager of Fujitsu’s Personal Systems Division.
Some have argued that the impending merger of technology from television (images), compact discs (sound) and computers (data) will provide American firms a unique opportunity to break into the consumer electronics market.
“We are a nation of people that don’t know how to program VCRs,” John Sculley, Apple Computer’s chief executive, said during a recent trip to Japan. He suggested that Apple could offer Japanese companies the software they need to make consumer products easier to use and to generate a new spurt in sales.
But even if Apple does succeed in selling the software to Japan, most observes are betting that it will be the Japanese who ultimately combine the disparate technologies to generate new products.
“When it’s a question of merging lots of different kinds of technology, you need to have the broad technology base to differentiate your products,” says Furukawa. “We have the research base and the manufacturing technology.”
While Japanese companies pursue their trial-and-error product development strategy until they find a hit product, critics complain that American companies are focused on the smaller high-margin, technological frontier leaving the mass market behind.
“As the technology gets older and moves into the consumer marketplace, U.S. companies have tended to give up because they don’t think they can make any money out of it,” Smale says. “Americans aren’t good at finding new uses for old technology.”
Yet, ironically, it is to the best minds in American universities and start-ups firms that Japan is looking to for many of its ideas. Through its investment in Santa Clara based-Poquet Computers, Fujitsu picked up ideas for reducing the power consumption of laptops so they can be built smaller and lighter. Although Poquet products have not been successful, the company’s ideas have been incorporated into super-light Fujitsu laptops being sold in Japan.
Japan has not given up on software altogether. On the University of Tokyo campus, a peek inside a rectangular cement building provides clues to the directions the Japanese are taking.
Ken Sakamura, an information science professor at the university, is working on an ambitious project, known by the acronym TRON, to develop a computer standard that would allow computers embedded in a variety of products used in the home or factory to talk to one another. The project, as originally conceived, was supposed to provide a comprehensive Japanese standard as an alternative to such standards as Microsoft’s basic personal computer software.
“Japanese makers aren’t succeeding in personal computers because they aren’t a consumer product yet,” says Sakamura. “You have to think of ways to overcome people’s anxiety toward computers. They have to become a natural part of life like electricity.”
Japanese companies are working with Sakamura on the project, but few have adopted the TRON system for their own products. Instead, the project seems to have reinforced the point that Japan’s true strength is in using new technology to build useful products rather than to devise ingenious new basic technology such as operating systems.
The strongest interest in TRON, for example, has come from the construction companies that recently collaborated to complete an “intelligent house.” The futuristic house built in the middle of downtown Tokyo has more than 1,000 tiny computers connected to sensors that direct windows and curtains to open and shut with temperature changes both inside and outside the house. A laser disc in the kitchen shows images along with recipes for cooking and sets the oven to the appropriate temperature.
Even the toilet is designed to analyze urine samples at will. In the future, the information might be sent directly to the homeowner’s doctor. Because all the systems use the common TRON interface, they can theoretically be networked together. The construction companies see the offering of computerized homes as a way to boost margins with new options easily understood by consumers.
Takemasa, the NEC designer, suggests that engineers have been too confined in the way they have looked at computers. “It is like Japanese omanju (bean paste cakes). A lot of computers have different skins but contain the same bean paste (filling) inside,” he says. By giving his designers free reign to come up with new ideas, he says, he forces the product engineers to rethink the way they look at their products. “Some of them just laugh, but others understand what we are trying to do,” Takemasa says.
So do some customers. In one instance, a shipbuilding executive who saw the NEC computer screen goggles asked the company to design a similar product to be used on construction sites. The foreman could use the goggles to view three-dimensional blueprints of a ship and use the information to direct workers on how to combine the estimated 1,000 building parts that must be assembled.
A ski-resort operator has expressed interest in an armband cellular phone designed by NEC that can be dialed by voice so skiers can talk to friends on the slopes.
Japan’s Personal Computer Market
The production of personal computers by Japanese firms is expected to grow nearly sixfold between 1982-92. But the percentage exported is rising more slowly--from 16% in 1982 to an estimated 25% in 1992.
