From: "Nik Frengle" <eseller@eimode.com>
[snip]
> *Matsunaga is quite an interesting person, and her story is interesting.
She
> has a freedom of imagination and action which probably are unique to her,
> but which probably have a lot to do with her being a woman, and coming
from
> the private sector.
Some context:
There is an argument (which I've pointed out in this forum a few times
now) that DoCoMo *had* to make a success of i-mode. It had to get lots of
mobile market share, and fast, but on a network that it couldn't really
afford to upgrade to handle typical mobile phone traffic. It had to get
customers to buy something used for talking, but then keep them from talking
too much on it -- some conversation-deterrent/distraction that wouldn't also
piss users off. Quite the opposite of the usual mobile-telecom
requirement -- those folks would probably lobby for free amphetamine
dispensers on every corner if they thought it would increase talking time --
and it was a tall order from any marketing point of view. After crunching
all the numbers, financial concerns (and not, as Benjamin might have it,
DoCoMo being "s-t-u-p-i-d") were a major decision driver for keeping i-mode
on PDC.
i-mode wasn't like Apple's Lisa, an absorbable failure that led on to the
Macintosh's (initially sputtering) success. Apple wasn't looking at any
credible competition in that space; a really usable Windows was still a
glimmer in Gates' eye. Steve Jobs, et al. could afford years of
high-profile, big-ticket screw-ups, and they got them. DoCoMo, however, was
looking at a suddenly-deregulated mobile telecom market that it hadn't
really expected or planned for.
Imagine if IBM had been a U.S. government-regulated monopoly, and had held
computer technology back while keeping the price high, AND also had a lock
on the on-line services. Then imagine that the EU broke IBM's back with
trade-war threats. That's what happened to NTT in the mobile phone space.
This changed everything.
To the points Nik raises:
Matsunaga's freedom of imagination must have played a role. But lots of
systems sink under the fruits of freedom of imagination, and NTT has
sponsored a plethora of blue-sky, sink-to-the-bottom technology initiatives.
Kurt Vonnegut once said that anybody can write science fiction. Truly
disciplined, problem-focused imagination, however, is rare. No doubt
Matsunaga has that. It's certainly what this crisis required.
Matsunaga' freedom of *action*, however, probably had a lot more to do
with the fact that i-mode just *had* to work. Japanese corporations don't
just hand women the reins because they happen to be competent. There has to
be a reason that overwhelms tradition. This is, after all, a country where,
only a few years ago, major corporations could say "We're having a bad year,
so we won't be hiring any women." And hear not a peep. Not from the
judicial system, which nominally oversees the supposed anti-discrimination
laws. Not even from women themselves, sad to say.
Still, apart from endemic corporate sexism, Matsunaga being female was
probably a plus, and NTT probably knew it. Stereotypes aside,
sociolinguistics studies show that women all over the world typically speak
at least half again as many words per day as men; demographics had probably
already shown that women (many of them younger) would be chewing up huge
chunks of DoCoMo's artificially-scarce mobile voice bandwidth. So DoCoMo
would have been shrewed indeed to ask an intelligent woman "What sort of
mobile phone features would be so entrancing that they'd cut into what would
otherwise be your talking time? And how would you package them?"
As for coming from the private sector being a plus: it's a sad fact about
Japanese academia that it underperforms (by a fairly wide margin) its
equivalent in Europe and the U.S. Tokyo University is indisputably the top
university in Japan as a domestic undergraduate preference; in world R&D
rankings, however, it straggles in at around #45, beaten out by the top
schools of countries a fraction of Japan's size. So I'd say that it wasn't
so much that Matsunaga's private-sector origins were a plus as it was that
she wasn't laboring under the minus of being one of those stereotypically
irrelevant, can't-get-a-real-job daigakuin.
> As an aside: I was in New York a few months ago, and was talking to a top
> editor at Harper Collins Business, and mentioned this book. I told her I
> thought it was a really interesting story, and that she should try to pick
> it up. Apparently she thought not. I find it interesting how insular the
US
> book industry is that a hugely successful person such as Ms. Matsunaga
> cannot get her book published there.
Part of this is the "information black hole" phenomenon, I'm sure (it
enters Japan, but never leaves). And America's insularity is, in its own
way, as bad or worse than Japan's. But timing is also important here. If
i-mode hits the U.S. soon, especially if it's specifically branded as
"i-mode", and is successful, Matsunaga's book could be a runaway
best-seller. Until then....well, honestly, if I were a U.S. publisher,
*I'd* just shrug, too, and ask "Was she ever a geisha? Then you might have
something..." :-/
Still want to bet? Negotiate a snazzier title (hey, how about "The i-mode
Incident"? ;-), commission a print-run of 10,000, and I'll find the storage
space. It won't be long now.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
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Received on Wed Sep 5 13:05:18 2001