On Fri, 7 Sep 2001, Nick May wrote:
> I think the "dirty little secret" is that the site wants our ad
> impressions.
The "dirty little secret" seems to me to be that J@pan, Inc. has
been consistently more negative toward the whole keitai thing than
has been warranted. I was pretty apalled by their recent issue on
handset manufacturers. Their thesis was that Japan may be ahead now,
but as handsets get more and more complex, it's going to be a matter
more of software engineering than hardware expertise, and the Japanese
manufacturers won't be able to keep up because software is a very
difficult problem. (They use the recent handset recalls as evidence
towards this.)
Well, first the article seems to ignore that handsets in Japan have had
much more extensive software than those outside Japan. So Japanese handset
manufacturers have more experience than anyone else in making software
for handsets.
And then it seems to rest on the unstated assumption that the American
(or other) manufacturers are going to find the software a less hard
problem than the Japanese, especially as the complexity of phones
approaches that of computers. Absurd enough as it is, this hidden
assumption is directly contradicted in the article when they mention
(twice!) Window's infamous blue screen of death, a direct example that
the Americans, too, find software to be a difficult problem.
J@pan, Inc. is an interesting magazine, but I tend to take their analyses,
especially when it comes to keitai, with a rather large grain of salt.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 3 5778 0123 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
[ Need archives? How to unsubscribe? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Fri Sep 7 08:24:53 2001