how steve jobs 'out-japanned' japan - sfgate

How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' JapanBy Jeff Yang, Special to SF GatePublished 4:00 am, Friday, January 28, 2011

Jeff Yang muses on how Apple managed to beat the tech titans of Japan by playing their

game, only better

The better part of a month has gone by, and most pundits have already weighed in on this year's

CES -- the global gadget extravaganza that makes Las Vegas the gravitational center of the geek

universe every January. The consensus? Meh.

That's because the cacophony and crowds and celebrity sightings -- is there a rapper who

doesn't have an audio accessory line at this point? -- couldn't disguise the fact that Apple, the

new king of the tech hill, had once again refused to participate in a gathering dominated by

old-guard standouts like Sony, whose gargantuan 25,000 square foot pavilion is always the

show's largest, and which traditionally pulls out the razzle-dazzle stops in its presser (last year:

country pixie Taylor Swift; this year, the stars of "The Green Hornet" -- and their car).

And that meant all the noise and clamor and glitz and glamor would almost certainly be made

moot by whatever game-changing innovations Apple chose to unleash at its next invitation-only

private unveiling a few months later.

Not that the lack of an official presence prevented Apple's fingerprints from being found nearly

everywhere at CES. iPhone and iPad accessories were the only things more ubiquitous than

celebrity-branded headsets, and most of the show's plethora of new services and devices

desperately touted their compatibility with iOS apps and hardware. (Those that didn't, from

smart TVs to smartphones, were instantly benchmarked against existing or fantasized Apple

products -- and more often than not, found wanting.)

In short, despite CES's parade of CEO keynotes and bold-faced name guests, the man who did

the most to shape the show was the one who wasn't there at all.

And given Steve Jobs's recent announcement that he's once again facing health problems, it's

valid to wonder if his absence is something the technology world -- and Apple's millions of

global fans and customers -- may soon have to get used to beyond CES as well.

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Jobs' refusal to attend CES was hardly an accident: Apple has never made a showing at the

event in its three decades of existence, and as long as Jobs is its CEO, it probably never will.

CES is the home of the mainstream, the chorus, the echo chamber; by not attending, Apple

maintains its identity as the maverick, the soloist, the think-different visionary -- even though

its massive success has now made it the world's eighth-largest consumer technology company

by revenue.

That ability to express by omission holds a central place in Jobs's management philosophy. As

he told Fortune magazine in 2008, he's as proud of the things Apple hasn't done as the things it

has done. "The great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products,"

he said. "We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've

got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good

ideas." (Jobs sometimes says this even more bluntly: Nike CEO Mark Parker likes to recount the

advice Jobs gave him shortly after Parker's promotion to the top spot: "You make some of the

best products in the world -- but you also make a lot of crap. Get rid of the crappy stuff.")

Other companies fail to do things because they've overlooked potential openings or are cutting

corners to save money; under Jobs, however, every spurned opportunity is a conscious,

measured statement. It's why the pundits who give Apple products poor reviews for not

including industry-standard components -- for instance, the iMac's lack of a floppy drive -- just

aren't getting it: Apple products are as defined by what they're missing as much as by what

they contain.

To understand why, one has to remember that Jobs spent much of the 1970s at the Los Altos

Zen Center (alongside then-and-current Gov. Jerry Brown) and later studied extensively under

the late Zen roshi Kobun Chino Otogawa -- whom he designated as the official "spiritual

advisor" for NeXT, the company he founded after being ejected as Apple's CEO in 1986, and

who served as officiant when he wed his wife Laurene in 1991.

Jobs's immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of

ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate

aspects of how a culture sees the world, it's nearly impossible to accurately explain -- it's

variously translated as "void," "space" or "interval" -- but it essentially describes how emptiness

interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance. If someone were to ask you what makes

a ring a meaningful object -- the circle of metal it consists of, or the emptiness that that metal

encompasses? -- and you were to respond "both," you've gotten as close to ma as the clumsy

instrument of English allows.

While Jobs has never invoked the term in public -- one of the aspects of his genius is the ability

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principle is, ironically, what has allowed Apple to compete with and beat Japan's technology

titans -- most notably the company that for the past four decades dominated the world of

consumer electronics: Sony.

Learning the rules

Alan Deutschman, Reynolds professor of business journalism at University of Nevada-Reno and

author of "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs" -- the definitive unauthorized biography of the

Apple CEO -- notes that from his early twenties on, Jobs had a fascination with Sony that

bordered on obsession.

"It was very nearly fetishistic, in fact -- he even had a collection of Sony letterhead and

marketing materials," laughs Deutschman. "Sony was a company that Jobs instinctively

admired and saw as model from the very beginning. So it's been an interesting transformation

over time, to see Apple supplant Sony as the center of the consumer technology universe."

Deutschman sees Jobs as having some uncanny similarities to Sony's founder -- not Akio

Morita, who was Sony's CEO and public face, but his elder partner Masaru Ibuka, the proprietor

of the original radio repair shop that evolved into the electronics giant and, during its rise to

market dominance, the company's chairman and the architect of its philosophical foundation.

"Ibuka was really the heart and soul of the company," says Deutschman, who wrote about

Sony's elder statesman in his most recent book, "Walk the Walk." "He was the one responsible

for Sony's sense of purpose. This was a company that was launched in a Tokyo that had been

leveled by firebombing in World War II, that had experienced the kind of destruction associated

with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and whose residents were facing homelessness, hunger and

desperation. And yet Ibuka laid out a mission statement for Sony that was aimed at changing

the world."

That statement was simple and to the point: "Sony will be the company that is most known for

transforming the global image of Japanese goods as being of poor quality." It defined Sony by

what it would not do -- make bad products -- making it something of an omission statement, if

you will.

By way of example, Deutschman tells the story of how Sony entered the color TV marketplace,

noting that in the Sixties, when color TV was going from 3% to 25% of the market, Sony was one

of the few electronics companies that didn't sell a color model. "People were telling Ibuka, 'You

have to come in to this market, everyone will take your market share,'" says Deutschman. "And

Ibuka refused, saying, 'No, we will only do great products. We will only do high quality goods.

We will only do breakthrough technology.'"


of the Trinitron TV. A full 25% brighter than its rivals, Trinitron became the best-selling color

TV for the next quarter century.

"At the time, Sony was committed to not releasing a crappy product just because the market

was there; they waited until they had a truly revolutionary innovation, combined it with great

design and then profited from it for long, long time," says Deutschman. "For decades, Sony was

a perfect place for engineers to fully use their creativity, because it was focused on bringing real

meaning and benefit to society by making great products. Sadly, in the last couple of decades,

Sony has lost its way."

Changing the game

What Sony misplaced, arguably, was its sense of ma -- its understanding of what it shouldn't do,

even if it could.

Buoyed by blockbuster successes like the Trinitron and the Walkman, Sony was led to believe it

could launch any product and create a new market category around it. As a result, points out

USC Annenberg professor and director of new media Andrew Lih, Sony became "too complex,

with too diverse a set of offerings, without sending a clear signal to the customer what the ideal

vision should be for its products."

Lih points out that recent mass-market consumer technology successes have generally had a

simple concept, a clear purpose and a thoughtfully limited set of features and options, giving as

examples the Flip camera, the Kindle, the iPod and the iPhone.

"Consumer electronics are so complex today that they can't simply be a checklist of features,"

says Lih. "The brands that curate their products well, with thoughtfulness and consideration for

the customer, end up the winners. And Sony has hardly done that."

The apex of Sony's why-not-what-the-hell attitude toward product introductions was reached in

September 2007, when -- six months after Apple announced the original iPhone -- it introduced

the $399 Rolly, an egg-shaped MP3 device that would spin around and flap its winglets to the

rhythm of the music it played. The Rolly was a disaster, as anyone would likely have guessed

given its price point and exceptional lameness -- but it failed to teach Sony a lesson.

No better example of this exists than the company's go-for-broke focus on 3-D television. Last

year's CES saw the industry unleash a flood of 3-D TVs, only to encounter ho-hum reactions

from consumers and, subsequently, mediocre sales -- research giant NPD estimates that just 2

percent of all televisions sold in North America were 3-D capable. Rather than consider

whether introducing a nonessential technology with minimal available content was a bad idea,

Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer was quoted by USA Today as saying, "No -- you have to launch


At this year's CES, with the help of "Green Hornet" stars Seth Rogan and Jay Chou, Sony

triumphantly showcased a pair of prototype devices intended to serve as the company's

innovation centerpieces. The first was a glasses-free portable 3-D video player suitable for use

in the car. The second was a Geordi LaForge-esque "personal 3-D viewing visor" that wags

promptly dubbed the "Headman."

Meanwhile, as Douglas Krone, CEO of Dynamism and Gizmine -- sister companies that sell

otherwise-unavailable Japanese gadgets to American early adopters -- notes, the home of Sony

has become the land of Apple.

"I was at a party last night in central Tokyo that happened to have a bunch of twentysomething

guests," he says. "Every time I saw something glowing, it was an iPhone. It was a chilling display

of dominance -- five years ago, you would have seen 99.9 percent Japanese handsets and 0.1

percent Nokias and MotoRAZRs. Softbank's flagship stores look almost comical now, with rows

and rows of iPhones broken only by the occasional row of iPads, in a space that used to have a

wide array of handsets."

The unexpected popularity of the iPhone and iPad in a country hitherto dominated by phones

with a far greater array of features and capabilities has taken many pundits by surprise. A 2009

Wired.com Gadget Lab article, "Why Japanese Hate the iPhone," even predicted that the

iPhone would be a profound flop, with Japanese consumers seeing the device as outmoded

technology offering insufficient support for video and multimedia messaging and a complete

lack of standard (for Japan, anyway) features like a built-in TV tuner. It has instead become a

game-changing hit -- selling over 5 million units and owning, as of the last quarter of 2010, over

72 percent of the country's rapidly expanding smartphone market.

Apple's successful conquest of Sony's home turf could be seen as the final evidence that the

Cupertino company is what Deutschman calls Sony's "spiritual successor." "Under Jobs, Apple

has the kind of passion for design and innovation that Sony did in its heyday," he says.

"Everything they do is the 'greatest thing we've ever done,' which will 'once again change the

world.' And recently, most of the time they've been right."

There have been questions as to whether Apple can continue its stunning run of success in Jobs'

absence -- pointing to how the company foundered after its founder was ousted in 1986. The

difference between then and now is that Jobs has spent much of the past seven years (yes, it's

been that long since Jobs first announced he'd undergone surgery for pancreatic cancer) laying

the groundwork for the company's transition -- not merely in terms of succession, which most

analysts have focused on, but in its fundamental business model.


and around his iconic devices: Seamless cross-device integration; ridiculously simple platforms

for downloading, sharing and streaming content; a one-click payment system that currently

holds more than 100 million active accounts, each with linked credit card information.

The rumors are rife about Apple's soon-to-come move to the cloud -- which would make its

media and application framework both ubiquitous and device-agnostic -- and an even-sooner-

to-come addition of wave-to-pay technology to its mobile devices -- which would allow Apple's

iTunes accounts to be used to purchase real-world goods as well as digital ones.

If so, Jobs's last act as CEO might well be not just to change the world, but to build a new one,

with Apple's technology at its core. That is, if the rumors prove true.

"Who knows?" says Deutschman. "Whatever happens, for the next two or three years, Apple is

in terrific shape. It has incredible momentum. And you know -- no one's made money betting

against Steve Jobs in a very long time."

© 2014 Hearst Communications, Inc.


how steve jobs 'out-japanned' japan - sfgate

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