Nintendo seems to care quite a lot (I worked at Opera when the two companies built the Wii browser together. Wow. They were incredibly brutally perfectionist, in a painful but somehow admirable way. I've never seen a company doing so many iterations of some particular detail before that.)

But yeah, I agree, whenever a large Japanese company that is not Nintendo does software (at least for consumers), you can pretty much expect a disaster.

(I know there's a small group of startups that do good stuff - I am not talking about them.)

I think there is an interview where Steve Jobs said as much in regards to Sony and why they didn't own the market before the iPod.

Maybe the reason we think of asian hardware companies unable to build good software is tainted by the fact that one big american hardware company (Apple) managed to do so (build good software, I mean).

I mean, which other large american hardware-centric companies have managed the transition to software well?

I don't disagree, but I would imagine most base their view on the titans of each country. Apple and Sony got a lot easier to compare in the 2000's and Sony really did have bad software (friggin e-reader). Steve Jobs talked about Sony a lot in interviews. I would bet if we talk South Korean products, Samsung would be the archetype. Microsoft for their part makes nice hardware with pretty good software to back it up.

I haven't used a PlayStation in a long time so I don't know the current state, and I would guess Nest is not helping the US side of the equation. Apple isn't exactly covering itself in glory in the last couple of iOS releases (never mind the "California" series of OS X releases).

The PS3 software (based on FreeBSD) had quite nice usability but horrible system level performance, particularly when it came to disk/filesystems. You'd end up watching software update install progress bars more than play actual games.

The PS4 has a weird UI that feels oddly half-finished, but does okay on system level performance. It's sort of where the Xbox 360 was in 2005.

That's cool to hear from the other side; I was at Nintendo for many years and worked closely with the team that directed the browser, so I know exactly who you're talking about (though I wasn't with them for the Wii browser). All Nintendo software is developed like that, and it's still different from how the major American software companies work, but it's very effective for what they do.

Obviously I'm biased, but I agree Nintendo is the only major Japanese company that has any idea how to write software. They also have a legacy of incredibly talented programmers that they respect more than most Japanese companies.

This. A programmer at a big Japanese company has about the same status as the guy on the loading dock. It's something you do when you're fresh out of school and only as long as you have to.