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A comment on The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology (2021). Parent comment

Re:The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology ... by RajT88 on Saturday October 21, 2023 @10:02PM (#37972209)
Back in 2009, I visited Tokyo for work. What I learned from the folks in my local office is the deployment software my company made tooling for was not very popular.

The reasons were mainly that most of that software was made by Western (English speaking, specifically) countries and they did not trust it. They were not exactly wrong - software tends to work best on English systems, unless it was developed by a local company. I heard of some really embarrassing Korean translation issues that even as a person just with Google as my Korean language skill, I could validate the translation issue. Like Korean 101 kinda mistakes.

So Japanese companies were using vastly inferior deployment software, which would basically RDP into an interactive session and replay inputs, because that software worked fine in Japanese.

...Or also very common was sneakernet deployment with DVD's and thumbdrives, making the lowest workers do the running around.

*I do not know the current state of software deployment in the Japanese market.

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Re:The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology ... by MichaelZuo on Sunday October 22, 2023 @05:01AM (#37973899)
If I was a busy decision maker at a major Japanese firm with a dozen direct reports and a hundred balls in the air simultaneously, and if I could even spot translation issues in a few minutes on the polished demo presented to upper management, then there's no way I would ever assume anything is correct with the software when I'm not looking.

Let alone my subordinate's subordinate's subordinate who would actually be using the software day in day out with their job on the line.

So it's a very sensible heuristic. If it's supposed to be a serious enterprise software product, offered for sale in Japan, then spending a few million dollars to hire expert technical translators to double check everything should not be an issue.

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