Re:Japan's Homegrown Operating System
by patio11 on Friday August 21, 2009 @02:39PM
(#778161)
I think you underestimate the needs of products on the Japanese consumer electronics market.
Take the remote control for a karaoke machine. Do you have a mental image of what that looks like? Does your mental image look something like an American TV remote control? Good -- your mental image is accurate as of about 1989.
In 2009, a karaoke machine remote control has Wifi to download the song lyrics that it displays inline, a search engine available in four languages, integration with the mike and system so that it can grade you on your vocal performance without your coworkers seeing if you failed, top 100 charts updated monthly for the last year and yearly for the last decade or so, etc, etc.
Would you like to code directly for that purpose and completely avoid the overhead of an operating system? ;)
(In actual fact, most Japanese electronics are one-offs though. sigh I thank God every day that I took the job in Big Freaking Enterprise Web Apps instead of embedded devices.)
Take the remote control for a karaoke machine. Do you have a mental image of what that looks like? Does your mental image look something like an American TV remote control? Good -- your mental image is accurate as of about 1989.
In 2009, a karaoke machine remote control has Wifi to download the song lyrics that it displays inline, a search engine available in four languages, integration with the mike and system so that it can grade you on your vocal performance without your coworkers seeing if you failed, top 100 charts updated monthly for the last year and yearly for the last decade or so, etc, etc.
Would you like to code directly for that purpose and completely avoid the overhead of an operating system? ;)
(In actual fact, most Japanese electronics are one-offs though. sigh I thank God every day that I took the job in Big Freaking Enterprise Web Apps instead of embedded devices.)