Mr. Stuart Chambers resigns from a position of CEO of Nippon Sheet Glass NSG) abruptly, citing "family reasons".
Chambers took the position just a bit more than a year ago and made a headline in Japanese business press, as it was a rare case where a Japanese company chose a foreigner in a top position after the company acquired a British company Pilkington.
As you can hear in the interview, he points out "I could not become like a Japanese salaryman, who puts priority in work over family."
That reminded me of my days in Honda - I worked for Honda Motor in the 80's. There, in retrospect, the work-life balance was quite good. We did not have to put long hours like the typical Japanese companies. While I was a bit unhappy that my work hours were limited unfairly against men and therefore was getting less pay, but overall, still the work hours were not terrible at all.
Honda is a truly global company, and now I can say that the company was making a genuine effort to keep the work condition on "global standard". Other Japanese companies, I guess, still have a long way to go.
Breaking news - Yomiuri newspaper reports that NEC is considering merging their mobile handset business with Casio Hitachi, although no source is specified and the article sounds speculative.Japan's largest handset vendor is Sharp with 22% market share, second is Panasonic with 17%. If NEC (12%) gets together with Casio (5%) and Hitachi (4%), then they jumps up to the second position. Casio and Hitachi have already set up a joint venture Casio Hitachi, and NEC is reported to invest into this JV, holds more than 50% and combines their production facility. Panasonic, by the way, has acquired the handset business from Sanyo recently.
NEC is a major vendor to DoCoMo/W-CDMA, and Casio Hitachi is KDDI/CDMA camp, so the combination makes much more sense than NEC-Panasonic talk about combining their development platform together - which was on the news some time ago, and I don't what happened to it after that.
I have been advocating that Japanese vendors have to consolidate QUICKLY. Better late than never!!
Michi
In this animated image on the official Web page of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, a noodle chef, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Democratic Party leader Yukio Hatoyama, widely expected to be the next prime minister, replacing ruling party chief Taro Aso after the balloting on Aug. 30, 2009 for the lower house of parliament, presents a bowl of noodle, trying to please every customer until his bowl is an overflowing concoction of fish, fruit and ice cream. The ad, which has drawn more than 208,000 hits on YouTube, is poking fun at the alleged indecisiveness of Hatoyama and his party, the Democratic Party of Japan. (AP Photo/The official Web page of the Liberal Democratic Party)
OK, this is what I have been talking about. Finally, they are catching up, and there have been SO MUCH discussions about "internet usage for politics" on Japanese blogs/twitter/whatever.
Mr. Daisuke Tsuda, one of the net opinion leaders, said in his blog that the role of "gathering lots of votes" is as important as "casting your own vote" and still to me Japan's political net usage is not about THAT point and more of just "propaganda" or "advertisement" of the politicians, but I believe that people are smarter than politicians and will get it eventually.... I hope.. maybe.
Two word - "bad economy". During the bad economy, no more "me too" ventures rise up. The survivors who had built enough clout before the crash hit will have easier time with less cut throat competition, and can scoop around smaller companies with bottom price, thus stabilize their position even more.
Amazon went through this phase after the first bubble, and became the #1 e-commerce site among zillions of "dot com bubble" companies. Google came in a bit later, but also built up their basic search technology quietly while many others are going under after the bubble burst.
Now, it is extremely hard for a new "fad" SNS to attract financing. Facebook, and for a certain extent Twitter as well, is in a good lead off position like Amazon one cycle ago. During this time, they are gaining critical mass of users and are quickly becoming a default "infrastructure" of human network.
I tend to look at Facebook and Twitter as new types of communication tools, something that adds to a variety in addition to telephone, mobile phone and e-mail, rather than "media", as are often perceived. In that regard, I believe that this bad economy era is GOOD for these "emerging communication tools" to become a next gen infra.
There are so many telephone companies in the world, yet they can talk to each other easily. That is because there are "finite" number of international carriers and they can negotiate interconnection among themselves. It is easier to come up with standard of ways of doing business among themselves. Now that we have a clear leader in SNS, with a few more competitors, it becomes much easier to form a federation and to connect among these networks and other services.
Now things are becoming more and more connected. When I write this blog, it gets published in my Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed automatically. For the blog and SNS providers, it is easier to form such loose federation, taking advantage of each specialties. Now it is also much easier for consumers to decide which services to turn to with less number of choices, and that they are connected to each other so you don't have to sign up to zillions of different services.
Isn't it a wonderful world!!?? I kinda like it. In Chinese old story, "Old man Sai(?)'s horse", a lucky incident turns out bad later, and a bad luck turns out to bring lucky result later. "Bad economy" can be a Sai's horse, at least in this SNS world.
Mixi [J] (Asiajin articles), the biggest social networkservice in Japan, starts their OpenSocial compliant application
platform Mixi Appli officially opened to every Mixi user on PC. Mixi
Appli Mobile is planned to follow next month.
Now I am trying out this Typepad's "Blog It" feature - it is quite nice.
So Mixi's new Appli store, Japanese version of Facebook Apps, proved
to be quite successful with a high number of launch - the number of
which I saw briefly on Twitter and looks to have been deleted by now -.
AT&T's no-rehire policy comes under fireVeriSign sells messaging biz to Syniverse for $175 millionCWA, AT&T make headway in contract talksUtilities: Cable should pay telecom rate for pole attachments FairPoint faces new allegations over Verizon network acquisitionAttention broadband providers: There's gold behind that demarc point
As my previous post, Japan's parliament election is officially in progress right now, with the general voting date on August 30.
The law to make it possible to vote overseas passed some years ago, but due to technical difficulties, only "proportional representation" was made possible since 2000, and finally we can also vote for "small election district" since 2007. It was applied to the upper house election last year, and for more important lower house, this is the first time.
So I went to Consulate General of Japan in San Francisco today to cast a ballot. You can do it through Saturday this week in person, or you can send in the ballot via mail. For mailing method, you first have to send your overseas voter certificate to your election district and get the ballot before the election begins, so it takes a long time and I decided to do it in person this time. It also is a bit of nice feeling to actually go and vote with many other people in the same place.
It is interesting that the consulate's PR about the election says "you should collect information about your district's candidates through press or internet". In strict Japanese culture, it would not have been allowed to let such "loose" definition go. In fact, in debate during the law making, the opposition argued that "some people do not have internet access and it would be unfair treatment for these people."
So those were the days. Now there are several database covering statistics about elected officials in Japan, and you can see the party leaders' speech on YouTube. Technology opens the door for wider range of people to participate, in many ways. At least, it is my belief.
Japan's parliament election is coming up at the end of August, and this time, citizens there are feeling "change" in the air. Not just about who will be the next prime minister there, but also about "how" he will be elected. Although the election rules prohibit many types of Internet usage by individual candidates, on the ground of fairness - the remains of the days when Internet was not universally available -, so Obama-style "Net campaign" is impossible, still some interesting activities are happening on the Net this time.
Ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is in danger of losing the majority in the lower house for the first time since 1993, and the major press, including newspapers and TVs, are all predicting that the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) will win, and thus the change of government. Such an important occasion called for a public debate between the leaders of these two parties, and it was held on August 12 hosted by a volunteer organization, 21st Century Rincho.
In the U.S., the presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, aired on TV, forever changed the American politics. In Japan, just because LDP has been in power all the time, there was no need for such a debate, and TV could get by with just showing snippets of party leaders' speeches here and there. This time, however, Japanese people really wanted to see the unedited version of the leaders' debate.
So came the Internet video. On August 12, the real-time streaming was shown on YouTube-like free video service "Nico Nico Douga", with subscribers' comments shown on the screen. You can still watch the recording on Nico Nico, YouTube or on 21st Century Rincho website.
TV showed only the snippets, as usual, and major press kept reporting that DPJ Hatoyama was leading over current prime minister Aso (LDP) in the debate, following the lines of their "change" campaign. However, Net users are expressing a VERY different view.
In the full version, Hatoyama kept giving vague and contradictory statements, at times even painful to watch, and Aso making points much more clearly and sounded more reasonable. Even discounting that the ruling PM has a clear advantage with experience and research power support by government officials, I have to say at least that Hatoyama is a weak public speaker and DPJ's policy is either not strong or not clearly communicated to the public.
And the Net opinion is flaring up, saying that the traditional media is covering up such DPJ's failure and trying to manipulate the public impression. For the first time in the country's history, anybody can now have the access to the non-edited original video. Power of Internet in public disclosure was proven in a dramatic manner.
In 1960, radio listeners thought Nixon won, but TV audience was getting an opposite impression, and the election ended up in Kennedy's victory. It is still not clear whether this debate will have any influence in the election result this time around in Japan, and if it does, it could mean no "change" of government. But more importantly, I believe that people realized the importance of Internet-style information disclosure. And I hope it will give enough scale of shock to wake up the sleepy Japan.
