It is ironic that you point to Apple's success as being at least partly the result of the fact that Apple is not a Japanese company. Inside Japan, Apple's customer service and support are absolutely awful. As for DoCoMo, they have lost their way inside Japan as well, as they have been losing customers in droves to Softbank and AU, and they still don't get it. Both Apple and DoCoMo seem to have completely lost touch with their Japanese customers.
Why Apple Isn’t Japanese
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At this point, it is worth taking another look at the cautionary tale of DoCoMo. Today it is trapped in a domestic market with a diminishing population, watching as its nimbler rivals at home grab an ever-bigger piece of the shrinking mobile pie. Its only hope for decisive growth would have been to leapfrog into the global market. But it didn't happen, thanks mainly to the company's limited cultural horizons and unimaginative management. Just three years ago the value of DoCoMo's shares amounted to about 10 times that of Nokia's. Today Nokia (based in Finland, with a population of 5 million versus Japan's 127 million) has a market capitalization more than double that of DoCoMo's. That puts Nokia in the realm of other global giants like Apple, Google and Vodafone. And just look at who tops the list: China Mobile.
This drives home the point that the lesson for "them" (the Japanese) isn't necessarily that they should be more like "us" (the Americans). It's merely to warn that some serious adjustments might be in order. Over the next century, disruptive innovations won't be coming only from countries like the United States. They'll also be emerging from dynamic, hungry, rising economies that offer plenty of room for risk-taking, flights of fancy and cross-border synthesis. If the Japanese want to be a part of that club, they'll have to revamp not only how they think about technology, but how they think about themselves.
With Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo
© 2007
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