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How Steve Jobs Got the iPhone Into Japan
hcs_$reboot writes "Masatoshi Son, SoftBank CEO, remembers the early days when he tried to cut a deal with Steve Jobs in order to be the first to offer the not-even-named-iPhone-yet- 'new phone' from Apple, back in 2005. At the time, Son didn't even own a mobile carrier. He then purchased Vodafone, and was indeed the first to sell the iPhone in 2008 (then Au-Kddi in 2011, and DoCoMo in 2013). Today, 75% of smartphones sold in Japan are iPhones."
Android phones far outsell iPhones in Japan. See these charts as just one example
http://kakaku.com/keitai/smartphone/
IPhone sales only surpass Android sales for a few weeks after each new model comes out. Then it settles back down into the top 5 to 8 phones sold being Android phones.
Have you seen how big the Android phones are? Now remember this is Japan. :P
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
The story was hilarious as it showed the sheer depth of incompetence at apple, and Jobs' utter inability to be flexible until reality hit him in the face several times over.
When you think about it, the Japanese market is perfect to iphone's "style over substance" approach. That's how it always functioned, and now just with phones but with many consumer goods ranging from electronics to plush toys (which have a huge adult market in Japan!) Problem is, Japanese have some very specific requirements when it comes to their goods that are typically completely unique to Japan and do not exist outside that country. They need to be made suitable for them functionally and culturally, as they have a very different approach to many things from one we have here in the West.
So initial foray was an unmitigated disaster. People returned early iphones back to stores in droves and the reason was utterly obvious - Jobs' idea for iphone was "same thing everywhere", and Japanese absolutely needed several significant adjustments to their phone, such as integration of certain Japan-centric services and input methods. The crash of iphone in market that everyone thought it would immediately take it by the storm actually got major players like Fujitsu say that Japanese market was so different, Western companies just don't stand the chance.
Then someone at Apple hit Jobs with clue bat hard, "one approach for all markets" paradigm was buried for Japan and iphones sold in Japan were significantly adjusted to match expectations of Japanese public.
Rest was history. While numbers are not quite as silly as this article suggests, Japan today has one of the highest iphone sales per capita in the world, because the general idea behind iphone, the "style over substance" approach is simply what Japanese market and mindset is all about. All it needed was understanding that no, your product is not perfect for all people everywhere and that some important adjustments for cultural differences and expectations are necessary.
In many ways, it makes for a good extreme case study on how products, no matter how good they are, always need to be adjusted for sales in target area.
What the article claims is that according to one research company this happened for one month last year, in October, the first month after launch of iPhone 5c and 5s.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EZYE...
So who is right?
As opposed to the android we know it's crap but it's cheap approach?
I've got both an iphone 7.1 and Android Kit Kat Phone. They are both good in their own way.
However I've also looked at a whole array of uttery dire Android phones.
Biggest problem with Android? Which Android. Since Froyo phones are still available, it will give android a bad name.
Which is a shame, as Android is "almost there" in comparision with iOS and mostly a hell of a lot cheaper.
This slashdot beta is ugly as hell.
That's the iPhone market percentage in Japan, but 8 out of the 10 most popular smartphones sold for the last four months are iPhones. So yes, the iPhone market share is increasing.
Oh, and the "East-Asian concept of 'face'..." post above is utter nonsense. The real esoteric reason it's popular is because people just "like" it.
I live in Japan. I have a Sony Xperia. iPhones are locked-down, corporate, American shit.
Actually, practically everyone in Japan had oversized cellphones before the iPhone took over. It's all essentially a status thing. Just look at the low iPhone usage across the sea in Korea and China.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
What does style over substance mean in this context? The only thing I can think is design over specs?
That's not a strictly Japanese, or apple thing though. It's what makes an M3 better than a neon srt (obviously other things, this is an extreme example, as they were priced no where similar ).
The iPhone provided a good browser experience, yes, it wasn't 3g, but the browser was great, and there was WiFi. Everything you wanted to read on a phone, you could see twice as much of on an iPhone, calendars were better, text histories were better, maps were better, reading email was better. These are all arguably things of style, but it me for a better phone.
Style is how you get more out of the same substance, and it counts for a lot. It's why pottery is worthless, while others is priceless.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
He took one with him.
I must say the story itself and comments are pretty hilarious.
First of all, Masayoshi Son is not even Japanese. He's Korean who was neutralized recently, with a very strong Korean background and ties to his home country.
And Apple was really stupid to give Softbank an exclusivity for so many years. Softbank remains the smallest of the 3 major carriers in Japan with 26% market share even after years of iPhone exclusivity. With their shoddy reputation, almost fraudulent sales tactics, crappy reception and coverage, unreliable and overloaded network capacity, they just could not steal any meaningful number of subscribers from NTT DoCoMo (45% market share) and KDDI au (29%) even after MNP became available. As the recent increase in iPhone sales proves, it's obvious that many people waited for KDDI and NTT to start offering iPhones.
I mean, we weren't missing any features that iPhone offered, so people didn't have much incentive to switch in a hurry. Even now, flip phones and Android phones made by Japanese manufacturers offer many crucial features (to Japanese consumers at least) such as waterproof body, TV tuner, NFC(FeliCa), etc. All of these had pretty much been standard features in Japan even before iPhone came out.
In fact, it's hard to find phones that do not have these features except for iPhone. To a typical Japanese, his/her cell phone has been their train pass, wallet, TV set, main email client (not just SMS/MMS, but a full html email, with huge library of emoticons and templates), internet browsers (a full-screen opera-browser as well as an iMode/WAP browser on the same device), high-res camera (with flash of course), music store + player, and 3D game console (with hugely successful app stores), all on pretty fast 3G networks, for about a decade.
I've been a mac user for more than 20 years and I use iPhone myself (on DoCoMo, no less), but Apple still have a long way to go before they can win over a majority of Japanese users.
I kinda like some Japense perspectives. But... this chanegs everything.
The Japanese have a very strong propensity to conform. So if your friends all have an iPhone, you need to get one too. They even do this when they decide to be a rebel. When I lived in Japan in the 1990s, all the "rebels" wore a plain white t-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in one sleeve, their hair greased back Elvis style, and they all hung out on a street corner in Harajuku. They all looked like clones of each other.
American saying: The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Japanese saying: The nail that sticks up will be hammered back down.
I don't care if I get down modded for life, this made me lol.
Sigs are bad for you...