Japan's strength comes from the "users"

I joined Atomico Open Office in Tokyo recently where Niklas Zennström, co-founder of Skype, and CEO and founding partner of Atomico joined as speaker. When asked what he likes about Japan, his answer was love for technology and innovation, seeks for high quality. "Japan was the leading the world on broadband, and I knew the world will be following Japan. I saw that in mobile too." He continued though, that "making a good product is much more important than the technology itself." Make good products, make good UIs that are easy for the users to use.

At The New Context Conference, Joichi Ito, director of MIT Media Lab spoke about how China is strong at hardware manufacturing, US is strong in software development, and Japan has strong  users. Which sort of resembles what Niklas mentioned- the Japanese users loves interesting and innovative stuff, cool stuff, demands high quality, and Japanese developers and makers are all exposed to this strong demand and desire for quality which pushed Japanese production to high quality.

At Google For Entrepreneurs Week in Tokyo, Kentaro Tokusei,  product management lead at Google Japan says "If you are able to satisfy Japanese users, you have a chance to be successful globally"and pushed the audience (entrepreneurs) forward by telling them "If you wish to do so, you can change the world."

Go go > Japanese developers!

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki