When you start getting familiar with other japanese companies you realize its not that nintendo is fake “japanese” and has this mba side, its that they are japanese through and through including getting hard up on ip. This sort of thing plagues any japanese company I am familiar with. Car companies. Fujifilm. Same thing. Market on “creative, different, japanese” but its really a locked down product with artificial moats they put in to protect their incremental upgrade models. When you realize the potential of what these sorts of companies could do you get a little sad of the route they instead trot down.
For example fujifilm is resting on their laurels during the modern film resurgeance. They have stopped making film for the american market and let kodak make it for them and slap their logo on it. Every film lab in the world worth their salt still uses their 30 year old Fronteir scanning system because there is literally nothing better made as film industry investment fell off a cliff 30 years ago and large scale engineering efforts in that sector ended. And of course the cameras. Everyone is using an old slowly dying film camera because they don’t make new ones. And fujifilm had some of the best of the best in their “texas leica” medium format cameras. It is like civilization died in this sector and we are living off the scraps of what was left from the great civilization. Why does fuji do this? Avoiding their seat on the throne in this growing newfound industry?
Because hubris. They are japanese. They made the decision to forget about film and they are set on it damnit. They don’t want to cannibalize the sales of their modern day digital cameras (even though they probably won’t). They have a good thing going where they increment features on a couple hundred dollar camera bodies. What they don’t realize is the film buffs today probably pay vastly more in film than digital shooters pay upgrading their camera bodies a year on average. So much money left on the table just totally obsinate reasons for leaving it too that boil down to a certain hubris you see in japanese companies.
For example fujifilm is resting on their laurels during the modern film resurgeance. They have stopped making film for the american market and let kodak make it for them and slap their logo on it. Every film lab in the world worth their salt still uses their 30 year old Fronteir scanning system because there is literally nothing better made as film industry investment fell off a cliff 30 years ago and large scale engineering efforts in that sector ended. And of course the cameras. Everyone is using an old slowly dying film camera because they don’t make new ones. And fujifilm had some of the best of the best in their “texas leica” medium format cameras. It is like civilization died in this sector and we are living off the scraps of what was left from the great civilization. Why does fuji do this? Avoiding their seat on the throne in this growing newfound industry?
Because hubris. They are japanese. They made the decision to forget about film and they are set on it damnit. They don’t want to cannibalize the sales of their modern day digital cameras (even though they probably won’t). They have a good thing going where they increment features on a couple hundred dollar camera bodies. What they don’t realize is the film buffs today probably pay vastly more in film than digital shooters pay upgrading their camera bodies a year on average. So much money left on the table just totally obsinate reasons for leaving it too that boil down to a certain hubris you see in japanese companies.
Don’t even get me started on Toyota.