Japan striving to be the next Google
September 4, 2007
Japanese authorities have finally recognised the fact that their dominance in all things device and hardware is slipping and that they have missed a trick by not moving into the service side of things such as search.
The Financial Times carries a story about a new initiative to move into researching search and ways to personalise devices such as in-car navigation using search as the building block.
I’d love to think that a state funded program could compete with Google (GOOG), but I fear it will take all of the Japanese inventiveness to come up with anything that comes close. I’d say they’d be better off investing the money into research in new network protocols and ways to usher in a new era of web connectivity. That is after all something the Japanese have always been very very good at.
