Japanese phones and the Galapagos Syndrome

When I visited Japan a decade ago I was amazed by the functionality and superior design of Japanese cellphones and wished I could take one home. This past year I had a very different experience in Tokyo as I found the phones to be uniformly similar and impractical for the business user.

Why have Japanese manufacturers like Panasonic and Sony failed to evolve in this field as they have so successfully in other consumer electronics ? A professor at Keio University, Takeshi Natsuno, has been pondering the same thing labeling this phenomenon “The Galapagos Syndrome”. In a NYTimes article this week, he considers the problem to be due to the companies’ focus on the unique demands of the domestic market, making them incapable of understanding the needs of the worldwide consumer.

Extending Professor Natsuno’s theme, I’d posit this as an example of Evolutionary Biogeography, a field pioneered by Darwin’s contemporary Alfred Russell Wallace. In his revolutionary work on islands, Wallace conceived the idea of independent development of ecosystems based on geographic compartmentalization. Applying this theory of natural selection to social and economic dynamics is an admittedly speculative though interesting exercise.

In Japan cellphones have followed the dominant design paradigm of the society, highlighting compactness and functionality tailored to the needs of the general consumer rather than the business user. Smartphones with large screens and physical keyboards like the Blackberry are the fastest growing segment of mature markets like the US but are nonexistent in Japan. Interestingly the iPhone, though wildly popular elsewhere, is not very successful in Japan as it fills a niche of personal Smartphone that’s uninteresting to consumers.

Functionally Japanese phones are packed with social and interactive features such as GPS and high resolution cameras but don’t seem to provide the ability to synch with MS Office or VPN into a network.

Architecturally the phones are tightly coupled with the underlying layers of the network allowing a very rich portfolio of services though conversely making them difficult to translate to other environments. NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode, partly developed by Dr. Natsuno, is proprietary to Japan and needs to upgrade to the evolving 4G standards in other countries such as LTE (to continue the analogy, LTE stands for Long Term Evolution).

The close integration of the different aspects of the environment from handsets to network to content providers is not easily replicable in other countries leading Professor Natsuno to make the quintessentially understated Japanese remark that “outside of Japan, the i-mode is different”.

In contrast, the chaos of the US market seems to indicate a primitive stage of development from his perspective though I would characterize it as biodiversity in an adaptable biogeographic ecosystem.