The Japanese Government has marshalled a coalition of technological and corporate firepower in an attempt to break the global stranglehold of Yahoo! and Google.
The project is tipped to cost about £500 million and will probably take about three years to complete, government insiders say. The search engine aims to be the ultimate tool for navigating online content, and will give web users a Japanese alternative to the two US giants.
The impetus is believed to come indirectly from the IT research department of the office of Junichiro Koizumi, the Prime Minister. He has embraced the internet as a political tool, and has emphasised Japan’s need to extend its presence in the world of information technology. The Education and Internal Affairs ministries will play a central role, along with the state-funded broadcaster NHK.
Plus — they can always get some extra cash in through the backdoor from Microsoft.
They build a heck of a good car in Japan. The U.S. now builds the top search engines and U.S. auto engines are substandard. They rebuilt Chrysler by installing Japanese engines in the products. We import auto engines and export search engines. They don’t need our search engines now. Maybe Google can engineer a better auto engine. GM can’t seem to do it to save the company. We seem to build the best automatic transmissions. The Japanese may have better manual transmissions as well as engines, which may explain why they get better fuel economy from their products. Our products are engineered around a culture of waste. We’ll waste money to save time. Google is perfect for wasting time, which is good for making money. Maybe the Japanese will build search engines that will save time, since we love wasting money. Google is a lot like GM, in that it appears to be American while it tries to be global and global isn’t as easy as it looks.
Look at Iraq and every other place we try making more American. It never works like they plan and it cost billions to fail as the leaders (corporate and government) explain how it is really working, it’s just not being communicated the right way. Japan takes care of Japan and you have to respect that. They aren’t in Korea trying to make Korea more like Japan. The U.S. is everywhere and getting nowhere to sell cheeseburgers and Cokes to people who had a low fat diet for 800 years. All Iraq needs is a chain of burger joints and it will be just fine. Send in Col. Sanders and build more Ft. KFC’s. Export the culture and Burger King can rule the world with Dairy Queen.
Good luck the Japanese govt, but technical innovation should be left to their more than able private companies. Their history of these mega-projects is not good. Witness the 5th generation computing project (I think that was what it was called).