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crissindahouse on 14 December 2012
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haxxiy said:
kowenicki said:
No surprises.

Japan is widely regarded as an insular and protectionist society for a very good reason. It is.


To be fair though  a lot of foreign companies like Apple, BMW, Coca Cola, Harley Davidson, Louis Vouitton etc.   have been very sucessful on Japan. Yes you need a very specific and precise handling of the business market to succeed in Japan... as you need basically everywhere else in the world but WE and NA. 

Some comments on the article were very insightful on mentioning how the Xbox brand was tainted by the perception of something drawing on the worst possible american imagery you could convey out of the english world and that's very worring since so far MS hasn't done much to combat or prevent it. Right now the US and the UK consist of about 28% of the world's economy; when the Xbox franchise launched, it was 38%. And yet another MS console will end up last throughout most of the world bar those countries, even on a lower pricepoint and with a one year headstart. How is it going to be for Microsoft a decade from now, when the US and the UK become less than 20% of the world's economy? 

all foreign car companies together have a marketshare of 5% or something in japan, if you call that very successful i don't know. yes bmw and vw have more success there as ford or something, maybe because they are german cars (75% of foreign cars in japan are german) but it is a joke compared to japanese car companies in japan. vw was the most successful importeur last year with 50k cars^^. it's like you would call the 360 a huge success there because it sold 2.5 million units or something. the difference between a car compay and a console is that even 20k sold cars can be enough to make money there but with a console you have to sell a decent amount to get the developers on your side.

it's well known that it's hard for foreign companies to have a chance to truly compete against japanese companies as long as you don't have something they don't have or if you are really better in it and even if there are examples who managed it like coca cola or apple. but for 1 foreign company really successful in japan i could give you 10 foreign companies successful in germany or uk.

if the same xbox would be from sony it would have sold as much or almost as much as the ps3 because it has sony as brandname.

and that "patriotism" thinking or whatever it is is also in other countries but if someone would really make an analysis about the japanese and as example the uk market i would bet it's much harder to compete against japanese companies in japan as it is in uk against uk companies if all other factors would be the same (quality as example)