Web design is subjective. What looks "ugly" to one person or one culture, works in another. Is it just happenstance that East Asian web design (Chinese and Japanese web design have a lot of parallels) looks quite different from Western web design? Could it be that it has something to do with the information density of East Asian languages?
WRT the gwern's comments regarding Japan and software, I do think that this is largely correct (with the exception of the gaming industry where Nintendo, Sony, Sega, etc. have made globally popular software.) I should note that Asia overall (not just Japan) does not have a track record of developing globally popular consumer-facing software aside from game software. Korea is largely reliant on Windows on the desktop and Android on mobile. Same is true for Mainland China. So wrt software I think the critique is Asia-wide, not just Japan.
As an aside, I'd ask anyone to list European-developed globally popular software. My list: Skype, Rovio, Spotify...
A bunch of the links in the appendix are many years old and not that accurate any more. Japan has many billion-dollar Internet/IT companies today. It is a market that both is large enough for domestic Japanese firms as well as foreign firms.
Web design is subjective. What looks "ugly" to one person or one culture, works in another. Is it just happenstance that East Asian web design (Chinese and Japanese web design have a lot of parallels) looks quite different from Western web design? Could it be that it has something to do with the information density of East Asian languages?
WRT the gwern's comments regarding Japan and software, I do think that this is largely correct (with the exception of the gaming industry where Nintendo, Sony, Sega, etc. have made globally popular software.) I should note that Asia overall (not just Japan) does not have a track record of developing globally popular consumer-facing software aside from game software. Korea is largely reliant on Windows on the desktop and Android on mobile. Same is true for Mainland China. So wrt software I think the critique is Asia-wide, not just Japan.
As an aside, I'd ask anyone to list European-developed globally popular software. My list: Skype, Rovio, Spotify...
A bunch of the links in the appendix are many years old and not that accurate any more. Japan has many billion-dollar Internet/IT companies today. It is a market that both is large enough for domestic Japanese firms as well as foreign firms.