Blissful Japan

Recently I was forwarded this article from TechCrunch: Why Yahoo Japan is Worth Nearly as Much as Yahoo. It is worth a read, but I’d like to add a few thoughts. Here is my experience with Yahoo Japan, since having moved to Tokyo in 2001.

1) YahooBB

YahooBB took off because it was simply cheaper than anything else out there. Forget the fact that they didn’t have the manpower or capacity to handle all the people signing up, they just offered the lowest DSL rates (at the time). When I moved to Tokyo in September 2001, I immediately tried to sign up for YahooBB since their DSL rates were unbelievable. 6 weeks later I still didn’t have any service. There was no way to contact Yahoo to inquire about the status of your application other than to go to a web form, hit send, and pray that they email you back (which usually they didn’t.) So I tried to sign-up for DSL with another provider only to be told that they investigated and found that I already had service with Yahoo (apparently they put a block on my phone line) and I would need to cancel with Yahoo first before I could apply for DSL service from another company. But there wasn’t any way to contact Yahoo besides the aforementioned web form, or a fax number.

Eventually I was able to get them to remove the block on my line, and at the same time the Japanese government issued them a warning for bad consumer practices. After suffering without home Internet for close to 2 months due to their incompetency, even this day I cringe at the thought of YahooBB.

Anyway I guess it comes down to “you get what you pay for” - YahooBB did offer substantially cheaper DSL rates, with substantially worse service - as well as super agressive marketing by Yahoo, which I suppose is rather impressive.

2) Interviewing at Yahoo Japan

Last year I decided to interview at Yahoo Japan just to see what the experience would be like. I was warned by two friends of mine (one Stanford undergrad CS alum who is American, and one Stanford MBA alum who is Japanese) that it was a waste of time to think about working there, but I still wanted to see first hand. I thought they could seriously use someone such as myself to help bridge Yahoo Japan and Yahoo US on a technical, language, and cultural basis.

The interview process was amazingly Japanese. As I had a feeling that they drastically underpaid their engineers, I made clear up-front my minimum salary requirement, and HR insisted that it still was within the realm of possibility. I went through one or two rounds of interviews each time with about 2-3 company representatives interviewing me at the same time. I made it clear to them that I was not interested in a programming position, but rather a technological project bridiging/management position.

Eventually they said I had to come in for a technical interview. What a joke that turned out to be. I was given a computer running the test in a web browser, with a very small screen. The interface was remarkably poor. You didn’t know what question you were on, how many were left, or how much time was left. All you could see was a progress bar giving you a rough indication of what percentage of the test was complete. There was no way to skip back and forwards through questions, you HAD TO DO the test in the order which it was given. You couldn’t skip ahead to the sections you were most confident in and come back and later go to the parts which you were weaker in. You had to do it in their order. The screen was so small that for some questions you constantly had to scroll up and down over and over to re-read the question and the answers. I couldn’t think of a worse designed test system. However for certain one definite problem was that the test was entirely in very technical Japanese, and while my Japanese is quite good, it was not good enough to understand many technical concepts which I have only had to deal with in English; additionally, many questions were of the form “which of the following 5 statements is incorrect,” so if you didn’t understand every one of the 5 statements in complete clarity, you couldn’t answer the question.

I felt cheated. I specifically told them that I was not trying to be a regular Japanese employee, but clearly they had a standard recruitment procedure and it had to be followed. ZERO flexibility. If they don’t have any flexibility on interview style, it made me wonder what kind of flexibility they might have on work responsibilities or pay scale. At any rate, when the woman from HR came back to the test room to notify me that there were only 5 minutes left, I had had it. I told her I didn’t need 5 more minutes, and that they should only hire Japanese people, and stormed the hell out of there. At that point I didn’t care what happened further.

Amazingly, they still called me back in for a final round of interviews, this time with the mobile unit. This time it seemed to go pretty well again, but the last question was to ask me again what my salary requirements were. I had already answered this question once or twice earlier, so I repeated the same answer. The next day they called and said that they did not have any matching positions at the time. I don’t know the reason for their ending of the interview process; maybe I was too independent and they didn’t think I would fit in with their ZERO FLEXIBILITY culture. But I think the salary had something to do with it, as that was the last question, and they asked it multiple times.

Japanese engineers are already paid only a small fraction of US engineers, and it would seem Yahoo is not at the top of that salary scale by any means. But they are still able to create a suprisingly successful company even though they don’t treat their engineers well like they do in the US. It is a mystery to me how this can happen, I think Japanese engineers are just used to grinning and bearing it… little do they know the miserable lives they lead compared to American engineers, in my opinion.

One more item with respect to benefits at Yahoo Japan.. I found out about this new concept called サービス残業, aka Service Overtime. As it was explained to me, Yahoo Japan pays its employees a flat allowance of around 40,000 (?) yen a month, and in return the employees are expected to work unlimited overtime until 10pm. If you happen to stay after 10pm, then you can qualify for real overtime pay, but coincidentally, at 10pm the air conditioning shuts off and the office starts to get really hot… Seems they are asking their employees to go home.

3) Yahoo Japan vs Google Japan

Last year while interviewing at Google Japan I also did a lot of work comparing Yahoo to Google, especially with respect to Japan. Yahoo’s infrastructure and services are noticably inferior to Google’s in most respects. So why is Yahoo Japan so much more popular? First of all, it’s true, Yahoo customizes its services for Japan while Google opted for a 1-size-fits-the-world approach. This has been changing. The Google Japan home page is actually slightly different from the Google US home page now (it didn’t used to be until the last year), featuring several tabs with Google services, broken down by category. I don’t think this goes far enough though. As mentioned in the TechCrunch article, Japanese people are used to very densely populated pages of information. This does not just apply to web sites, but everything .. magazines, newspapers, TV shows, … Also the fact that Yahoo Japan offers everything in one place is nice. Want a weather forecast? It’s right there in Yahoo Weather. (Google finally added a simple weather forecast of the next several days, but if you want any additional info, you had to do a search, which would give you links to other weather web sites.. very user-unfriendly.) Want to check out conditions of ski lifts, and user’s opinions? Just check Yahoo Outdoor. I could go on, and on. Google says that their model is to provide links to information, and not the information themselves, but they flip-flop on this a lot. Like they started providing simple weather forecasts, but not in detail. And now they provide train route search as well. But they don’t provide much other information.

Of course, Yahoo has been in Japan much longer than Google and has been doing Japan focused R&D much longer and much more focused than Google. Only in the last year or two has Google started to do new original R&D specific to the Japan market, and not just porting projects from the U.S. This gives Yahoo a huge lead.

Many people also think that Yahoo does a better job of indexing Japanese web pages. I don’t know if this is true or not though, but it is a statement I heard from some people during my research.

Additionally, I think user lock-in is far more noticable in Japan. Once users are familiar with a certain service, it’s really hard to get them to switch, even if you have a superior search engine. Japanese customers are just familiar with Yahoo. As the TechCrunch article says, many of them associate Yahoo as the Internet. Romanized domain names are very difficult for most Japanese users to remember so they usually search for the top page of other sites by going first to Yahoo. My ex-girlfriend used to go to Yahoo to search for Mixi’s top page, rather than typing in mixi.co.jp into the browser’s URL bar. Yahoo search comes preinstalled on most domestic PCs sold in Japan; my informal survey last year pegged it at around 70% of PCs, Google with say 15%, and others (Goo, Biglobe, etc) with the remaining. Many Japanese users aren’t up to removing the pre-installed Yahoo search and Yahoo toolbar and replacing them with Google.

4) Yahoo Auctions vs EBay

This is an interesting subject to me as I like auctions. When I moved here in 2001 (my memory is a bit hazy here but correct me if I’m wrong) EBay had an extremely poor Japanese site that was basically the US web site with a few help pages in Japanese. Yahoo came along with a fully localized site, fully inferior in terms of functionality. They hooked it into the banking system and made their own payment system similar to PayPal. They charged outrageous rates - to participate in auctions in any way (bidding or selling) you had to pay a 315 yen/month surcharge. (Finally they changed it nowadays so that you only have to pay if you want to sell items, which I still think is robbery.) They offered absolutely inferior functionality. For instance, to this day they don’t offer a way to search completed auctions. (Note: A third party service aucfan.com finally stepped up which offers this.) So at the time, if you were watching an auction (even if you added it to your “watch list”), and it suddenly ended, you couldn’t even find it again unless you had bookmarked the original page, as there was no way to search for it anymore. Simply AWFUL. To this day I am amazed at the extreme poor design of Yahoo Auctions compared to EBay. Features are poor, design is poor, flow is poor, you have to do many clicks to do simple things, although it is slowly improving. And they are still charging me 315 yen a month. I hate them. But liquidity rules.

I heard that EBay hired the CEO of KFC (yes, a chicken restaurant chain!) to run EBay Japan which also didn’t help matters, but I don’t know if that is true or not.