经济学人下载:日本武士走向没落

The result is that Japan’s software industry is underdeveloped. Since 2008 Japanese software firms have lost 20% of their market value, even as software firms elsewhere grew by 15%. In software spending relative to GDP Japan ranks 35th, around the level of Saudi Arabia, according to INSEAD, a business school.

结果就是日本的软件行业未能发展起来。自从2008年，日本的软件公司损失掉了自身20%的市场价值，其他地方的软件公司却增加了15%的市场价值。根据一个商学院欧洲工商管理学院的说法，日本软件花费占GDP的比例排名35位，和沙特阿拉伯处于一个水平。

Japanese code has tended to be inferior, says William Saito, an entrepreneur who sold his software company to Microsoft years ago. This is because it mirrored the shortcomings of Japan’s business culture: it was written in a hierarchical way that outsiders would have trouble building on, when the trend in America and Europe was exactly the opposite.

几年前把自己的软件公司卖给微软的企业家威廉．齐藤说，日本人的编码水平趋于下降。这是因为这反映了日本商业文化的缺陷：日本以分层次的方式编码，外人在此基础上编制是有困难的，而美国和欧洲的编码趋势却恰恰与之相反。

A transition is under way, however. Firms such as Rakuten, an online shopping mall, and DeNA, a developer of games for mobile devices, have reached global prominence. So has Trend Micro, a big security software firm. Small companies are succeeding too, such as Cybozu, which makes collaboration software. And Japan has begun filing international software-related patents galore (see chart). Only America files more.

无论如何，正在进行转变。像网上购物中心Rakuten公司和开发移动设备游戏的DeNA公司，已经成了全球领航者。一个大的安全软件公司Trend Micro也是如此。小公司，例如开发协同软件的Cybozu公司也赶上来了。日本已经开始申请了大量与软件相关的专利，但是美国申请的更多。

An example of Japan’s shift to software is Ruby, a programming language that undergirds big websites such as those of Twitter and Groupon. It was created in Japan by Yukihiro Matsumoto, and counts 1m developers around the world. Marc Benioff, the boss of Salesforce.com, a large “cloud computing” firm in Silicon Valley, sees opportunities everywhere in Japan. Over the past year the company paid $212m for Heroku, which develops web services based on Ruby, and acquired stakes in Synergy Marketing, Uhuru and Netyear, three business-software firms.

日本向软件转变的一个例子是Ruby，它是一种加强像Twitter和Groupon这类大网站的程序编制语言。它被日本人松本行弘创制，是全世界1000名开发人员的成果。位于硅谷的大型云计算公司Salesforce.com的老板马克．贝尼奥夫，看到日本无处不在的商机。过去的几年，这个公司为Heroku花费了21.2万美元，Heroku基于Ruby开发网页服务，并且该公司获得了三个商业软件公司Marketing、Uhuru 和Netyear的风险投资。