Japan Moves Towards the Post PC Era

Hiroko Tabuchi, reporting for the Associated Press in Tokyo, observes that "a new PC or laptop computer may be the last thing a Japanese student will want to buy for college." Leaving aside the differences between the Japanese and American undergraduate curriculum, several important observations stand out:

the Japanese PC market is shrinking, rather than growing. PC sales have declined in each of the last 5 sales quarters.

Hitachi, like IBM in the United States, has announced that it will cease manufacturing home computers,

hand-held keitai devices are providing more and more of the computing power usually associated with PCs.

The last item points to an important component of the platform shift ... keitai devices and services in Japan are where the action is.

More than 50 percent of Japanese send e-mail and browse the Internet from their mobile phones, according to a 2006 survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The same survey found that 30 percent of people with e-mail on their phones used PC-based e-mail less, including 4 percent who said they had stopped sending e-mails from PCs completely.

The fastest growing social networking site here, Mobagay Town, is designed exclusively for cell phones. Other networking sites like mixi, Facebook and MySpace can all be accessed and updated from handsets, as can the video-sharing site YouTube.

Story: Hiroko Tabuchi, PCs being pushed aside in Japan, Associated Press, November 4, 2007, 5:49 AM (ET). http://apnews.excite.com/article/20071104/D8SMQ8DG0.html

Image: Ken, Keitai = Cellphone = modern security blanket, http://artsyken.com/2004_07_01_archive.php