It all boils down to a population problem. Japan is ageing and software demands huge work force.
I fail to see how it boils down to that. The demographics of Japan are changing (we hear about it constantly in the western media but holy hell spend one weekend in shibuya and you wouldn't believe it) but there's no way it could account for the effects we are talking about. Japan didn't lose their way because there weren't enough young people to fill their software industry; they hit this problem because they didn't even know they needed to be training people up to be software engineers. The best engineers went into solving hardware problems, not software. It's a quality thing, not a quantity thing.
As an aside, comparing apples and oranges is sometimes instructive to see if a theory has a kernel of truth to it. There are 1.8M total people in Silicon Valley (including food service industry and the like) and at least twice that many in just the 20-24 year old category in Japan. There are also at least 10 million more Japanese people now than there were in the 1980's when everyone was hysterical about them taking over the hardware business world. If Japan hadn't been so successful in hardware and had motivated their workforce around software instead, they certainly would be a significant force today. I don't think an aging population plays a significant factor (yet).
I fail to see how it boils down to that. The demographics of Japan are changing (we hear about it constantly in the western media but holy hell spend one weekend in shibuya and you wouldn't believe it) but there's no way it could account for the effects we are talking about. Japan didn't lose their way because there weren't enough young people to fill their software industry; they hit this problem because they didn't even know they needed to be training people up to be software engineers. The best engineers went into solving hardware problems, not software. It's a quality thing, not a quantity thing.
As an aside, comparing apples and oranges is sometimes instructive to see if a theory has a kernel of truth to it. There are 1.8M total people in Silicon Valley (including food service industry and the like) and at least twice that many in just the 20-24 year old category in Japan. There are also at least 10 million more Japanese people now than there were in the 1980's when everyone was hysterical about them taking over the hardware business world. If Japan hadn't been so successful in hardware and had motivated their workforce around software instead, they certainly would be a significant force today. I don't think an aging population plays a significant factor (yet).
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=silicon+valley+populati... http://www.wolframalpha.com/share/clip?f=d41d8cd98f00b204e98... http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Japan+population