We Were Burning : Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age
Author: Bob Johnstone
List Price: $17.50
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ISBN: 0465091180
Publisher: Basic Books (October, 1999)
Sales Rank: 200,746
Average Customer Rating: 4.62 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 3 out of 5
Valuable stories but wait .. don't generalise yet
Bob Johnstone accomplished the long awaited account of the enormous effort Japanese entrepreneurs have put in innovations in the electronics industry. Western economists have tended to overlook the personal contribution in the success of the Japanese electronics industry. After reading the book, it is just laughable that some in the West have accused the Japanese of stealing western technology. Johnstone provides the details of how painstaking the development of semiconductors was. Yet, the more detail, the less generalisations. Johnstone's stories are not representative, they are selective. It is not true that all technology was created in the US and all technology applied in Japan as Johnstone makes us believe. The book "only" proves that the success of Japanese firms was based on hard work. One of the problems of the book is, that the contribution of Europe are almost (with one exepction) totally omitted (there was considerable scientific progress in seminconductors, LCD, solar cells). This is problably to much to ask for, but it means that the book is incomplete. The second problem is, that the book does not really explain the dominance of Japan in several products lines. Entrepreneurship exists in the US as well, big companies that are unable to develop new industries exist in Japan as well. Johnstone is not convincing that there is a general difference between the US and Japan in entrepreneurship. Maybe he should have looked more into the domestic markets (military customers in US vs. consumers in Japan).
Rating: 5 out of 5
We were burning
A must read book for all electronics/computer technology professionals/hobbist. Bob's comprehensive research and writing style made it easy to read and informative.
The book gives you retrospect on what had happened and how it happened. Although they were history but it gave us lesson on the past and we can plan or predict the future. It also gives a lot of insight on technology management. What made things happened and what screwed things up. In another prospective, as a technology worker, it also taught us not to give up easily.
Highly recommended.
Rating: 5 out of 5
A great book
Bookstores in the US are buldging with entertaining and informative "insider" books on Apple Computer, Microsoft, IBM, Xerox PARC etc. and a similar English-language writeup on Japanese companies such as Sharp, Sony, and Seiko is long overdue. Fortunately the Japanese stories and characters are every bit as entertaining and there are the bureaucratic villains as well. As a bonus, nice background information on the growth of the worldwide semiconductor industry is weaved into the narration. "Japan INC" seems a lot less monolithic after reading this book. The author is married to a Japanese national and apparently devoted much of his adult life to researching this story.
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