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| Japan Internet Report No. 16 June 1997 ********************************************************** In this month's issue: - JIR back issues available now - Special info from new report on Japanese Web users - Interview with William Auckerman, Editor-in-Chief, Computing Japan magazine - Who you are - Industry news briefs take a rest this month ********************************************************** JIR back issues available now A number of readers have asked us to make back issues of JIR available, and we've finally got around to putting some up. They can be retrieved at: http://www.tkai.com/jir/ ********************************************************** Special info from new report on Japanese Web users Our new syndicated research report is complete and we've shipped about a dozen copies. We'd like to share some information from the new study with JIR readers: - Number of people with Internet access reaches 6.7 million There is strong statistical evidence that indicates there are at least 6.7 million people in Japan with access to the Internet today. These include approximately 2.5 million individual users who enjoy dialup access from their homes, and approximately 670,000 people who use commercial online services to access the Internet. It looks like Japan now has the world's second largest Internet user population. The new Web User report contains highly detailed crosstabs that when used in combination with these numbers will enable readers to calculate with reasonable certainty sizes of certain populations, such as the number of women users accessing from home in the greater Kanto area, or the number of male Internet users in their 40s who are readers of the Japanese version of Wired magazine. - Microsoft winning browser war Microsoft is quickly and surely winning the browser war. The company's share has gone from zero to 35% in sixteen months, and it has overtaken Netscape among users of Windows and PC98 machines. What's more, Microsoft's overwhelming dominance of Japan's PC operating system market, and the high percentage of new users and growing number of consumers who are buying PCs specifically for the purpose of using the Internet means that Explorer is rapidly becoming the default browser. Our month-to-month data stretching back to July of 1995 shows this trend very clearly. We expect that within a year most survey respondents will report using Internet Explorer rather than Navigator. For more information on the report and a complete table of contents, take a look at: http://www.tkai.com/services/research/1997.html ********************************************************** William Auckerman, Editor-in-Chief of Computing Japan magazine, was kind enough to respond to our interview request with a personal story that will be of special interest to those JIR readers who have written inquiring about working in Japan. Thanks, Bill, for providing all of us with food for thought about our work lives. - How did you come to be the Main Guy at Computing Japan magazine? I've always felt that getting the job as editor-in-chief of Computing Japanwas "fate." Back in February 1994, when I was still a freelancer, the Tokyo PC Users Group (TPC) interviewed me for their newsletter. One of thequestions asked in that interview was, "What would be your dream job'" and I answered, "I'd love to be the editor of a computer magazine someday." That same day, when I went home from the interview, I opened up the Japan Times and saw theadvertisement for this Computing Japan job. (I bring up TPC because I'mconvinced it was my experience as as editor/publisher of the TPC newsletterthat was the deciding factor in my getting this job as editor of themagazine. Sometimes volunteer work can pay off big.) Our publisher, Terrie Lloyd, and a couple of friends had put out a trial issue of Computing Japan in late 1993 to test the market. I was hired as editor in late March 1994, and immediately began working 100-hour weeks toget our first official issue, June 1994, together and published on schedule. For three months, I was the magazine's entire editorial staff. - Tell us a little bit more about your background and how you came to be working in Japan. I came into the profession from a scientific background. In 1979, thanks to my Master of Environmental Sciences degree (from Miami of Ohio) and my high score on a government exam, I was offered a job as editor with the US Department of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service (SCS). I worked in the SCS editorial office just outside Washington DC for four years.Then I was promoted to supervisory editor of the Southern region, and spentthe next two years in Ft. Worth, Texas. I need to backtrack here, to mention that I met my wife, Keiko, in college,and we were married in 1975. By 1985, we had been living in the US for ten years, and I thought it was about time we returned to her home country to live for awhile. After six years with the government, I was ready for achange, so I quit my "career" SCS position and we came to Tokyo. Through an ad in the Japan Times, I soon found work as a freelancerewriter/technical writer with a translation agency, and eventually addedsome other agencies to my roster of clients. Until the early '90s, I made avery good living as a freelancer working from my home office (actually acorner of the bedroom). When the bursting of Japan's bubble economy began toaffect the amount of freelance work I was getting, I decided it was timeagain to look for a "real" job. I worked briefly at McKinsey & Company herein Tokyo as a communications specialist, and with the Charles E. Tuttlepublishing company as production editor, but neither of those jobs reallymatched my skills and interests, so I went back to freelancing. In the late '80s I got a modem for my computer, and soon was on the localEnglish-language BBSes a lot, including the Tokyo PC Users Group BBS.Eventually, I joined TPC, and within a few short months found myself editorof its newsletter. I served as editor of "Algorithmica Japonica" for aboutthree years, and as its publisher for nearly two (and eventually as TPCvice president and president). - The latest Nikkei telephone survey projected that approximately sevenmillion people in Japan now have access to the Internet. How quickly do you think the market is growing and how many people in Japan will be online by the year 2000' It's probably true that seven million Japanese have "access" to the Internet. The real question, though, is how many of those actually have ever been online to the World Wide Web, or use the Internet for anything more thane-mail. My own guess would be maybe one in ten. Both Nifty-Serve and BiGlobe have more than a million users each, but I suspect a majority of those users stay on their "home" system and rarely venture out into the Web. There's no doubt Japan's Internet market is growing rapidly, and has grown enormously in the past couple of years. But Japan's per-minute system of charging for phone calls limits the amount of time the average person will be willing to spend online. (My own home phone bill generally hovers around $150 per month, which works out to less than an hour per day since my ISP is in a neighboring area code). The biggest revenue growth over the nextyear or two for Internet vendors and providers will come from the small andmedium-size corporations who finally are discovering the Internet. - Here's a question that some JIR readers have asked us to address: What advice do you have for someone interested in working in an Internet-related position in Japan' Well, simply designing/making HTML pages has become fairly commonplace, so don't count on those skills to get you a job. But programmers with CGIscripting, Java, or ActiveX knowledge are in short supply, as are engineers with intranet-building or hardware/protocol experience, and designers withan aptitude for graphics creation. For "production" or "technical" jobs,some Japanese-language ability is useful (if only to communicate with Japanese coworkers), but not mandatory. For sales or other client-contact roles, however, though, at least a strong Japanese-speaking ability is essential. I'll add, though this is probably true everywhere, that you should be prepared to work long hours in cramped quarters with less than state-of-the-art equipment on tight deadlines -- without overtime pay. And remember that most job openings aren't advertised publicly. If you comeover without a job already lined up, you should plan on going to PC user group meetings or just visiting some companies in the business and make yourself known. One effective way to get your foot in the door can be to offer to work as an intern (i.e., for very low pay). If you prove yourself, within a few short months you'll likely be offered a regular job with the same employer or a competitor. We have several full-time employees in LINCMedia who started off with us as interns. But that does bring up the visa issue. If you're a foreigner without a working visa, you can't legally work in Japan, and if you don't have a job offer,you can't get a working visa -- a real Catch-22 situation. - What do you find most rewarding about working and living in Japan' That's a tough question, bcause I'm not sure the truly rewarding aspects of work and life are country-specific. I suppose I could cite Japanese culture, or the safety, convenience, and cosmopolitan nature of living in Tokyo, or the satisfaction of providing information that might otherwise be inaccessible to non-Japanese speakers... but those are just window-dressing. The most rewarding part of my 12 years in Tokyo has been the people I have met and worked with -- both Japanese, and other expatriates like myself from all over the world. I probably shouldn't say this (since my boss maybe reading), but in my circle of priorities, family comes first, friends second, and work third. My family is here, I've made some very good friends, and I have a job that I enjoy -- for me, that's what is rewarding about living and working in Japan, or anywhere. Wm. Auckerman Editor-in-chief, Computing Japan http://www.cjmag.co.jp bill@cjmag.co.jp ********************************************************** Who you are We welcome new JIR readers from Dell Computer, Lucent Technologies, Agfa, Daewoo, Rockwell, Verisign, Wired, PacBell, Fujitsu, ATT Jens, Texas Instruments, IBM, Dacom and other firms, and new friends in India, Korea, Singapore, Italy, China, Australia and so on... The list now numbers over 700. ********************************************************** Industry news briefs take a rest this month We took a rest from providing industry briefs this month and will return to the usual format next time. By the way, if you're reading JIR but not Computing Japan magazine, you're missing out - may we suggest you subscribe? Call 03-3499-2099 if you're in Japan or anywhere else outside of North America. In North America call Andy Miller at (209) 742-4252. Tim Clark Editor Copyright 1997 by TKAI and Digitized Information, Inc. All rights reserved NOTE: Some JIR industry briefs appear later in Computing Japan magazine under modified titles. JIR is co-sponsored by Digitized Information, Inc. of Tokyo, a leader in providing daily English language coverage of electronics industry developments in Japan. For more information on monitoring electronics industry developments in Japan, or to receive a free e-mail sample of service offerings, please contact Digitized Information at diginfo@gol.com |
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