Nice post. My time at Panasonic & then later selling software tools to the Symbian OS developers was eye opening to say the least. The Japanese corporate mentality was, in many ways, still feudal. Fujitsu's Symbian OS team was given a lot of support by NTT Docomo but also a crushing amount of responsibility -- they were developing something like 30 baseports a year, 15 each for the Spring and Fall seasons, for all their handsets and acting as lead Symbian developer for the entire NTT Docomo group with little to show for it. Talk about churn & burn.

When I spoke to the management about this, they said that they were in a position where they couldn't say no to Docomo and likewise they didn't see anyway of not continuing to do their development. And yet, and no offense to the folks grinding this stuff out, there was little real differentiation in the software, the OEM's were all focusing on the hardware feature differentiation and the software was really just a "necessary evil."

So I'm not convinced that it's simply a case of needing a "force multiplier" framework, the Japanese companies need to see that there's value in cultivating better, highly differentiated software.

DeNA, GREE, and the other Japanese social startups seem to have found this whereas the larger vertically integrated semi manufacturers are basically stuck writing drivers for their whizzbang hardware.