<story><title>Carts without horses</title><url>http://www.aaronkharris.com/carts-without-horses</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>donw</author><text>Having lived in Japan for quite some time, it is sort of amazing how often companies come here and blow not insignificant amounts of time and money simply because they assumed their business model could cross the border without being detained and thoroughly questioned.&lt;p&gt;For example, a personal-transportation company pitched up in Japan offering better alternative to the traditional taxi, because they are &amp;quot;safe&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;clean&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;convenient&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;While this offering makes &lt;i&gt;complete&lt;/i&gt; sense in most of the US -- where very different adjectives would be required to describe the average taxi experience -- it doesn&amp;#x27;t really fly in Tokyo.&lt;p&gt;Taxi drivers in Japan wear white gloves, which should give some idea just how clean the taxis are. The doors open automatically so that you don&amp;#x27;t have to touch the door handles. The same goes for safety and convenience, but more importantly, the taxi companies here do a solid job of serving the local population.&lt;p&gt;There is no adversarial relationship to exploit, and a slightly better app experience isn&amp;#x27;t going to turn the market on its head.&lt;p&gt;It honestly doesn&amp;#x27;t take much to be successful in Japan -- Fastly looks to be a great example of Doing It Right -- but you do need to start with the idea that it&amp;#x27;s a foreign market, and that the business model is going to be different than Back Home.</text></comment>
<story><title>Carts without horses</title><url>http://www.aaronkharris.com/carts-without-horses</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>eloff</author><text>One also saw this in the developing world where many countries, lacking the existing telecommunications infrastructure based on landlines, skipped a step and jumped straight to mobile infrastructure. For a while some developing countries had mobile infrastructure and coverage that surpassed developed nations (one could argue that some still do, with no equivalent to M-PESA in developed countries.)</text></comment>