Is the Tokyo Node Being Left Behind?

With all the epochal changes in electronic mail and telecommunications, is the Japan Operation destined to be left behind?

In this case, the answer is: NO!

E-mail in Japan has all the major factors going for it, and the equation is getting better all the time.

Economic factors

Electronic messaging is not equivalent to faring, but for sending simple messages, it is certainly cheaper. A typical one-page message (3K of text) can be transmitted in less than one second, using a 14.4K bps modem costing as little as $150. Faring ta kes 20-30 seconds/page and requires much more expensive hardware. E-mail is superior on almost every financial criterion: time cost of establishing the connection, cost of sending multiple copies, labor cost, paper cost, reliability, etc. Even capital cos t is low, assuming the computers already exist

The fiber links under the Pacific are the key to communication in and out of Japan. The capacity is growing much faster than the economy as a whole, and the pricing mechanisms for different users and data types are imperfect. On both sides of the pac ific, politicians, bureaucrats, and telecommunications companies are sitting around the cable heads like so many crows, scrapping for access and trying to avoid costs.

Pricing communications is an arbitrary process -- it's a poker game, like the markets for real estate or legal or accounting services. Different customers get very different prices, even from the same providers. Yet there is tremendous, fixed capacit y on the fiber and on satellites, capacity that must be used or wasted. Like the case of a dairy farmer, there is limited pricing power at the margin: the milk is there; it can't be stored. And like airline ticket sales, discounters and group tour organiz ers have gotten involved!

There is almost always extra data capacity, especially at night. Even in Japan, e-mail customers have a buyer's market if they shop around, because their data amount is so small (comparatively), they can afford to wait a few minutes or hours, and the y can schedule calls when the rates are lowest.

The underlying need

EDP systems managers control e-mail implementations, and they like e-mail. In both the head office and in the field, there has always been a strong self interest in establishing world-wide email. This is one of the few areas of computerization in which managers almost always could deliver a highly visible, useful system without risk of failure, and without running into turf conflicts with operations people, accounting, or the executive ranks.

A powerful impetus for e-mail services to Japan is the time-zone problem. There is no overlap in ordinary business hours between Japan and the US East Coast, and precious little with Europe or California. Expat executives and employees coming to Japa n, used to picking up the telephone all their lives, suddenly need email. The overseas staff are no more willing to work at 1 PM than we are -- at least not in any company I ever worked for! They often won't even reveal their home numbers.

Text storage and retrieval

In 1994, you cannot apply desktop computing power to managing the information in fares or incoming stored on disk and manipulated: filtered, scanned, quoted, forwarded, or re-used without retyping. Historical copies can be maintained much more cheap]y than paper files or fares. You can even feed the message into your Sound Blaster card and listen to a robot read your boss's memos!

Maintaining a message database is intrinsically cheap because the data amount is small. I hold all my incoming and outgoing e-mail messages for the last four years in a 6MB text database. If I need to find every instance of the term "joint venture," it takes under 10 seconds to scan the entire file. I couldn't even get up and walk to the file cabinet that fast, let alone find anything. The database also has indexes; I can choose from a picklist of every memo I ever sent to Fred or received from Sally , or containing a given subject, instantly.

Groupware

Messaging systems enable large numbers of people to work together on a common mass of messages and files. This will change your life, in most companies. And the company will either have it, or lose market share.

Many-to-many media are revolutionizing business organizations, just as profoundly as the Internet and PC bulletin hoards are revolutionizing the wider culture, or just as profoundly as one-to-many (radio and TV) and one to-one (the telephone) messagi ng did 50 and 100 years ago. The existence of an open forum enables the participants to exchange comments with a wider audience -- and to be judged on their merits -- with less interpersonal politics.

Workflow

A large portion of e-mail is passed within the site in which it originated. Communicating by e-mail is actually superior to conversation in several ways:

• It can be done at any time, not just when convenient.
• It doesn't interrupt workflow and concentration like a telephone conversation can.
• Writing is usually more precise and disciplined than speaking.

Telepresence

The maturation of e-mail products, such as cc:Mail and MS-Mail, which allow logins directly from remote PCs, is part of the infrastructure change enabling more employees to work at home, and more corporate tasks to be outsourced to contractors. This co uld spell trouble for a some highly-paid foreign executives in Japan, because it is an enabling technology for companies to escape the extreme operating costs in Tokyo. Some jobs are at risk of being moved back to the home office.

Even within Japan, substantial parts of Tokyo's information economy are even now being broken up and shipped out to the prefectures. Tools such as e-mail, groupware, and remote control software provide opportunities for moving to cheaper places and sel ling services back into expensive, high-income areas like Tokyo. If travel and phone costs into Tokyo can be minimized, the data communication itself is cheap; companies ma); be able to retain a very wide pricing spread on their services.

We left our campfires and came to the bright lights of the city for the good jobs, but now the big city is becoming less relevant and the campfires beckon once again.

E-mail as the future

Most foreign multinationals in Tokyo already have e-mail. The most common systems I've seen are completely in-house host-based systems, with a single, central mail repository back at headquarters and nothing in Japan except a PC and modem. These system s always have special menu choices, such as for viewing a client list or commercial software packages for mini or mainframes, or custom program with some file areas available for viewing or downloading.

For remote users, such as us here in Japan, a host-based system is less than ideal. We have to wait for a connection every time we use it, and it can be a chore to download our mail and upload replies -- these completely tit up our computer so that w e can't de other work. In addition, connection are unreliable: downloads frequently fail, and sometimes we can't even log in.

E-mail alternatives

Alternative e-mail vehicles often see: in Tokyo are ATT Mail, Sprint Mail GEISCO, or MCI Mail. These vendor have lots of corporate customers ii Japan. This is completely different from corporate e-mail -- the mailbox: is maintained inside an e-mail ven dor' computer. The mailboxes are accessible by cheap local dial-up worldwide so it's perfect for people who travel internationally; you can access you mailbox without paying the excessive long distance charges in many countries. The access charge for a US mail box is something like $14/hour plus 20 cents/KB -- a little more here (isn't everything?).

These e-mail vendors provide reliable interconnection to the planet: a the other mail providers, customer suppliers, and the Internet. They've also implemented a sensible addressing standard called X.400, enablin unrelated users to exchange mail more r eliably and confidentially than through the Internet, even across different e-mail providers.

Lotus cc:Mail and Microsoft Mail are being installed by foreign companies all over Japan. I've installed both within the last year on my company's Novell LAN. The systems are reasonably easy to install for a nonprofessional -- the process home office a fter all. In principle, they work almost the same: small DOS or Windows modules on each PC, all accessing a shared message database, which is just a file stored on the file server. MS Mail and cc:Mail both include a sending-and-receiving module (cc:Mall R outer, Message Transfer Agent, Gateway, etc.) that runs on a dedicated machine, connected to the LAN.

For e-mail delivery outside the LAN on which it is installed, the postoffices from Microsoft and Lotus both support gateway products connecting to wide area networks, mainframes, UNIX systems, and third-party e-mail providers. The most common software module by each vendor seems to be the one designed to directly dial up its own, same-vendor post offices by modem. The post offices in Japan I have seen use this approach, although they do not usually initiate calls. Instead, they are dialled into by larg er MS-Mail or cc:Mail post offices overseas, for example at 7 AM and 7 PM US time.

Neither MS-Mail or cc:Mail's basic gateways can talk to the Internet, ATT Mail, Sprint Mail, etc. -- you need yet another piece of software on another 386 on the LAN, to interface between the mail provider and the MSMail or cc:Mail gateway, which in tu rn, accesses the mail databases. Most of these gateways don't work very well, and therein lies a tale....

Market fragmentation

The market for e-mail products in Japan is as fragmented as that for all the other computer markets. Communications inherently requires common standards, but most LAN products seem to have been designed from an all-or-nothing, scorched earth marketing approach. The result is that you can't dial a Microsoft post office from a cc:Mail or DaVinci post office, and vice-versa. And naturally, they don't connect with the out much extra cost and hardware. It is usually easier to simply switch 100% to the PC pl atforms!

One key reason cc:Mail was rejected by my company last year as a worldwide platform was that Lotus (at that time) couldn't provide a fully functional gateway from the LAN to international X.400 mail services, such as ATT Mail and Sprint Mail. Another c ompany had a gateway that almost worked, but it had fatal limitations in directory synchronization with our existing, older e-mail systems. The e-mail service providers also couldn't provide the gateway to the LAN. Here in Japan last summer, a representat ive of one American telecommunications vendor informed me they had no experience supporting a cc:Mail gateway on a LAN in Japan. He suggested we consider putting a UNIX box on our IPX LAN, because they had a terrific X.400 gateway for that!

Host- or LAN-based Telecommunications vendors work hard to service their mainframe and host systems customers -- and most data is not e-mail. They can't possibly get control of the Windows and LAN e-mail market, and it is tough to fit their telecommuni cations capabilities into platforms that are constantly changing and have competing, incompatible standards.

If anything, they'd rather see host-based e-mail grow and prosper. What would be their role if corporations could easily dial directly to customers' and suppliers' cc:Mail post offices, without assistance from online e-mail services? The corporations would only need one site with a gateway to forward onward to the Internet, or pickup/deliver from the e-mail services!

Where were all the vendors of commercial e-mail packages on hosts, when Windows took off? Perhaps ifthey had written a Windows front-end For their e-mail systems, or provided a decent gateway to cc:Mail, corporate users wouldn't have felt the need to move their entire mail system to the LAN. Perhaps the host people figured that if they didn't provide the Windows interface and the gateway, users would have to stay on the host forever!

In the past, e-mail was a byproduct of the existing computing infrastructure of the company, and the international data connection that already existed because of their line of business. (Very few hosts and international leased lines ever got install ed just for e-mail.) Now, as mainframes continue to be unplugged, corporate e-mail is moving to the LAN and remote PC platforms. Even many large sites keeping their mainframes are moving the whole e-mail process off the hosts and onto Windows/LAN products for three main reasons

1. Windows e-mail is much easier to use and manage and is more interoperable with current desktop applications. It improves efficiency since employees are doing more types of work with Windows applications and can cut and past attachments to their mess ages from those applications,

2. The mainframes and hosts used by multinationals in foreign countries are often from different vendors (e.g., best of-breed in each country). (global competition now renders this approach non-viable, since management can't see global consolidated dat a and can't serve customers who have global requirements. Even e-mail systems on the Europe, North America, and Asia hosts often cannot talk to each other you'd be surprised at some of the very big, otherwise smart companies that are in this pickle right now. Integrating all of a company's computing is a huge common mail platform, like cc:Mail or MS-Mail, to cheaply and quickly to connect all workers with global e-mail.

3. Taking e-mail off the hosts simplifies the tangle of applications to deal with. It makes sense to first move off a non-integrated application like email. Even if there is no plan to unplug the mainframe, bandwidth on the leased lines and computing p ower on the host machine are so expensive at the margin that whenever a company runs out of capacity with its mission-critical functions, it's often cheaper to move something like e-mail off the system. Global e-mail also provides a basic infrastructure f or PC based spreadsheet file transfers and other workarounds while the messy process of downsizing begins. While client/ server systems are built, this provides an environment for systems people to work globally, and perhaps even transport some of the dat a itself, in the new systems.

Conclusion

In Japan, we all want easy, cheap email that runs in the background and doesn't take over our life when we hit the "SEND" button. For providing a bunch of mailboxes for the whole office, the best products, in my view, are the LAN-based post offices suc h as cc:Mail or MS-Mall. Both have good front ends for DOS, Windows, or OS/2, and they take care of all the connection and delivery tasks. You can call them at night from home. If the overseas affiliates have either a cc:Mail or MS-Mail post office, or an e-mail system that can be reached by X.400, Internet, or any of the other gateways, we'll probably be able to find a cheap, reliable way to connect to them From Japan.

Todd Boyle is a CPA and applications developer. He has been working in Japan since 1983.

Person-to-Person

There's no need to be held hostage to the e-mail services your company provides. A couple of ideas to consider:

1. Find your own mail database solution, one that enables you to keep your personal incoming and outgoing messages permanently. Most PC-based systems can be used in this fashion, and there are some excellent off-line readers in the shareware market. A com mon storage method is to append all your mail into a huge text file that can be easily searched with a word processor or file viewer. A DOS batch file can quickly append your daily mail to an archive file without any manual work at all. With hardware constantly getting cheaper, why shouldn't we continue storing our mail this way permanentiy, until the day we retire? (And why should I let the company take over the job with its mail system, where the material will be harder to access, can' t be immediately imported to my current document, and will be deleted regularly at unpredictable intervals by those knuckleheads in Headquarters?) This is an excellent way to retain and access the technical material and research, and the long-term client relationship background, contained in the messages?

2. If you can't reach certain segments of people either within or outside the company, look into the Internet. Internet access is ridiculously cheap in the US (as low as $2/hour), and it is only a matter of time before it becomes (relatively) cheap here in Japan. Remember, a typical full page of text only takes 1 second to transmit to the US, if compressed with other messages. All a service provider needs is a PC and a modem. I regularly contact individuals at their desks in the US via the Internet e-mail link at the Tokyo PC Users Group BBS (listed in the "Events" section).