by John BOYD

Who's to Blame for Industry Hype?

Surely there is no other industry so given to overhyping and underdelivering as the IT business.
This notion came to mind with Apple's recent introduction in Japan of the Newton MessagePad. Apple Japan, which has licensed a Japanese language kit for the upgraded Newton from a Tokyo-based startup called Enfour, has finally begun marketing its popular PDA (personal digital assistant) here for the first time. Not that the company can be blamed for its protracted wait-and-see attitude; the overhyping of former Apple President John Sculley's pet project almost caused the Newton to implode at its 1993 launch in the US. The first Newton, besides being a buggy product, was a far cry from the exciting gizmo consumers had been led to expect.

It's as if Sculley had learned nothing from the premature Macintosh unveiling in 1984. Then, too, Apple succeeded marvelously in hyping up the Mac -- but what it delivered was an underpowered toy, minus even an essential second floppy disk drive, let alone a hard disk. If Apple had waited at least until the Fat Mac, the Macintosh (like the Newton) wouldn't have gone through the trauma of a near-death experience at birth.

Apple isn't alone; overhyping has hurt a host of other IT products, alliances, and events. Consider Microsoft's early versions of Windows, Windows NT, and Bob; General Magic's Magic Cap; the Talligent and Kaleida joint-ventures from Apple and IBM; pen computers; 3DO's game machine and Apple's Pippin; the perennial Unix unification efforts; the IBM-Motorola-Apple PowerPC platform; early CD-ROM software; Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality; Internet companies; and the vast majority of computer games. Even Hollywood has a better record of delivering on its hype than the computer industry.

Japanese IT marketers are far from immune to the use of hype. But in a culture where humility is equated with maturity -- and boastfulness with childishness -- overhyping on the scale and frequency of the US industry is less common. Even comparative advertising is little used to press an advantage, lest it backfire by being seen as a boastful denigration of an honorable competitor.

The mob mentality

At least, this is the case when it comes to marketing efforts from individual IT companies. It's quite a different story, however, when it is an industry affair, and there is no clear individual around to blame if things don't work out as planned.

Take, for example, Japan's high-profile, high-tech industry projects. The Fifth Generation Computer Project was an attempt in the 1980s by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to have Japan's computer industry leapfrog into the 21st century, via a 10-year development program of creating highly intelligent computer technologies. According to author Scott Callon, who examines the Fifth Generation Project and other Japanese high-tech consortia in detail in Divided Sun [see the book review and author interview elsewhere in this issue--Ed.], Fifth Generation couldn't possibly have delivered on expectations. Indeed, it was doomed to failure even before it began.

MITI purposely overhyped Fifth Generation, says Callon, in order to pressure the Ministry of Finance into allocating sufficient funds for the project. Unfortunately, the hype worked too well; the entire industrialized world sat up and took a keen interest in developments that, 10 years later, ended in an immense and embarrassing anticlimax.

Much the same can be said of TRON (The Real-time Operating system Nucleus), promoted by Tokyo University's Ken Sakamura. TRON was billed as a revolutionary, open computer platform that would suit all needs, while ridding the world of proprietary systems. Sakamura certainly convinced much of Japan's IT industry, which got caught up in the hype and invested in the project, even down to the chip level.

So many companies backed TRON that, at one point, it seemed the sheer weight of numbers might see it through to achieve some of the vast market share Sakamura and others were predicting for it. However, TRON also failed miserably to deliver. Of course, with so many entities involved, no one was to blame (except, perhaps, the US government, which was made into a convenient scapegoat).

Looking in the mirror

When it comes to industry hype, we all share some responsibility. Vendors certainly do, when they capitulate to market pressures and overhype simply to build mindshare ahead of a product's release. And the press is also to blame, because it pressures or seduces companies into early revelation of plans, builds up readers' expectations, then self-righteously pans a product when it doesn't live up to the hype the press helped create.

We end users, too, are part of the problem. With our insatiable craving for ever-faster, newer, more powerful technologies, we help create an environment conducive to hype.

We get what we deserve.

John Boyd is the Tokyo correspondent for InformationWeek and writes the weekly "Computer Corner" column in the Japan Times. His e-mail address is 6840615@mcimail.com.