International Standardization and Information-Communication Industries - Essay Example

The reasons for this difference in the electronics companies in the United States and Japan can be traced to historical reasons. In Japan during the early 1960s, the Ministry of the Economy, Trade and Industry helped in the formulation of trade agreements wherein each Japanese developer of computer systems was paired with a counterpart in the United States, with the objective being that of ensuring Japan’s participation in the electronic revolution and to enable it to compete with IBM which was then the most important player in the market for computer systems.

(Hagiu, 2005). The result of this policy was the development of incompatible systems, with operating systems for each being different depending upon which U.S. partner the Japanese company was working with; even IBM systems were sometimes incompatible with each other. Thus, in order to enhance profitability, the Japanese electronics companies found it more profitable to develop integrated systems, whereby one company manufactured highly customized systems offering free software and upgrades, as well as all the hardware component parts, sourcing distributors and suppliers and integrating them into the network of the company organization itself (Hagiu, 2005).

This also resulted in a gradual elimination of the U.S. counterparts. The Japanese market is now characterized so much by specialized development of software and electronic products from vertically integrated companies that it is difficult for medium sized independent developers/companies to flourish because there is very little scope for the development of popular platforms which justifies mass scale production of software. In the United States on the other hand, the monopoly enjoyed by IBM in the 1960s and its vertically integrated structure was affected after an antitrust suit was filed against the Company (Hagiu, 2005).

Due to this suit, there was a public hue and cry against monopolization