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That's nothing compared to Japanese consumers.

We were a US company working with a Japanese software distributor to do Japanese versions of our products. Occasionally on some Japanese non-IBM compatible PCs [1] we were seeing a lockup during installation.

It was the kind of lockup where CTRL-ALT-DEL does nothing, the CAPS LOCK light no longer toggles, and if you have a GUI that mouse pointer no longer moves. There's usually pretty much nothing to do at that point except hit the reset button or toggle power.

It was quite rare, giving us not much to work with. Our Japanese partners decided it was rare enough to go ahead and ship handling the (hopefully) handful of people that hit it via tech support.

So we shipped. And they got something like 100 support calls--but the callers were not upset. In fact they were happy with the product except that they wanted to suggest that the installer should be made faster or should run in the background so they could use the computer while the install takes place. The reports said that the install took something like 20-30 hours.

I can't even conceive of a US consumer letting a computer that appears totally locked up while installing a small utility program sit for up to 30 hours.

(BTW, knowing that it was just very slow rather than frozen was enough of a clue to let us figure it out. We needed to scan for hard drives and CD-ROM drives. The way we were doing that was hitting some sort of edge case on a particular model of controller's firmware that made some requests take a long time. We were able to change the drive scan to avoid that controller's edge case).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-9800_series






It sounds like, in any future war involving Japan, we should expect to find soldiers hiding out in the jungle years later, still trying to log in to their email...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda




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