Blaming all ills of any Japanese industry on the keiretsu is in vogue for decades, but at best, keiretsu is a symptom, not a cause, of the underlying risk-averse culture. Keiretsu, even when they were toxically anti-competitive, did not go out of their ways to crush would-be global startups in Japan; keiretsu, by the author's own argument, didn't care about the global software-only market, thus would not kill those startups. The true culprit, the risk-averse culture -- while with own merits -- did not mesh well with the more fluid flat culture of software development.<p>It was not an accident that software did well in the most hippy region in the US, San Francisco. On the contrary, hardware development, due to much more constraints from the laws of physics and economics, has been done well in Japan et al as careful top-down planning is the edge, not individual-level agility.*<p>I am a little surprised that the author, who is active in Japan, is off the mark. I regularly talk to many engineers/entrepreneurs in the region, and the cause-and-effect are quite easy to see and are unanimously agreed upon. Kudos to people there who are trying to change the software development culture for the better.<p>* Elon's ventures seem to challenge this conventional dichotomy as he attempts to bring both agility and top-down leadership into his firms. More power to him.