Japan- Welcome to the Red Ocean

LINE detailed their big push into Manga today, with emphasis on the potential to use their manga reading platform as a bridge to overseas markets (n Japanese:)….And they were not the only ones, as Softbank also announced the release of a new free Manga reader app (in Japanese). This follows DeNA who released MangaBox last December. Everyone seems to want to release manga readers, at the same time, for consumption at home and abroad. This pattern of companies releasing similar offerings at similar times is not new: whiteness the proliferation of personalized news reader apps (Smart News, Gunosy, News Picks- all with high valuations) from both startups and larger internet companies.

Certainly, startups outside of Japan also follow this pattern (chat apps, anyone?), but the scale of corporate investment into undifferentiated platforms seems unique here. A few quick thoughts that I hope to develop later: 1) “Risk” in technology ecosystems seems to be misunderstood here: It is riskier to not innovate than to innovate 2) With the market/channel power that these companies have- at least domestically- it seems like there would be opportunity for greater margins by releasing products that give users a truly differentiated, desired experience but nobody seems to be doing that.