Jeff Yang had a great article in the San Francisco Chronicle the other day explaining Apple’s Japanese influences. More specifically, he talks about what made Sony so successful in the latter part of the 20th century and how Apple has succeeded by doing what Sony is no longer doing today.
Jobs’s immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate aspects of how a culture sees the world, it’s nearly impossible to accurately explain — it’s variously translated as “void,” “space” or “interval” — but it essentially describes how emptiness interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance. If someone were to ask you what makes a ring a meaningful object — the circle of metal it consists of, or the emptiness that that metal encompasses? — and you were to respond “both,” you’ve gotten as close to ma as the clumsy instrument of English allows.
While Jobs has never invoked the term in public — one of the aspects of his genius is the ability to keep even his most esoteric assertions in the realm of the instantly accessible — ma is at the core of the Jobsian way. And Jobs’ single-minded adherence to this idiosyncratically Japanese principle is, ironically, what has allowed Apple to compete with and beat Japan’s technology titans — most notably the company that for the past four decades dominated the world of consumer electronics: Sony.
Basically this sentence sums it up pretty succinctly:
Apple products are as defined by what they’re missing as much as by what they contain.
If you think about it, it’s very true. Many of today’s successful products don’t try to bombard users with a dizzying array of product features and options.
Read More: How Steve Jobs ‘out-Japanned’ Japan | SF Chronicle Full Page.
