Smile Zemi: putting a dedicated tablet in the home and ending the packaged-software business (2012)

Choosing to make the device yourself

What makes the Smile Zemi decision different from an ordinary new venture is that the foundation already existed inside the company. For a firm that had spent thirteen years making the learning software used by roughly 80% of Japan’s public primary schools, the grammar of a screen a child operates was not borrowed. What was missing were two things — the household as a customer, and a mechanism for receiving payment every month — and a dedicated tablet filled both at once. The outline of this judgment lies in not choosing to put an app on a general-purpose tablet, and instead taking on the burden of supplying the device itself.

A company that could not defend Ichitaro earned the largest profits in its history from a business that does not use it. One could also say that a company which lost its basic-research corps in 2009 recovered on the unglamorous accumulation of thirteen years in classrooms. JustSystems as a packaged-software company reached a dead end once in the 2000s, and walked through the 2010s as a company selling correspondence education and corporate cloud services. The name, the listing and the Tokushima head office have not moved; only what it sells has been replaced.