I think they are failing because sometime in the mid-Nineties, in the effort to compete with lean and hungry overseas companies, they lost their legendary reputation for quality and customer service, as they tried to respond to changing circumstances.

A couple of examples of my own:

Around 1996, I bought a cassette recorder made by Aiwa, which had been a fairly upscale electronics brand. It looked nice from the outside, but when I examined it closer after buying it, I realized it was a fairly crude, generic cassette recorder of the time, made in China, probably the generic output from a factory there that Aiwa had slapped their name onto.

It failed in less than a month. I brought it to the store for a replacement and that one failed too within thirty days, exactly the same way the first one did. Obviously, Aiwa had not done extensive testing on this model, and I think probably didn't even design or supervise its manufacture.

In the early 2000s, I bought a Sony Palm OS PDA. It was very advanced and had great features that I loved. But it failed in two weeks due to bad connection to the lamp that lit the LED display. After a few minutes' search on the Internet, I saw this was a well-known problem with this device, caused by a design flaw.

I took it back to the store, and got a replacement that failed exactly the same way in two weeks. The store wouldn't give me another, so I had to rely on Sony's warranty service.

It was my worst-ever warranty experience. After a long conversation with customer service reps in India, I was able to convince them it was actually failing. They sent me a box to return it in. It took almost a month to come back, only to fail with the same problem about three months later.

I went through the whole process again, waited another month. This time the repaired (or replaced) device came back rattling around in a box with no packing material. It too failed, several days after the one-year warranty expired.

I think the decline of the Japaneses electronic giants has been caused by a combination of several things. Japanese technology companies built their reputations during the late Sixties and Seventies, at the start of the Japanese economic boom, when they had a highly skilled workforce willing to work at relatively low wages, compared to the US or Europe. They had already sharpened their quality and innovative abilities in the intense domestic Japanese market, which was extremely competitive and where the consumers were very picky about quality. That market was protected, so there was almost no competition from overseas.

When they moved into Western markets, they were the young, scrappy underdog taking on dinosaur companies like RCA and Phillips, that could not respond fast enough to compete effectively against them. They were also aided by the low value of the yen relative to the dollar, which made their products a very good value.

So all of these things have changed. Complaints of unfair trade eventually forced Japan to open their domestic market to overseas competition. As the article pointed out, now Japanese companies are the dinosaurs in their domestic market, competing against Apple and Samsung. Meanwhile, the yen is very high against foreign currencies, which hurts them badly in export markets.

The Japanese labor market has also changed. Younger Japanese are much less willing to work with the dedication their parents and grandparents had. Wages have gone up, and are equal to or higher than those in the US and Europe, and like those countries, they have tried to cut costs by shifting manufacturing overseas, which has resulted in a decline in quality.

Also, the Japanese population is declining, with fewer and fewer young workers, and those coming into the job market have been conditioned to expect comfortable, high-paying, lifetime office jobs, not manufacturing jobs.

Meanwhile, the inefficiencies of the lifetime employment system in Japanese companies have made it very difficult to adapt to changing circumstances by laying off workers, even as that system is starting to break down.

It's like a perfect storm of bad news for Japanese companies, but in many ways it is very similar to what happened to electronics giants in the US thirty years earlier as they tried to defend against Japanese competition and eventually failed.