.... the year was 1991. Japan was still riding high from the "bubble" years. Taxis lined the streets of Ginza weeknights at 2:00 A.M., to take salarymen home to far-off Yokohama and Chiba, after a night's entertainment. Real-estate companies had too much money, and they were buying up software companies and English schools.
Following the success of Israel-made dbMAGIC 4th generation application generator, a young software engineer named Baruch Vardi developed WIZDOM, an advanced Object Oriented Database application generator. He tied up with Israel's venerable data processing services company M.L.L., led by Amiram Shor and Arie Shemesh. They asked Todd Walzer, newly arrived in Japan after a decade at Intel's FAB 8 in Jerusalem, to try to duplicate the success of dbMAGIC in Japan.
I contacted with a company called Phitex, which was – guess what – a software company set up by a real estate company. The president Tagusari-san and the VP Engineering Umezawa-san really liked Wizdom. After evaluating and dissecting the product for 6 months, they were ready to move ahead…but, the bubble was starting to burst. Within a few months, the real estate company was in bank receivership, and Phitex was gone. Well, Tagusari-san introduced Wizdom to some of his friends, and a software company called Technocom from the Kubota (tractors) group signed on. iLand6 had its first deal!
Those were pioneering days to Japanize packaged software. PC's still ran on DOS. Localizing software code was a big job, and you had to port to 3 DOS platforms – NEC, Fujitsu, and IBM. To give you one example, if a user entered text in a field, then did "Back-Space", it only deleted the 2nd byte of the double-byte Kanji, and you were left with gibberish.
We finally overcame the challenges, and Wizdom sold very well for 2 years, to customers like Toshiba, electronics retailer Laox, etc.
All good things end. Japan's bubble burst, Windows replaced DOS and brought with it mass-market software packages, Laox went backrupt, after buying Wizdom licenses for over 10 years. iLand6 went on to build many more businesses. I'm still friends with Tagusari-san, Umezawa-san, and the former Technocom management team – Kato-san, Niimi-san, Wakabayashi-san, and we have a beer from time to time.