The country of technological innovation par excellence has decided that it is time to abandon floppy disks, an ancient information storage system that many of our readers have probably only seen in movies and series. In full 2022, the Japanese Government recognizes that they are still necessary to successfully carry out more than 1,900 bureaucratic procedures.
The newly appointed digital minister of the country, Taro Kono, expressed a few days ago on Twitter the need to abandon “old-fashioned” technologies such as floppy disks, CDs or MiniDiscs. Among the commitments is also to eliminate tools such as the fax or hanko, a carved red seal that is still essential as a signature on official documents.
Kono’s announcement takes place in a context where the country is aware of the need to modernize the way in which the inhabitants relate to the administration in their daily lives, with the aim of eliminate inefficiencies and errors and save time and costs. It is surprising, to say the least, that a country with Japan’s rate of tech adoption is so far behind others when it comes to digitization.
Beyond opinions, there is a powerful reason to abandon floppy disks: Sony, one of the main manufacturers, stopped producing them more than 11 years ago and most manufacturers followed suit. Thousands of organizations first bet on the USB storage and then for the cloudbut there are legal and bureaucratic obstacles that must be resolved before an entire Administration is ready to take the leap.
Japan is no exception. Until not many years ago, the US used floppy disks to contain its nuclear program and, even though it was an obsolete medium, those responsible for the Armed Forces defended its continuity due to its resistance to hacking, compared to modern cloud-based systems.
In Spain, public institutions began to abandon floppy disks since they were withdrawn from the market in 2011 and it is fair to recognize that the digital administration has advanced a lot in recent years, although there is also a lot of work ahead.