世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research, carried out an internet-based survey of 330 people employed by national and local government, and by private enterprises to find out how well they knew various English computer-related buzzwords and acronyms. The sample was 72.7% male, with 23.0% in their twenties, 42.7% in their thirties, 24.8% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, and just 0.3% aged sixty or over. Note that those interviewed are not necessarily IT specialists, or even IT users, in their workplace.

Note that the questions are testing to see how confident the respondents are in their knowledge, not if they are correct or not. I do remember one incident at work regarding the GPL (actually, I remember lots of incidents with lots of technical terms) where one senior person was holding forth at length and with great confidence about a certain aspect of it but was, in fact, talking utter cobblers.

I’m rather surprised at FTTH scoring almost double of RSS and SNS, though. As far as I am aware, FTTH is rarely used in advertising for high-speed home internet access; it is usually just fibre-optic (光ファイバー, hikari faiba-) or NTT’s trademark B-FLET’S (B for Broadband, F for “flat rates, friendly Internet access, and a flexible environment”, and “Let’s” for “Let’s IP Service”).

How well do you do in knowing these terms?

The first figure mentioned in the article is that over seven in ten of those questions identified with the statement “Because people around me are using them, I’ve also used these IT technical terms without knowing what they mean.”

Q1: Have you confidence that you understand well business IT terms like “Blog”, “.NET”, “AJAX”, etc? (Sample size=330)

Yes	20.0%
No	42.1%
Can’t really say either way	37.9%

Q2: Select from the following list all of the technical terms you know at least a good bit about. (Sample size=330, multiple answer)

Google	87.0%
Blog	84.8%
QR Code	61.5%
FTTH	40.9%
Windows Vista	32.7%
RSS	23.6%
SNS	20.9%
I understand none of the above	4.2%

I score seven out of seven.

Q3: Select from the following list all of the technical terms you know at least a good bit about. (Sample size=330, multiple answer)

CRM	20.9%
Web 2.0	15.2%
Japanese SOX law	11.8%
SOA	10.0%
EDA	6.1%
I understand none of the above	65.2%

I have to put myself in the “None of the above” category here, so some of these links might go to the wrong definition! I hear Web 2.0 a lot, but like many people, I don’t really know what it means, or even if it does mean anything at all other than just being the internet’s equivalent of washing powder’s “New Improved” flash.