I've been exploring ways to enter the East Asian market for a while now, and whilst it is an extremely large and potentially hugely lucrative market, I find that the differences between not only western cultures of business but also the differences in cultures between East Asian counties is an insurmountable barrier to entry.
Based in Australia, our company is in a small, fully developed market, and so looking to East Asian is a logical step to expanding business opportunities. However, while we already successfully employ developers in East Asian countries, no opportunity has yet presented itself in regards to customers. Developing markets for our Joomla products and services (and also for Joomla in general) in Japan, China and Korea would be a huge boon for our organization, but as your article points out, the differing business cultures make entering these markets incredibly difficult.
However, while I agree that a change in marketing, sales, customer engagement, etc is very important to succeed in Japan (and China, Korea, etc) I think there is a large gap in the language customizations and translations that are available for these markets (especially in relation to European languages). I think a concerted effort to develop better and more up-to-date translations for East Asian countries would go a long way to making Joomla more accessible in these markets.
