According to Kono, floppy disks, along with other legacy technologies such as compact discs and minidiscs,
Kono's promise to "purge" the government of flexiblediscs, which are 50+ years old, came amid a broader effort to modernize the way people in Japan apply and other forms for government services. The digital minister said Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is backing his "anti-floppy crusade".
This is not the first time Kono has criticized the inefficiency of Japan's government bureaucracy. Previously, he advocated the elimination of facsimile machines and traditional carved hanko seals.
“I want to get rid of the fax machine,” Kono said.
Japan may have no choice but torefuse diskettes for purely practical reasons. Sony, one of the largest disc manufacturers in the past, officially discontinued their production 11 years ago. Since then, most organizations have moved to more advanced storage alternatives such as USB sticks and cloud storage. Even the US Department of Defense, which oddly has a strong reputation as one of the late adopters of new computing technologies, finally phased out floppy disks in 2019 after 50 years of use.
In addition to supply problems, floppy disks are becomingless and less practical. Today's text and spreadsheet files are significantly larger than they were in the 1980s, when floppy disks were in their prime, and therefore simply won't fit on them.
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