Undisputed king of the personal computer heap for a decade in Japan, NEC Corp suddenly finds itself in the same quandary as Apple Computer Inc: can it afford to pass its standard on to third parties – and can it afford not to? The company still commands about 53% of the Japanese market but is beset on all sides by price-cutting competitors building machines to the DOS/V standard created by IBM Japan Ltd and eagerly adopted by competitors jealous of NEC’s dominance. Now NEC is making its peace with Seiko Epson Corp, the only company that has succeeded in building any kind of business out of clones of the NEC PC-9800 family. Where NEC has until now used all the tricks originally invented by IBM Corp in the mainframe world to try to trip Seiko Epson up, the company is now seen as NEC’s sole ally in selling NEC-compatible personal computers, and earlier this summer, Reuter reports, NEC removed from its operating software a block function that prevents its MS-DOS variant from running on Seiko Epson machines. It is even inviting Seiko Epson to its company fairs to be held in November to display its NEC-compatible machines and peripherals alongside software developers that write for NEC. NEC originally successfully sued Seiko Epson for cloning, later installing the block function: Seiko Epson used a decoding function to overcome it. Sharp Corp and AST Research Inc at one time built NEC-compatibles, but now do DOS/V boxes.
