The market for X Window graphical user interface clients – and their future direction – is a topic that absorbs the thinking time of David Shepherd, founder and president of Tangent Computing Ltd of Tokyo. Echoing the trends in other world markets, people within the Unix industry in Japan are looking at the Windows market for explosive growth, he says; the Unix market is growing at around 20%, while the Windows market is experiencing more than 50% growth since last year when Windows95J was released. Tangent is the Japanese distributor of products from the KL Group of Toronto; these products are a family of widgets (or graphical user interface software objects) for use by programmers in developing Motif applications, and include XRT/3D for three- dimensional graphs, XRT/Table for tables and forms, XRT/field for formatted data input and XRT/gear, a collection of widgets to add Windows-like functionality – for example, tables, tool bars, icons, labels, and so on – to programs. Shepherd says his sales have never been better – company revenue last year was approximately $1m – and that with XRT software the company has achieved a comfortable niche position. Tangent sells over 50% of its product direct and the other 50% though a range of resellers, including Astec, Sumisho Electronics, Tomen Electronics, Lifeboat and others. Tangent recently became a project client in the Japan Market Entry Competition, a program which is rapidly becoming known as the mini-MBA course in Japan market entry. Through this six-month program he had a team of young business people work on a business plan for the Japan introduction of KL Group’s products for Windows which are due this summer. One of these is Olectra Chart custom controls which enables Windows developers, both programmers and non-programmers, to embed charts as screen objects in their programs. Market research for the business plan identified one major Japanese competitor in this market but despite this, Shepherd sees the future for the programming tools market as bright – this is just the beginning of a huge software component industry, he says.
