Sony Corp has withdrawn its support of a joint venture desk-top publishing business company, Newscaster, which it formed with printing and publishing company Koei Group in 1988. Both Sony and the Koei Group gave various reasons for the split, Sony that its mission of developing the desk-top publishing market on workstations had been accomplished, while the Koei Group indicated that Sony’s NEWS was too narrow a system for the jointly developed software which will now be converted for other workstations and personal computers, including Sun Microsystems Inc Sparcsystems and Apple Computer Inc’s Macintosh. Sony initially targeted its workstations, planned to be in the forefront of the Unix workstation business in Japan, at the desk-top publishing market, pioneering the office workstation business while Sun and Hewlett-Packard Co concentrated on the engineering field. Sony’s efforts, lead by Dr Toshitada Doi, had some effect but Sony, once third in the market after Sun and Hewlett, has lately lost its position to NEC Corp with its EWS 4800 workstations, which like Sony’s later models are based on the MIPS Technologies R3000 and R4000 series RISC microprocessors. NEC and Sony are said to be ready to formalise an alliance following their initial agreement in May to share application software catalogues (CI No 1,922). The efforts that Sony has put in for the NEWS outside Japan would give NEC a flying start in the US and Europe should it decide to enter the international workstation market. Sony has also announced a version of Novell Inc’s NetWare for Unix v3.11, formerly Portable NetWare, its NEWS workstations. The NEWS workstations running NetWare for NEWS will be offered as servers for personal computers. Sony did its own Japanese translation and implementation of NetWare. It already has AppleTalk on NEWS, and expects demand for workstations that can handle multiple operating systems to grow.
