Personal computer software sales in Western Europe in 1994 were up 4% at $1,801m for all of 1994, the US Software Publishers Association in Washington reckons, while unit sales for the period were up 69%; for the fourth quarter of 1994 sales were up 11% on 1993 at $540m; Germany with Austria is the largest market in Western Europe, but was the only market in which sales declined both in the fourth quarter and full year periods – they were off 10% at $474.5m for the year; the UK and Eire rose 7% to $432.6m while in France, sales came out flat with 1993 at $288m after a strong rebound in the last quarter.
We think with Windows95 we’ll create the biggest upgrade phenomenon the industry has ever seen, Microsoft Corp chairman Bill Gates told the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in San Francisco, sticking to the August shipment date; the much derided Bob environment for novice users has slipped a month and will now ship next month.
There are no values attached to the figures, but Dataquest Inc reckons that in 1994, a total of 779,385 workstations were shipped, a rise of 25.3% on 1993, with 216,000 going out in the fourth quarter: Sun Microsystems Inc lost market share to Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM Corp, ending up with 36.2% by number, down from 38.15; Hewlett-Packard was at 19.8%, up from 19.1% and IBM was at 12.9%, up from 11.0%; Digital Equipment Corp is still suffering from a hangover of the Ken Olsen factor over Unix, and its share slipped to 10.7% from 10.8%; Silicon Graphics Inc rose a smidgen, to 5.9%, up from 5.7% in 1993.
Compaq Computer Corp has set mid-April for the next set of enhancements to its server line, when it will add 120MHz Pentium options and 32-bit Fast and Wide SCSI-2 controllers, with the cost of the 120MHz ProLiant 1500 expected to start just above the $6,353 entry-level price of current 100MHz Pentium models, Infoworld reports; the 120MHz single-processor system will come equipped with the TriFlex/PCI bus architecture, Error Correction Code memory, redundant power supplies, a Fast and Wide SCSI-2 controller, and a 1Gb hard disk; existing users will be able to upgrade either by buying the new daughterboard or via the Pentium OverDrive upgrade socket; new ProLiant 2500 and 4500 models will include many of the features announced with Compaq’s ProLiant 1500 in February.
McDonnell Information Systems Ltd has won a #2.5m five-year facilities management contract from UK stationer John Dickinson Stationery Ltd, which will move its VAX computers from its headquarters in Apsley to McDonnell’s data centre in Hemel Hempstead; seven staff will be transferred with the computers.
Hutchinson, Minnesota-based Hutchinson Technology Inc plans to build a $12m manufacturing plant in Eau Claire, Wisconsin employing 1,400 people at peak, with an annual payroll of more than $15m; it is due to open in the first quarter of next year, and is being built to meet the expected demand for suspension assemblies for disk drives.
ISDN, Integrated Services Digital Network, with its multiple digital channels on a single line, is an essential step on the road to the bandwidth-hungry Interactive Superhighway, but has been slow to take off in the US – and things threaten to become a whole lot worse because in January, the Federal Communications Commission ruled in January that telephone companies must charge for each channel as if it were a separate phone line, making the concept hopelessly uncompetitive, raising the cost of ISDN service in the US by as much as 50% before the end of the year, unless the Commission changes its mind; it is looking at the issue again, and the companies that offer ISDN service have filed waiver petitions in the vain hope that the agency won’t require price increases to take effect before it sets new rules.
British Telecommunications Plc has awarded a multi-million pound contract to Apple Computer UK Ltd for the supply of 1,000 Apple PowerBook Duos 270 and 280, associated services and software integration for its National Business
Communications Business Intelligence Toolkit for Sales project: the choice was based on British Telecom’s need for the sales force to have remote access to up-to-date corporate sales and account information and to provide a two-way communications link between head office and the mobile sales force; sales data can be downloaded remotely from the corporate VAX-based relational database onto a local Omnis database on the PowerBooks and the sales force can use this local database to update customer information and help manage billing and quote generation.
Ausburg, Germany-based Innovative Gesamtlosungen in der Mikroelektronik GmbH, which launched its Etherterminal 4W at CeBIT, says an Integrated Services Digital Network board will be available that will enable the terminal to be connected to the Internet, the World Wide Web, telephone systems and electronic mail: the attraction of the 4W for many companies is that they can add keyboards and screens of their choice, the terminals can be configured remotely; it also has an internal CD-ROM drive that holds all the software, TCP/IP, Windows and terminal emulations, so that end users cannot tamper with data.
A weaselly little paragraph in the New York Times’s report on the Visa International embedded microprocessor Smart Card payment cards that are to star at the Atlanta Olympiad next year (CI No 2,628) says Banks like the electronic purse cards because of the myriad fees they can charge for using them – customers will pay a fee to buy the cards and load more cash onto them; merchants that accept the cards will also pay their banks a percentage of each purchase as they do now with credit and debit card transactions: as we understand it, National Westminster Bank Plc has no plans to charge customers to buy or load the cards and here in the UK it is well-nigh certain the system would be a failure if such charges were levied.
Utah has joined the handful of US states to vote to allow competition in telecommunications, and Electric Lightwave Inc, Vancouver, Washington expects to be the first beneficiary: the company applied in October for permission to provide a full range of telecommunications services in the state by building an end-to-end speech, data and video services optical network.
Omaha, Nebraska-based MFS Communications Co Inc completed construction of a 100% fibre optic Metropolitan Area Network in St Louis: it extends some 80 route miles and will connect at least 42 buildings.
Atmel Corp has bought a 37-acre site in North San Jose for its new manufacturing facility: the site is adjacent to its current facility on which the lease will expire in 1997 and the new plant will house local manufacturing operations – increased back-end manufacturing, resulting from increased wafer production at its Colorado Springs plant, will be handled at the new site, and it expects also to house more design and product engineers, and related computer tools at the new site. – o – Ericsson Telecommunications Inc aims to capture up to 20% of the Philippine cellular phone market: Southeast Asia sales and marketing manager Edi Ahman said the Swedish firm currently had one to 2% of the market, which currently stands at some 200,000 mobile telephone users; the company now has around 10% of the total Asia-Pacific cell phone market and hoped to increase that; he estimated the demand to grow by 70% every year from the current 10.5m cellular phone users.
Royston, Hertfordshire-based Plasmon Data Ltd has launched the NetReady range of optical jukeboxes for Unix systems: jukebox management is via Plasmon’s multitasking Manager software and the interface to the network is via Network File System; the jukeboxes can house either rewritable or write once media; prices start from #15,000 for the 90Gb, 60-slot jukebox.
Microsoft Corp was due to make a major announcement involving Hollywood’s new DreamWorks SKG studio at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington as we closed for press last night, with Bill Gates and DreamWorks principa
ls Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg all billed to appear, but the company declined to comment on speculation that Microsoft would be announcing an equity investment in the new entertainment company; Gates has expressed interest in animation, which is expected to be a major part of the new studio’s production; Patty Stonesifer, vice-president of Microsoft’s fast-growing consumer division, was to be at the news conference with Gates; one source suggested that the two companies would merge their technological and creative skills to develop an array of new consumer products.
On the IBM Corp mainframe front, the second generation CMOS machines are expected to go to 10 processors on a board, up from the maximum of six on the first generation 9672s: the company last week released the Sysplex coupler feature that will enable up to eight of the one-to-six-way machines to be clustered.
ICL Plc yesterday announced a global joint marketing and purchasing agreement with Electronic Data Systems Corp under which the companies will jointly market ICL software with Electronic Data-related services worldwide, and establishing ICL as a global vendor to the General Motors Corp subsidiary: the agreement initially covers a broad range of network security and messaging software, business process re-engineering, and analysis tools for law enforcement and fraud detection, but others may be added.
The European Commission warned yesterday that the Community must not over-regulate emerging Information Superhighway applications such as electronic newspapers, distance learning, home shopping and interactive sports broadcasts, and that the approach should be based on the Single Market rule that where a service is approved in one member state, it can be offered in all.
Sony Corp appointed managing director Nobuyuki Idei to succeed Norio Ohga as president from April 1, when Ohga will become chairman in succession to founder Akio Morita: It’s fool to accept an offer to be Sony’s president at a time when the dollar is at 89 yen, Ohga observed to Tokyo reporters, who wondered whether he was really only joking.
If you have any Macs, hope your shop is secure as Fort Knox: gossip on the circuit says that replacement of stolen machines now makes up 10% of Apple Computer Inc’s total annual business in the UK.
If you can’t get everything exactly right before you launch, you better fix the problem quickly, and a relieved UK National Lottery operator Camelot Group Plc was able to announce yesterday that sale of its Instants immediate win lottery cards could resume – the computer problem that caused the readers to say the necessary function was not activated to validate winning cards was fixed 24 hours after launch.
Deutsche Telekom AG finally out-bid Cable & Wireless Plc for the stake on offer in Indonesian satellite telecommunications company PT Satelit Palapa Indonesia, Satelindo, and will pay $586m for a 25% stake.
In an almost unprecedented sensation for Japan, a shareholder of Minebea Co Ltd has filed a lawsuit against top executives of the company in which he demands that they pay $200m to Minebea for alleged damage caused to it because they failed to manage the major maker of miniature bearings – used in such things as disk drives – properly, causing the firm significant loss.
The European Commission has sent a letter to Dutch, Swiss, Swedish and Spanish telecommunications operators seeking information on their Unisource NV venture as well as their plans to co-operate with AT&T Corp: the Commission is expected to make approval of Telefonica de Espana SA’s partipation in Unisource conditional on a more rapid liberalisation of the Spanish market.
Comcast Corp’s Comcast Cablevision of Maryland LP plans to invest more than $100m to upgrade its cable systems in the Maryland counties of Baltimore, Harford, and Howard with over 1,500 miles of optical cable.
Atari Corp, Sunnyvale says its 64-Bit Jaguar Interactive Multimedia system wi
ll have a suggested retail price of under $160: the 64-Bit Power Kit includes the Jaguar console, a controller, power adaptor and video cable but no software.
The United Arab Emirates awarded AT&T Corp a $119m contract to supply its armed forces with digital communications equipment: AT&T beat Alcatel NV and Siemens AG.
What’s really behind the charges that Alcatel Alsthom SA overbilled France Telecom? Former industry minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn told Europe One radio openly that behind it is nothing less than a time-honoured practice by which the French government circumvents anti-subsidy regulations enforced by the European Commission by nodding through such over-billing of the state and state-owned industries to provide hidden subsidies to favoured firms for industrial projects that the state sees as meritorious.
Abingdon, Oxfordshire-based RM Plc, newly floated on the London Stock Exchange, will be one of the major suppliers of multimedia systems to English and Welsh primary schools under a #5m National Council for Education Technology grant: RM’s contract is for #1.7m of RM Multimedia ClassMate personal computers.
Now Computer Sciences Corp is outsourcing a major activity: it has signed Cincinnati-based Future Now Inc to manage an estimated $50m in desktop computer purchases that will be made by Computer Sciences’ North American offices this year; each business unit within Computer Sciences presently handles its own personal computer purchases, but with centralised negotiating, the El Segundo, California company is hoping to save over 15% on its equipment costs; a Baltimore facility, which is owned by Intelligent Electronics Inc will support the programme and will offer an 800-number phone line for purchases.
Even Chinese software companies are worried about piracy, and 12 local companies have set up the China Software Alliance to fight piracy and protect intellectual property, China Daily said; the 12 include the Founder Group, Legend Group, Stone Group and China Computer Software & Technology Service Co.
The US Federal Communications Commission says all of the 18 winning bidders at its latest airwave auctions met the deadline for submitting a total of $1,400m in down-payments for new wireless licences.
Sounds ominous: Bob Frankenberg sees a need for Novell Inc to boost its name recognition with the general public now that computers are more widely used – in the past, Novell’s customers were network managers and Novell did a brilliant job of marketing to them, but the company means nothing to the general public and Frankenberg has consolidated its advertising with one house, Young & Rubicam, and plans to increase its ad budget by 40% to $140m – but can he be sure all the software he sells to the public will be so perfect that he won’t make Novell’s name mud with the public as Intel Corp did?
