The organisation that guided Japanese computer manufacturers to pre-eminence through the 1960s and 1970s, the powerful Ministry of International Trade & Industry, has at last begun concrete moves to set industry guidelines for separate pricing of hardware and software. Japan, led by the major Japanese manufacturers, has been notorious for emphasising the cost of hardware over the cost of software in the pricing of systems, resulting in infamous cases such as the one-yen software tender for local government systems in both Hiroshima and Nagano prefectures (won respectively by Fujitsu Ltd and NEC Corp). All major hardware manufacturers have kept teams of application software programmers at the ready to develop systems for customers. However times are changing and manufactures are finally unbundling software, as Fujitsu is doing with its Propose system of software and services pricing, the definition of which is believed to have been influenced by experience at affiliates such as Fujitsu Australia and ICL Plc. The Ministry’s approach has been to form a Basic Policy subcommittee under the auspices of the Information Processing Committee. The subcommittee is chaired by Kenichi Imai, a professor at Stanford University, and will meet several times before the end of the year, publishing an interim report in December, with the final report due in spring 1993.
