The US efforts to turn promotion of Japan’s Tron operating system for use in schools into a trade issue have dealt the operating system a serious blow: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co has abandoned plans to start marketing the B-Tron personal computer version of the operating system, saying that it feared that the move would lead to boycott of its products in the US market. The US alleges that promotion of Tron would be a non-tariff barrier to free trade by eliminating computers that didn’t use the operating system from Japanese schools – despite the fact that the Tron consortium offers licences to the thing it to all comers.
