The Japanese personal computer market is set for a new shake-up following a decision by IBM Japan Ltd and Seiko Epson Co to gang up on market leader NEC Corp, which through all the turmoil of the past couple of years has still managed to hang on to its 50% share of the market – there are some 19,000 Japanese-language applications for the 9800 series, compared with about 5,000 for the DOS/V AT-derived standard. Despite this, Seiko Epson Co is the only company to have persisted with clones of NEC’s PC-9800 series, and has now licensed IBM Japan to use the emulation technology in its DOS/V machines, which will be launched next spring. Meantime Seiko Epson has decided to offer seven Pentium-based DOS/V models at from $4,000 as well as the PC-9800-compatibles, but rather than go to IBM it will buy them OEM from Digital Equipment Corp. Seiko Epson hopes to sell 50,000 of the new PCV series in the first year of marketing.
