IBM Japan Ltd has managed to round up 11 Japanese manufacturers, members of the AX group which has been making Japanese language AT-alikes for its initiative to set a Japanese personal computer standard and try to eat into NEC Corp’s seemingly unassailable lead in market share: it is prepared to license rights to its J4.0V Japanese version of MS-DOS, compatible testing support, and display technology, the companies include Hitachi Ltd, Mitsubishi Electric Corp, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, Sony Corp, Sanyo Co, Ricoh Co, Oki Electric Industrial Co and Canon Inc; Fujitsu Ltd’s position is unclear, because it doesn’t plan to abandon its FMR standard; it will cost $22,000 to join, and $15,000 a year thereafter; NEC’s share of the market briefly dipped below 50% when Toshiba Corp got the bit between its teeth with its laptop and notebook computers, but that didn’t last and NEC Corp’s 98 Note is now the top-selling notebook in the Japanese market.
