Other speakers included Shaw Pender, the Multimedia systems manager at the the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, who spoke on use of multimedia in the Voyager space-craft applications, and IDG analyst Keizo Kawamura, who analysed the past and future developments in the workstation market from a Japanese perspective. Kawamura echoed Scott McNealy in his pessimism about the future of the MIPS R4000, which while it has the support of NEC and Sony in Japan, has few users in the US. As a consequence he saw the SuperSparc (supported by Fujitsu and ICL Plc), Precision Architecture, backed in Japan by Hitachi Ltd and Oki Electric Industrial Co), and PowerPC would be the winning CPU technologies. He said one factor that would hold back the growth of Intel-chip-based Unix in Japan was the lack of high-end personals.
