The Matsushita-Sun deal leaves out Solbourne, the original third party Sparcsystems builder where the Japanese company already has 52%. Contacted last week, Solbourne chief executive Doug MacGregor, who voiced scepticism over the high value put on the pair’s OEM agreement, said he had been previously briefed over the alignment, and really didn’t care. Then, looking on the bright side, he figured it might help his position. Matsushita has exclusive rights to sell Solbourne machines in Japan, but hasn’t moved many because it lacked the Japanese version of SunOS, despite three years of negotiating with Sun for it. MacGregor attributed Sun’s past reluctance to license the Japanese Language Extensions, which Matsushita now has rights to, in part to Sun’s determination to carve out the Japanese market for itself, as well as to legitimate concerns over support. The extensions however are now only a short-term or even belated solution. When Sun moves to System V.4 some time next year, localisation will come via the Multi-National Language Support extensions. And besides all this, Solbourne does not see revenue from Matsushita sales. However, Solbourne, whose low-end system strategy is still not highly developed, is already interested in the S3000, Matsushita’s small footprint plasma version of Solbourne’s new S4000 desktop box, and despite negotiations with Trigem Co and Research, Development & Innovations Inc for the Brite Lite Sparc laptop, would be very interested if Matsushita were to come up with a notebook.
