Matsushita Electric Industrial Co has shelved plans to market sell Fujitsu Ltd’s FM Towns home computer under its brand name, even though it had said it would offer the thing this year, according to the Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun, the decision to postpone distribution reportedly stemming from overwhelming opposition from Matsushita top brass; the Panafacom brand name for office computers is a combination of the Matsushita and Fujitsu brand names, the two firms previously collaborated on FMR personal computers, and Matsushita developed the compact disk read-only-memory unit that comes standard with the FM Towns machine, but the postponement on the current collaboration is put down to a string of problems, reportedly including Matsushita’s desire to modifyi the machine, and internal differences over pricing; the suggestion is that Matushita, keen to have a hit computer in the mass market after several flops, will modify the FM Towns architecture to make it compatible with other Matsushita computers, so Fujitsu will be going it alone with the machine, which is short of software and incompatible with any existing software.
