Having done a very effective number on the US manufacturers, knocking them out of the memory chip market in the mid-1980s, the Japanese are now suffering the same fate at the hands of the Koreans, and the Wall Street Journal quotes a Toshiba Corp executive bewailing the fact that the company’s new $1,000m memory fab will take 10 months to build – it doesn’t take nearly so long in South Korea, he says; the Big Three – Hyundai Electronics Co, Samsung Electronics Co and Goldstar Electron Co won their pre-eminence by investing heavily in new plants in the early 1990s after the Japanese had put major new investments on hold in face of recession and tight money, and by next year are expected to have a higher level of investment than Japan’s top five semiconductor manufacturers; next target for Korea is thin-film transistor liquid-crystal displays – all three plan volume production this year, and together look to land half the world market by 2000.
The judge presiding over the patent dispute trial between Motorola Inc and Interdigital Communications Corp over Time Division Multiple Access technology is urging both to settle, according to court papers released late Monday at Reuters’ request: the transcript quotes Judge Joseph Longobardi telling attorneys he estimated it would take two-and-a-half years for the appeals process to be exhausted.
It was already known that VobisMicrocomputer AG planned to preload Windows95 on its personal computers when the thing is available, but the German and Microsoft Corp have now formally announced agreement to settle their dispute: Vobis will pre-install either Windows95 or OS/2 Warp; under the agreement, which Microsoft described as a contract and Vobis called a memorandum of understanding, Vobis will be able to buy Windows95 at wholesale prices without having to install it on all computers sold.
Motorola Inc’s European Cellular Infrastructure Division has formed a Wireless Intelligent Network centre for Europe, in Swindon, Wiltshire, called the IN.sr2 Solution Centre, matching the one opened in Arlington Heights, Illinois last year: the IN stands for innovation and integration, and the centre’s aim is to introduce new services through integration of third party products; there are also plans to open a satellite site in Madrid.
The PDO Media joint venture of Philips Electronics NV and Hoechst AG in Weisbaden, Germany has launched the DriveDoktor, a diagnostic system for magneto-optical drives that is said provide early warning of drive deterioration before failure occurs; the company says the key parameter is the drive’s ability to read and write; it costs $1,000.
In his first televised explanation of Alcatel Alsthom SA’s legal troubles on Wednesday evening, Pierre Suard was indignant – too much is too much, the suspended chairman said on France 2, acknowledging the risk he took by publicly airing his complaints but determined to counter the attack on his honour and his company: Judge Jean-Marie d’Huy’s case, after months of investigations and searches, has proven nothing – I am innocent, the group is innocent – we are victims of an attempt at destabilisation; Suard asserted that he had never been interrogated about alleged overbilling of France Telecom, neither did Alcatel make under-the-table payments to political parties – the payments Alcatel subsidiaries made to foreign accounts represent commercial payments that accompany export operations; as regards the home improvements he was said to have charged to Alcatel, Suard said a legal expert concluded that he had truly paid for them himself, although the security improvements to his home in Neuilly, which were made at the behest of the government after the assassination of Renault SA chief Georges Besse in 1986, were charged to Alcatel – throughout the world, security improvements are paid by the company, he asserted, concluding by issuing a veiled threat to decamp – If it is no longer possible to develop our business in France, we have other strings on our bow; we can grow else
where.
The first supercomputer from Intel Corp’s Intel Supercomputer Systems in China is going to the country’s Daqing Petroleum Administration Bureau: the Paragon XP/S 5 supercomputer, sold with PGS Tensor Inc of Houston, will be used by Daqing Geophysical Exploration Co for seismic data processing in its prospecting for underground oil.
Western Digital Corp has signed GS-Thomson Microelectronics NV to a multi-year foundry agreement under which the Italo-French company will supply it with chips and wafers, initially 0.7 micron double and triple level metal parts, moving to 0.5 micron designs by the year-end.
Zeos International Inc and Micron Computer Inc shareholders meet on April 6 to approve the acquisition of Zeos: the combined company is to be called Micron Electronics Inc.
Data Tools Inc of Menlo Park, California has released Easy BackTrack, a low-end version of its SQL-BackTrack, for back-up and recovery of Sybase databases: Easy BackTrack, priced at $1,300, is aimed at companies with small databases, but is upgradable to SQL-BackTrack if the need arises and the data overflows.
Fremont, California-based Qualtec Data Products Inc has launched two products designed to secure personal computers: the Steel-Lok I is a heavy-duty device that attaches to the bottom of the desktop box and then bolts onto the desk; the File-Lok III is a 3.5 floppy disk drive lock that is inserted into the actual drive bay and is said to have 50,000 different key combinations. – o – Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire-based Colotrac Ltd unveiled, at CeBit, a large format digital colour reprographics system based on its large-format scanner, the CT36/400, the company’s first product which it announced last year (CI No 2,507): Colortrac says that at a price of ú40,000 for the complete system, it’s much cheaper than any other type of large format colour scanner alone; to create the system Colortrac has combined the CT36/400 with a PISA Systems Photoscript 3000 RIP, Novajet 111 AO printer and the firm’s own Windows-based software.
Kanata, Ontario-based Newbridge Networks Corp is opening an office in Germany, the better to support its local customer base, that will be fully operational by the summer.
Flight simulator designer CAE Inc completed the $155m sale of the assets of its defence unit CAE-Link Corp to GM Hughes Electronics Corp: cash will be used to pay CAE’s debt.
Fremont, California-based Smart Modular Technologies Inc has announced the ST 2814, a V.34/V Fast dual standard 28.8Kbps PCMCIA facsimile modem: Smart says it is backward-compatible with all V.Fast fax modems and uses solid-sate line interface circuity for greater reliability; there’s no price for it.
Nokia Oy’s mobile phones division is opening a distribution centre in Bochum, Germany, adding to the existing manufacturing facilities it has at the site, the division’s second biggest European facility.
American Power Conversion Inc launched a range of uninterruptible power supply products at CeBit: the SmartSlot, an internal accessory option slot for use with power supply management accessories; QuickSwap, which allows users to change batteries without switching off the machine; SmartBoost, to manage brownouts; SmartTrim to reduce high voltages to output suitable to the device being used; and ProtectNet, a family of surge and lightning protection products for local networks and peripherals like telephones and facsimile machines.
Dublin object house Iona Technologies Ltd is shipping beta versions of its Orbix object request broker for Wind River Systems Inc’s VxWorks real-time Unixalike: Iona says Orbix can squeeze into 200Kb memory on Motorola Inc 68000 kit.
Is Motorola Inc going to buy Apple Computer Inc? Brown Brothers Harriman & Co analyst William Milton really thinks it might, and on that basis upgraded Apple to neutral from may sell – which still damns it with pretty faint praise: he emphasised that his conclusion was strictly based on his own analysis and th
at neither firm had given any indication or hints about a possible merger – it just made sense.
As most of the news wires were reporting Bill Gates saying in Brussels that Windows95 was on schedule to ship in August, Bloomberg Business News was saying that when he arrived in Bonn later on Wednesday, the date had slipped to September.
Microsoft Corp will launch its Windows95 Preview Programme at the end of this month, shipping up to 400,000 copies of the system to business users who want an early look to help them decide whether to upgrade: each participant will pay $32 for a copy of the beta release which will include documentation and a licence for up to five additional people to copy and use the software; those that want to continue using the software at the end of the Preview programme would have to upgrade to the release version, which will be sold for under $100.
Tivoli Systems Inc, Austin, Texas may be small – $1.4m net on $26.8m sales last year – but it is highly-rated and hugely ambitious, and with its shares, floated at $14 last week, soaring to $31 at one point and still riding high, coupled with the cash raised in the flotation, leaves it perfectly poised for an acquisition spree: We’re not going on a binge, chief executive Frank Moss told the Dow Jones Investor Network, but over the next year or so I see us making a couple of select acquisitions of either personal computer management desktop products or companies with technologies complementary to Tivoli’s business, the chief declared.
Apple Computer Inc admits its Power Macintosh line is in short supply.
IBM Corp has rallied Emeryville, California-based Sybase Inc to the OS/2 cause, signing the company to a development and marketing agreement to deliver client-server products for OS/2 for iAPX-86 and PowerPC: Sybase promised to develop optimised versions of the currently available Sybase System 10 product family for OS/2, including Sybase SQL Server, Replication Server and the Workgroup SQL Server bundle.
IBM Corp is making much of the fact that it costs less to run off the CD-ROM version of this year’s annual report than the dollar a copy the paper version cost it – but everyone has to have the paper version anyway, because the card to request it is in the annual report.
IBM Corp is also putting the report up on the Internet and says the CD-ROM features about 15 minutes of digitised video, including an interview with chairman Louis Gerstner, who also provides an abundance of polished narration according to Associated Press: the report also has its own original score and specially-created computer animations that depict such things as IBM’s new products and its global business; We began the year with a lot of people using the ‘survival’ word; we ended the year with most people using the ‘success’ word, Gerstner says on the disk, and he highlights the stream of new products introduced last year, IBM’s success at cutting costs, its much higher share price, and its growing cashpile, now at about $11,000m; he does complain that turnover grew only 2.1% and that the personal computer unit as a trouble spot; it cut research and development spending 22% last year to $4,360m from eliminating redundant efforts.
Commenting on its figures (page seven) UK cable television and local telephony operator TeleWest Communications Plc says the first two months of 1995 are in line with expectations and it expected continued strong growth in subscribers and revenue, but gave no update on its penetration rate, the number of subscribers relative to number of homes marketed, or on churn rate.
Getronics NV tells Reuters that despite not being in the winning consortium, it expects to get fives of millions of dollars of work on building the Dutch cellular system (it said tens of millions of guilders, but it amounts to the same thing): he said Getronics had sound expertise and staff at the ready to play a part in building the network, and having come close to winning the franchise, it d
oes not intend to abandon telecommunications.
Microsoft Corp’s sales force has begun informing key customers that the company plans to provide an interim update to Windows NT that gives it the Windows95 user interface, US PC Week reports, either late this year or early in 1996.
Nokia Oy says it is to be the Title Sponsor of the Tyrrell Yamaha Formula One Motor Racing team in 1995.
Updating the Alcatel Alsthom SA saga (see item on page four), lawyers for chairman Pierre Suard have asked the court to annul the judicial investigation which led to the ban on him running the company; and an employee shareholders organisation of Alcatel Alsthom sent an open letter to France’s justice minister complaining that the judicial probe into chairman Pierre Suard was hurting their savings – Andre Soria, chairman of the staff investment fund, said the 50,000 employees he represented were hurt in their dignity and noted their savings in Alcatel shares had lost their value partly due to the investigation.
Sherwood Computer Services Plc is still shedding: it has transferred the benefits and obligations in its customer base of its housing management products to the Capita Managed Services Ltd arm of Capita Group Plc, which became a distributor for the products a year ago; Sherwood will receive royalties on sales of the products up to a maximum of ú570,000, down from ú750,000 announced previously – but the business is hardly brilliant because it made a ú1.7m loss pre-tax on ú1.4m in the year to December 1993.
Swedish state-owned phone company Telia AB agreed to raise its stake in Digital Telecommunications Philippines Inc to 10% from 2.5% now.
Mercury One-2-One Ltd has been forced to raise its prices following its expensive marketing strategy offering customers free off-peak local calls, the Financial Times reported: it is raising the monthly rental for its PersonalCall tariff by 20% to ú15, the first time that prices have risen in the UK cellular telephone business; it is also bringing in a range of customer service charges but the tariffs for business will remain unchanged.
There’s a blast from the past: Boca Raton-based Panda Project Inc, which has innovative chip packaging technology to enable computers to be built really small, has hired H L Sparky Sparks as vice-president, marketing: Sparks helped build and lead the sales force for IBM Corp.
No-one ever won the glittering prizes that attend on fame by hiding their light under a bushel, and an energetic campaign by ex-IBMer Sam Albert to make himself the first port of call for any Wall Street Journal or New York Times journalist needing a quote on an IBM story has paid off handsomely – his name is now sufficiently well known that he is giving guidance on using your computer on news radio in New York in commercials for Chemical Bank.
