Hope it makes you feel good, investors that have gone long on the backers of a Broadway play or West End musical, otherwise known as angels – unless these backers are terribly naive, they can’t really be hoping to pick a long-term hit, it declares, forbearing to mention that the likes of you and me never get offered a slice of anything actually likely to make money, such as the latest Andrew Lloyd Webber show; they are, in effect, investing to keep the lights glowing on Broadway, Barrons goes on, and likewise, today’s on-line investor is helping to build a new medium – he’s doing good – whether or not he does well, the paper consoles.
Microsoft Corp doubled its sales in China in 1995, according to Jia-bin Duh, general manager of its China representative office: sales are expected to soar 200% in 1996, the Xinhua agency quoted Duh as saying.
Philadelphia-based US Fax Inc has signed an OEM agreement with Netscape Communications Corp to bundle Netscape’s Navigator client software with US Fax’s NetFocus VM Modules for the first series of vertical market and custom browser software for Internet use: US Fax will market the Modules with Navigator through other Internet service providers and directly to Internet users and large corporate and professional organisations; initial shipments begin this month and the company expects to generate over $8m sales during fiscal 1996, which is 1% of the existing Netscape Navigator market; its Internet-related sales are projected to be more than double software revenue.
Forte Software Inc, Oakland, California has pushed the promised 1995 delivery of version 2.0 of its second generation application development environment into this year.
While IBM Corp has now officially achieved XPG4 Base brand certification for the open systems version of its MVS/ESA System/390 mainframe operating system, there is still no operating system – Unix or otherwise – that has achieved full Spec 1170 compliance according to the XPG4 Base/Unix 93 and XPG4 version 2/Unix 95 specifications; IBM is promising full Spec 1170 conformance for MVS/ESA by the year-end.
Meantime, with Digital Equipment Corp’s promised Spec 1170-compliant Digital Unix 4.0 already pushed over into this year, Hewlett-Packard Co failed to keep its end-of-year promises either, and the firm has now pencilled its user-level threads/Spec 1170 HP-UX release launch for early this month.
Video games fans aren’t simply still playing with 16-bit consoles – they are still buying the things in enormous numbers, wrong-footing Sega Enterprises Ltd and Nintendo Co Ltd, each of which bemoaned the fact that they could have sold another 200,000 of the things in the US during the run-up to Christmas if only they hadn’t listened to the doomsayers that insisted the market would fall 50% this year: according to the Wall Street Journal, each prudently budgeted for a more modest 33% decline, but in the end, the fall-off was only around 25%.
Bohemia, New York-based Computer Concepts Corp and Perot Systems Corp have a marketing and distribution agreement under which Perot will take a stake of undiclosed size in Computer Concepts: under the marketing and distribution contract, Perot will sell a Computer Concepts data visualisation tool worldwide and also gets the option to increase its stake based on the first $50m of sales revenues, subject to conditions, including an increase in the authorised capital.
If the French experience is anything to go by, there is a vast market for very low cost Internet access devices: according to Reuter, despite widespread disparagement, the now decidedly clunky Minitel on-line information service still has 16m users – compared with an estimated 20,000 outside universities and the military that are on the Internet – and adding those in, the number of Internet users is still put at no more than 250,000;the reason, Gerard Merveille, a France Telecom spokesman, suggested is that a major difference between the two was that Minitel is almost free and for the Internet you needa personal computer; Francophones do believe in the Internet however – there are at least 1,000 French language Web sites and the number is rising by three to four a day.
Eagan, Minnesota-based Cray Research Inc reports that the US Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, has installed a 64-processor massively parallel T3D on undicslosed terms; the centre wants it for data fusion, sensor optimisation and environmental modelling for submarine and surface ship sonar and information management.
L M Ericsson Telefon AB’s Ericsson Schrack AG unit is to sell its 50% interest in Austria Telecommunications GmbH: no other details given.
Millicom International Cellular SA reports that its 48%-owned joint venture with a local partner has been awarded a cellular licence for Estonia, which expands its presence in the Baltic states: the company currently operates a cellular network in Lithuania and said it filed for a licence in November in Latvia via another of its joint ventures.
Does it have inside information denied to the rest of us? If you asked the Dow Jones & Co news wire to look up stories with Olivetti in them the other day, it said there are no companies with that name.
