Bob Roblin, former marketing chief of IBM Corp’s ill-fated Power Personal
Systems Division, more lately VP marketing and strategy for big blue’s
consumer division has been hired by Adobe Systems Inc as its SVP marketing.
McDonnell Douglas Corp is expected to bolster its defense business with an acquisition or joint venture, but observers are divided on whether it will be with current mooted defense partner Raytheon Co.
Belgian speech technology company Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV says Microsoft Corp has chosen its text-to-speech technology as its linguistic standard in software development. Microsoft will license TTS technology, which enables computers to convert written text to human-like speech and is already used in a wide range of products.
Digital Equipment Corp may be committed to selling personal computers but it’s not committed to making them according to Terry Shannon, editor of the newsletter Shannon Knows DEC. He says DEC will exit the desktop business altogether and simply resell third party machines.
Pioneer Electronic Corp will be hard on Toshiba Corp’s heels in the Digital Video Disk player stakes. It will start making them in September and will start marketing them in Japan and the US in October.
Is PointCast Inc going to be too successful for its own good? The screen saver that delivers news and advertising to your desktop any time the machine is not busy is proving so popular that no sooner has one person in a company downloaded it than ev erybody wants it, and in no time at all, the company starts noticing that at some time each hour, the PABX starts working overtime and all the lights dim as as machines all over the site start downloading their news updates…
