So we know that the first licensee – and there may be more than one – of Apple Computer Inc’s Macintosh System on PowerPC will come from Japan, but which are the most likely suspects? Fujitsu Ltd is firmly in the Sparc camp and Hitachi Ltd is unlikely to be wooed away from Precision Architecture, while Mitsubishi Electric Corp has made investments that have yet to yield a return in Alpha, so those three can probably be ruled out; there is a theory doing the rounds that NEC Corp could get so much closer to Compagnie des Machines Bull SA that it would be prepared to dump the R-series RISCs that it fabricates, but we don’t buy that one – it makes too many different R4000 parts; Matsushita Electric Industrial Co has had a nasty experience with Sparc as a result of its investment in Solbourne Computer Inc but is so close to Fujitsu that it is unlikely to defect from Sparc; Oki Electric Industrial Co is in the Precision Architecture camp and is not a personal computer player; Canon Inc is a very likely candidate because it is already halfway there in that it markets Apple machines through Canon Sales and is to build machines to run NeXTstep, so it can be counted as a banker; Sony Corp – presently an R-series user – and Sharp Corp both have ties to Apple, and are sufficiently unattached elsewhere that each is a possibility, as is long-shot Seiko-Epson Co, but the real dark horse is Toshiba Corp against is the fact that it is rather a wan R-series fabricator but resells Sun Microsystems Inc Sparcsystems, for are the facts that it already has a big joint venture with Motorola Inc making chips in Japan, is bes’ friends with IBM Corp in a number of other areas, notably colour flat panel displays, and the fact that if it became a Japanese PowerPC fabricator, it would be first in the game rather than an also-ran – so looks a promising each-way bet.
