Japanese companies continue to find the going extremely tough in the workstation business, where American companies led by Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co continue to make all the running, so defensive alliances are becoming essential, and Sony Corp and NEC Corp shared a platform last week to say that they are joining forces in the Japanese workstation market to enable Japanese language applications written for either of their MIPS Computer Systems Inc RISC-bsed workstation families – NEC’s EWS4800 and Sony’s NEWS – to run on the other. The two have jointly developed an Open Computing environment for MIPS Platform, OCMP, specification based on an expansion of the MIPS applications binary interface developed by Unix System Laboratories Inc and announced by the M-SIG special interest group at this year’s UniForum. Using Unix System V.4 as the base, enhanced with X Window R5 and Motif, three new elements have been added to provide portability of Japanese application programs. These three newly developed elements are an interface to provide a common Applications Binary Interface for Japanese language programs, based on the Unix International Common Japanese Environment Specification – even though the Japanese language entry methods used on the NEC EWS 4800 and the Sony NEWS machines are different, any differences are handled by the common application binary interface transparently; a CD-ROM Access Library which handles the differences in applications on the two environments, which use different CD-ROM formats; and use of the Sony-developed CDFF Common Document File Format, which enables word processing documents to be exchanged through use of a common format. The two companies plan to begin introduction of Open Computing for MIPS-based operating systems on their respective machines, NEC with the release of the NEC SuperStation EWS4800 running EWS-UX/V 4.0 in June and Sony with release of an OCMP-compliant NEWS-OS 6.0 in spring 1993. In both cases the new operating systems will maintain compatibility with existing operating systems versions so that existing applications can be moved up; however both companies plan to encourage software vendors to convert existing and develop new software based on the OCMP standard, through OCMP independent software vendor programmes and a joint conversion centre. Use of the OCMP standard should make it easier for overseas software vendors to convert software for the respective Sony and NEC machines in Japan. Both companies hope it will contribute to an increase in their joint and respective shares on the Japanese workstation market. According to Yano Research, in fiscal 1992, the two shared 26.4% of the market, with NEC taking the lion’s share of that, compared with 25.8% for Sun Microsystems Inc and 16.7% for Hewlett-Packard Co. Dr Toshitada Doi, director of Sony’s SuperMicro Division forecast that the combined Sony-NEC share of the work station market would be over 50% by 1993-94.
