The company’s progress so far with its News Unix workstations may have been spotty and unconvincing so far, but anyone betting against Sony Corp becoming a substantial player in the world workstation market is woefully ignorant of the determination and tenacity of Japanese companies – and Sony will be prepared to take losses on the business for years longer than would its US siblings. In a further effort to make the line stand out from the crowd, Sony Microsystems Co has adopted the Eiffel object-oriented language, method and software engineering environment of Santa Barbara-based Interactive Software Engineering Inc. Eiffel systems are made up of autonomous modules representing sets of objects with the same structure and the same behaviour and the package includes a complete set of libraries built of reusable components covering fundamental data structures, X Window Systems-based graphics and multiple windowing software, parsing, lexical analysis, non-graphical windowing and other applications. Target customers are professional software developers seeking to cut down on production and maintenance costs. Interactive will provide Eiffel directly to Sony’s end users and its resellers.