CONTENTS

BATTLE LOOMS FOR HOME ENTERTAINMENT MARKET
There has been much made of the impending debut of the set top box that will provide users access to movies on demand, video games, and other content on digital video disk, as well as Internet access. Market research firm International Data Corp. says much of this has been marketing hyperbole, but there is a market brewing for low-cost Internet access devices. MORE>

BANDAI AND APPLE DEBUT THE LONG AWAITED PIPPIN GAME SYSTEM
It was only a matter of time before the first set top box entertainment and information player came onto the market. The first to debut such a product is the subsidiary of Tokyo-based Bandai Co. LTD, Bandai Digital Entertainment of La Mirada, Calif. On March 22, the company will introduce in Japan the Pippin. It is the first device of its kind to allow low cost access to the Internet and CD-ROMs through the television. Bandai will bring Pippin to the U.S. in May. MORE>

MULTIPLAYER GAME MAKER PLAYS WITH AMERICA ON-LINE
Kesmai Corp., a pioneer in the on-line, multiplayer game industry, announced an agreement with America On-line, the largest commercial on-line service in the world, to provide a complete suite of real-time, multiplayer games for the Games Channel on AOL. MORE>

WILL PIPPIN BE YET ANOTHER NEWTON FLOP FROM APPLE?
Even before its formal release, criticism of the new Pippin entertainment has already begun. Pippin is the name of a set-top box designed by Apple Computer Inc. of Cupertino, Calif. It promises to play video games and digital video disk movies as well as access the Internet. Apple is licensing the manufacture of the box to Bandai Ltd. in Tokyo, but has no plans to build the box itself. MORE>

GAME MAKER SEGA PRE-PARES FOR 64-BIT DEBUT
Early this month, Sega Enterprises Ltd. in Tokyo announced it would be releasing a new scaled-down version of the Saturn on March 22. It will retail for only 20,000 Yen ($200), roughly $150 cheaper than what current Saturn systems sell for in Japan (34,800 Yen.) MORE>

CAN 3DO LEAD IN 64-BIT GAME HARDWARE?
The 3DO Company in Redwood City, Calif. stunned the video game market a couple of years ago by debuting a hardware design containing a RISC (reduced instruction set computer) and graphics system accelerator. In February this year, the company revealed its latest 64-bit M2 hardware design. MORE>

WHAT’S THE LONG TERM OUTLOOK FOR THE SET TOP BOX BATTLE?
The Apple, Bandai, Sega, and 3DO announcement this month points to equipment manufacturers’ struggle to exploit the large number of households that still do not own PCs. The assumption is these households are technical novices who fear the complexity of full-blown PCs. MORE>

HOW HOUSEHOLDS VIEW PC’S
Market research firm Odyssey based in San Francisco, Calif. says the number of U.S. homes with PCs grew to 35% at the start of 1996 up from 32% in July of last year. By the year 2000, International Data Corp. of Framingham, Mass. estimates that 60% of U.S. household will have a PC. In its research Odyssey surveyed 2,000 homes and found on average users spent 11 hours a week with their PCs. MORE>

CAN MICROSOFT DOMINATE INTERNET AS IT DOES OPERATING SYSTEMS?
According to a new report released by the Multimedia Research Group (MRG), Microsoft’s multimedia and Internet strategies, after significant revisions during the past 6 months, reposition the software giant to provide products and services which could dominate the industry. MORE>

WHAT FLAWS REVEALED IN THE $500 SET-TOP BOX
This month, the man who coined the term $500 Internet Computer, Larry Ellison chief executive officer of Oracle Corp. demonstrated the device in San Francisco, Calif. The price of the unit had risen to $650, based on the wholesale price of its components. With mass storage and a monitor or TV, the price jumps to nearly $1,000. MORE>

MICROSOFT AND WORLD WIDE WEB WIN ON-LINE
Since October, 1995 the Internet world wide web has proven to be the most popular destination of the modem-equipped home PC user. That’s the conclusion of the quarterly National Survey of Hardware Ownership completed by the NPD Group, Inc. last January. MORE>

WHY THE PC WILL BE THE NEXT HOME ENTERTAINMENT CENTER COMPONENT
Richard Silverman, vice president of marketing at Trident Microsystems Inc. in Mountain View, Calif. believes that a $1,200 PC will be the next entertainment center component to find its way into the home. He says there are economic reasons as well as technology reasons combining to make this happen. MORE>

SET-TOP PC MAKERS AIM TO BUILD $900 SOLUTION
At the November 1995 Comdex Show in Las Vegas, Nev. Sony Electronics, in Park Ridge, N.J. announced plans to partner with Intel Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif. to produce a line of low-cost consumer PCs. MORE>

UNIFIED MEMORY ARCHITECTURE MAKES COMEBACK FOR INTERNET
Last year, just as Intel Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif. was promoting its Unified Memory Architecture concept, Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash. was rolling out Windows 95. The two efforts had contradictory purposes and Intel had to put its objective second to Microsoft’s. With the advent of the next generation of Windows, Intel’s UMA may have another chance to prevail and the set-top box PC may be the reason. Here’s why. MORE>

DRAM TREND IN 1995
According to a report from market research firm In-Stat, of Scottsdale, Ariz. worldwide total DRAM sales grew an average of 68% per year during 1990 - 1994 while personal computer production grew at an average rate of 24% per year. MORE>

IC ENABLES PC FOR UNDER $2000
In another example of the power of many companies developing hardware for a common platform, a Mountain View, Calif. start-up this month debuted a chip that will enable a multimedia PC for under $2,000. The Mpact coprocessor from Chromatic Research Inc. supports the Direct3D applications programmer interface from Microsoft. MORE>

THE BUSINESS RATIONALE DRIVING JAVA PROCESSORS IN CORPORATIONS
Raj Parekh, vice president of marketing, Sun Microelectronics Systems Corp. in Mountain View, Calif. is a man on a mission. He aims to change the computing paradigm in business. Parekh’s group designs microprocessors optimized to execute the Java language. He believes the CPUs will outperform general purpose embedded processors. MORE>

WHO WILL FALL PREY TO JAVA?
In the battle to replace the personal computer with dedicated embedded processors running the Java language, there remains two camps within a corporation. In one camp are the computer operator who use the computer to access data—a person using the computer to make reservations. MORE>

WHAT’S THE APPEAL OF JAVA OUTSIDE OF CORPORATE COMPUTING?
The appeal of the Java language and its associated computing paradigm (see story facing page) is not limited to within the corporation. Raj Parekh, vice president of marketing, Sun Microelectronics Systems Corp. in Mountain View, Calif. believes it has just as much appeal in the many embedded processors users now own: cellular phones, pagers, personal digital assistants, electronic day timers containing calendar and business card files. MORE>

COMPUSERVE SENDS E-MAIL TO PAGER
One of the new directions in wireless communications is toward distributing data via pagers. An example of where commercial on-line information suppliers are moving is shown in the recent announcement by PageNet and Compuserve to allow mobile workers with pagers to receive e-mail messaging from Compuserve. MORE>

PC LEADERS EXCHANGE MARKET SHARE LEAD AS RETAIL SALES BOOM
Late last month, Computer Intelligence InfoCorp (CII) of La Jolla, Calif. released market share data on the largest PC suppliers. There were some surprises in the latest figures. Overall sales of both desktop and portable personal computers in U.S. retail channels increased 49% in the fourth quarter of 1995 over the fourth quarter of 1994. MORE>

WINDOWS 95, PENTIUM, AND MULTIMEDIA PUSHING PC PRICES HIGHER
After a long period of stability, the average selling prices of PCs appear to be rising. Starting in July 1995, and continuing every month since then, PC prices were up at least 8%, compared with 1994 at the same time. For example, September 1995 prices were a full 15% higher than in September 1994. MORE>

APPLE’S REASON WHY PC OUTLOOK IN HOME IS BAD
Apple Computer, Inc. says the outlook for PCs in the home is not good. The Cupertino, Calif. company believes the PC will never become as prevalent as the television in the home. It basis this conclusion on its market research. The research found that roughly half of U.S. households had no intentions of buying a PC for their home. Worldwide, Apple found that two-thirds of all households were not planning a PC purchase. MORE>

APPLE SEES MATURE PC INDUSTRY
According to Apple Computer Inc. of Cupertino, Calif. The personal computer industry is entering maturity. Starting in 1994, the home computer market in the U.S. became a second-purchase market, with over half the machines being sold into homes that already have a personal computer. MORE>

WILL WINDOWS NT DOMINATE CLIENT-SERVER COMPUTING IN CORPORATIONS?
Last Month, at UniForum ’96 in San Francisco, Calif. Scott McNealy, Chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., said multiple versions of Unix were healthy for the industry. What he should have said is that multiple versions of Unix is healthy for the proliferation of Windows NT, the rival to Unix from Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Wash. MORE>

EVOLUTION IN THE MASS STORAGE MARKET
The CPU-centric information technology industry is worth just under $10 billion annually. This market is defined by storage system’s connectivity to various CPU platforms. This definition is becoming less relevant with greater heterogeneity and connectivity in systems, and as software and hardware advances make the storage system more intelligent. As customers adopt information-centric strategies and as the Internet becomes pervasive, storage will become a $50 billion marketplace before the end of the decade. MORE>

SEAGATE AND CABLETRON FIX NETWORK MANAGEMENT PROBLEM
According to a recent Gartner survey, as much as eighty-five percent of the cost of running a network is directly related to administrative support and management, and as much a 90% of management costs are consumed in diagnosing problems and alarms. Cabletron Systems of Rochester, N.H. and Seagate Technology of Scotts Valley, Calif. have developed integration software to help solve this problem. MORE>

WHY MULTIMEDIA GREW TO $53 BILLION IN 1995
Worldwide sales of multimedia hardware and software have gone from $9 billion in 1993 to $53 billion in 1995 according to new information from a report on Multimedia Hardware and Software published by Frost & Sullivan. MORE>

RMON MARKET BOOMING
The remote monitoring (RMON) market grew rapidly in 1995 with sales reaching $385 million, a 114% increase over 1994, according to market research firm International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass. MORE>

MAXTOR SHOWS SIGNS OF RETURNING TO ITS COMPETITIVE FORM
Maxtor Corp. of San Jose, Calif. has had its troubles of late. It bet on the 1.8-in. drive only to find the market not ready for volume production. In pursuing the next smaller capacity size the company lost momentum in the 3.5-in. drive market it helped pioneer. MORE>

DIGITAL EQUIPMENT BACKS FIBRE CHANNEL
The Storage Business Unit of Digital Equipment Corp. in Maynard, Mass. has chosen Fibre Channel as the standard serial SCSI technology for the StorageWorks family. As requirements for long-distance connectivity and enhanced performance increase, Fibre Channel will provide a superior long-term solution for users. Digital will also continue to invest in the development and support of parallel SCSI products and technology. MORE>

RESEARCHER SEES 75% GROWTH IN MAINFRAME ADD-ON STORAGE MARKET
The mainframe DASD market experienced an amazing 75% growth in 1995 shipments, according to new research released last month by market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) of Framingham, Mass. MORE>

OPTICAL DRIVE COMPANY’S NEW 5.25-IN. DRIVE COSTS HALF ANY COMPETITOR’S PRICE
Pinnacle Micro, Inc. announced last month that effective March 1 it will begin to manufacture and sell a new 5.25-in. 2.6 gigabyte optical drive called Vertex for half the cost of its competitors. The Vertex cartridges will comply with the industry standards for media interchangeability between vendors and are upward compatible to the Pinnacle Apex 4.6 Gbyte optical drive. MORE>

FLORIDA UNIVERSITY IMPLEMENTS SMARTCARD TECHNOLOGY ON CAMPUS
Florida State University’s Card Application Technology Center (CATC) today announced the first multi-purpose, secure campus card program utilizing smart card technology beyond prepaid value. FSU’s CATC brought together six leading technology companies to develop this smart card solution. MORE>

SMARTCARDS GO TO THE OLYMPICS
Last month, BellSouth and Nortel announced BellSouth will deploy 200 Nortel Millennium intelligent pay phones in downtown Atlanta for use during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games as part of a smart card launch sponsored by First Union Bank, BellSouth and others. MORE>

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