Sun Joins Forces With Toshiba on New Line of PCs
Toshiba Corp., the giant Japanese high-technology manufacturer, will use computer chips and other systems designed by Sun Microsystems in a new line of low-cost personal computers, the two companies are expected to announce today.
While details of Toshiba’s new system are extremely sketchy, analysts said the agreement is a boost to Silicon Valley-based Sun’s efforts to set the standard for speedy, high-performance computing in the 1990s.
Although Sun is a computer maker itself, it has adopted a strategy of openly licensing its technology to other manufacturers in order to establish such a broad base of industry support for its designs that they cannot be ignored by software publishers. Toshiba, whose PCs initially will be available only in Japan, is not the first computer maker to license Sun’s powerful Sparc computer chip and operating technology, but it is the largest. “This doesn’t decide the game as to what computer technology will be king in the 1990s, but this does give Sun a big tackle on its team,” said Richard Shaffer, a computer newsletter writer in New York. “Toshiba has money, staying power and determination. It can help Sun get its message across.”
First Shipment Next Year
At the heart of Sun’s strategy of encouraging competitors to use its technology is the realization that software developers are most apt to write programs for the most popular computers.
It is a strategy that worked well for chip maker Intel, computer maker IBM and software publisher Microsoft when those companies teamed up behind IBM’s top-selling PC. And the lesson was not lost on Scott McNealy, Sun’s chairman and president.
“Rather than going into direct competition with each other, Sun and Toshiba should expand the entire market,” McNealy said. “The real challenge this poses is to Intel, Microsoft and (IBM’s) computers.”
Toshiba officials said the first models based on the Sun technology would be shipped early next year, with other, perhaps more powerful, systems to follow later. The company declined to reveal additional details, saying only that Toshiba expects to build “a new class of high-performance, low-cost computers” in the “kind of volumes that will attract” software programs, just as IBM’s personal computer did seven years ago.
Despite Toshiba’s size and market clout, some analysts remained skeptical. At issue is the very nature of the technology that Sun is promoting.
Sun’s microprocessors and instruction sets are all based on the Unix operating system, a detailed, complex set of computer directions that so far has been far more popular among scientists and technicians than routine computer users in offices and at home. Furthermore, Sun’s Sparc uses the sophisticated RISC (reduced-instruction set computing) design that so far has found far more popularity among scientists than office workers.
The notion that Sun’s chip and Unix-based technology will be the basis for another PC-style mega-hit is “pie in the sky,” said Bruce Jenkins, an analyst with Daratech, a high-technology market research firm in Cambridge, Mass.
“Sun is scrambling to make it appear that it is setting a standard, but I’m not sure that the market is ready yet to settle on a single standard,” he added. “Sun has a steep uphill fight ahead.”
