Word: multimedia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Japan's technology giants--Hitachi, Matsushita, Toshiba, Sony, NEC-- listened for years as their U.S. competitors talked enthusiastically about multimedia but remained skeptical: after all, they had come to believe the Americans were the has-beens of the electronics business. Besides, Japan's strength lay in hardware, not fuzzy concepts. For Japanese firms, the real battle would be for the next big gadget to follow the vcr, which in 1993 was worth $7.7 billion to Japanese firms alone. As a Sony executive scoffed two years ago, ``Multimedia is just a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Nobody...
...others, at least have the rainbow in sight. During the past year, U.S. companies have been streaming into the multimedia business, and the optimists among them expect to see gold glittering soon. By one U.S. estimate, business on the information highway--from providing video-on-demand to building fiber-optic trunk lines--will in 10 to 15 years generate $300 billion annually for software and computer makers, cable-TV and telephone companies, publishers and catalog houses. ``The Japanese want to get in on it, but they are a bit confused,'' says Roger Mathus, executive director of the U.S. Semiconductor Association...
...track with such specialized technologies as flat-panel displays--the screens of laptop computers--and other components, but big names are on the sidelines or tagging along in joint ventures with American partners. In crucial areas such as telecommunications, software and online services, Japan is barely in view. ``The multimedia markets in America are mostly sewn up by American companies,'' says John Ratliff, a researcher at the University of Tokyo, ``so it makes the domestic market critical for the Japanese...
...sets the rates. In several recent decisions, the MPT has forced NTT to give its competitors a break; the cable ventures are crossing their fingers that the pattern will hold. Whatever the ministries and their industry clients decide, there is a deepening popular enthusiasm for one part of the multimedia world: cyberspace. Though the graphics are a bit primitve, and there are almost no magazines available online, subscribers to NIFTY-Serve and PC Van, the two largest online services, now total 1.7 million, up 42% from a year earlier. Online forums, where groups of people can exchange ideas and comments...
Masanori Fujimori, a former IBM software engineer, thinks the metaphor is apt. He left IBM two years ago to launch a firm that produces software for multimedia. Cruising the Internet has been good for his business, with newfound friends in the field passing along specialized software tools and lining up profitable interviews for him with U.S. entertainment-industry figures. Now, in a small, smoke-filled room in Kawasaki, Fujimori is at his keyboard nearly around the clock. ``By meeting other people on the Internet,'' he says, ``you find out who you really are.'' For Japan's multimedia industry, that search...