Word: multimedia
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...suddenly, puzzlingly, Japan finds itself well behind in the race to catch the next big technological wave: the intersection of computers, telephones and cable television as well as the electronic services by which information travels across these networks. Americans call it multimedia; the Japanese call it ``maruchimedia.'' By whatever name, it encompasses everything from CD-ROM games to two-way television to the Internet, and quite a bit more. While foreign companies, most of them in the U.S., are zipping ahead along this frontier, Japan is way behind, clueless in cyberspace. What's going...
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...
...will be to keep up with the competition while maintaining universal delivery. That famous promise -- ``Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers . . . '' -- engraved on New York City's main post office has a more reassuring ring to a citizen whose new 100-megahertz multimedia PowerPC just crashed for the third time. By Suneel Ratan/Washington