Word: roms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Japan as a fortress impenetrable to outside products. But cracking the Japanese market has had deeper significance for the California-based company: with profit margins steadily shrinking in the personal-computer business, CEO John Sculley has set out to expand Apple's business into advanced consumer electronics like CD-ROM players and personal digital assistants (PDAs), far more powerful versions of the electronic pocket diaries developed by Japan's Casio and Sharp. Sculley believes Apple has a key advantage because it pioneered software that makes computers simple...
Sculley's vision enticed electronics giants Toshiba and Sharp to form alliances with his company earlier this year. Apple is contributing software know-how and product design to manufacture a CD-ROM player with Toshiba and a PDA with Sharp; the Japanese firms are providing manufacturing expertise along with key components such as flat-screen displays. Says Sculley: "We cannot afford to fund these projects by ourselves. These alliances give us a chance to be players in an important growth area." Agrees Toshiba's Takehiko Kotoh: "In the 100-m race, Apple is the top runner. They are very quick...
Apple's CD-ROM joint venture with Toshiba is focused through Kaleida, a subsidiary at work creating an operating system that will make the disks playable on a variety of computers. The CD-ROM can hold digitized text, still images and even video as well as audio. Its main appeal is that it can accommodate data equivalent to that carried by 1,000 regular computer disks or about 250,000 pages of text. At this point, fewer than 5% of personal computers are equipped with CD-ROM players because no standard exists: a CD- ROM for Apple, for example, does...
...could, however, be a tough sell. Few Americans own computers powerful enough to manipulate images, and even fewer have the equipment needed to retrieve pictures stored on a compact disc (a Philips CD Interactive system will do it, as will some CD-ROM computer drives). Kodak sells a $400 Photo CD player that reads both music and photographic compact discs, but until such devices are widely used, the company is likely to be caught in a classic chicken-and-egg marketing bind: people won't want to spend $25 to have their pictures put on a disc they cannot play...
...fine print of an editor's note in the debut issue of the Harvard Review wryly states that the journal is not available in "microfilm, fiche, CD-ROM or cranial implant...