Sun Microsystems Inc’s multimedia initiative, one area of the company not carved up into separate hardware and software entities in the reorganisation earlier this year, just got the strategic go-ahead from Sun management. Under the direction of interactive media director Bob Pierceson, a veteran of both Silicon Graphics Inc and Regis McKenna, the effort has been chartered to build networked multimedia capabilities into every complete Sun system that rolls off the line, starting late next year. Sun has in mind to create real-time communication between people and to automate office functions by making its machines the basis of audiovisual teleconferencing and supporting document interchange and such things as shared white boards to exist. It will stick, however, to providing the horizontal software. The effort, dubbed Net Media, needs the real-time scheduling of Unix System V.4, which Sun is not yet shipping as its operating system. Sun also figures that its most radical applications will require Integrated Services Digital Network and as a result may initially find the overseas markets friendlier and more profitable.
