The keynote speech by Scott McNealy, president of Sun Microsystems, was conducted in a television chat show format, hosted by the director of the science office at Sun, John Gage, and was beamed in real time by satellite to Osaka and US locations. McNealy said that Japan was one of the most important overseas markets for Sun, making up around 17% of total worldwide sales, and important also as the country of its major technology partners, which include Fujitsu Ltd and Toshiba Corp. Some 800 applications have been localised and sales are supported through Sun’s Catalyst programme. Discussion ranged around the direction of Sun technology. One of the new technologies includes the nomadic workstation – Sun dreams of a day when hand-held, low power devices can communicate to anywhere in the globe using satellite communications from portable Earth Disks. Truly mobile workstation power will be a reality only when the standards for new types of communications such as digital and infra-red communications are regularised and the infrastructure for global communications also exists, and at that time, Sun may enter that market. McNealy was dismissive of the Personal Digital Assistant efforts of companies such as Apple Computer Inc, claiming that the product’s main defect was a lack of true (by this meaning wire-less) communications. Sun says it is working with Japanese partners to make the nomadic workstation a reality. Sun will aim for continued domination of the under-$10,000 market with its low-end Tsunami-based workstations. He predicted a consolidation of the industry where only companies shipping in volume could survive. The world had room for only three technologies in each area: the three CPU technologies to survive would be Sparc, Power RISC and iAPX-86; the three operating system environments would be Windows NT, OS/2 and Solaris; and the three object-oriented modes to survive would be Sun’s Distributed Objects Everywhere effort, the outcome of the IBM-Apple Taligent Inc collaboration on Pink, and whatever Microsoft Corp was planning for that object technologies. Hitting out at the future for the MIPS Technologies Inc technology, McNealy termed the Sony Corp-MIPS-NEC Corp relationship and the Advanced Computing Environment consortium very defensive, and with a future which was doomed due to lack of volume sales for the chip and lack of applications. From the Japanese perspective, MIPS seems more important though, due to the success of MIPS in creating relationships with its technology partners, which include the numbers three and four workstation vendors NEC and Sony, as well as Kubota Computer Co, and top X-terminal maker Japan Computer Corp with its new line of X-terminals based on the R3000 chip. Wayne Rosling, president of Sun Microsystems Laboratories on the third day of the Conference reviewed progress in the Spring project, a Sun research project that began in the spring of 1988 and aims to develop a set of fundamental technologies that can be used in any operating system – this could include NT, Taligent, Unix and MS-DOS, as well as SunOS/Solaris. Development has been based on tools and concepts selected at the start of the project, which included C++ as the programing language, object orientation, language-independent tools, a small kernel architecture, threads and network proxy. Rosling sees these as defining the direction of operating system development for the next 10 years. The results of the Spring project will be released on a CD-ROM, in source code format, to academic and industrial research organisations, in June 1993. While the technology as a whole is not intended for public release, the results of research will be first made generally available with incorporation of Distributed Objects Everywhere into Solaris, Sun’s new operating system, next year.
