MICROSOFT FORMS COUNCIL TO BUILD AWARENESS OF MPC LABEL AND PRODUCTS
Ignorance is not bliss for MPC vendors

On June 3, in a massive, worldwide effort to promote Microsoft Corp.’s Multimedia PC (MPC) specifications, Microsoft and 10 personal computing companies including Tandy Corp., Zenith Data Systems, Philips and AT&T Corp. announced the formation of the MPC Marketing Council.

“We’re not sure the industry understands multimedia, especially after seeing some of the presentations at Comdex” last month, said Darby Williams, product manager for Microsoft’s multimedia systems group. “Most developers still don’t know what it means or what to start with.”

The marketing council, founded by Microsoft, is now incorporated as a non-profit subsidiary of the Software Publishers Association (SPA). Ownership of the MPC logotype mark has also been transferred to SPA to administer.

“We want all information publishers and software publishers to build applications to MPC specs, and SPA has the best installed base,” said Williams. “Also, they know how to protect intellectual property rights, and that’s what the mark is.”

The council’s primary purpose is to encourage and support both hardware and software developers building products to Microsoft’s MPC specifications.

Companies pay a sliding scale to join the association based on their affiliation. A computer system company such as Tandy, for example, pays a base fee of $250,000 to join the Council and will pay an additional fee per unit sold or delivered.

International hardware companies, or those providing only MPC upgrade kits such as Media Vision (Fremont, California), will pay “far less than” $100,000 to join, according to Williams. The last tier of membership is for software developers, who will pay less than $1,000 to join.

Members’ products are required to connect with Multimedia Windows program interfaces, to work with MPC computers and software, and to use at least one media element such as sound or video. Members are then entitled to use the MPC logo on their products to signify compatibility, in much the same way that the tags “VHS” or “Compact Disc” are used today.

The 12-member Council board includes SPA executive director Kenneth Wasch, Williams of Microsoft, Jerry Calabrese of Philips, Julie Galliers of AT&T, Paul Jain of Media Vision and Jim Anderson of Headland Technology/Video7. The group elected as chairman Mike Grubbs, senior director of marketing for Tandy Corp. Tandy announced the first commercially available Multimedia PC in Palm Springs last month, and it has made a major corporate commitment to MPC.

The initial infusion of capital from shareholders will be used for “furthering the cause” of MPC, Grubbs says. Ongoing revenues will come from licensing deals with members.

A full-time staff member will be devoted to promote MPC and to provide education and information to the application development community.

“The MPC is an application delivery platform,” says Grubbs. “So we thought SPA would be a good marriage for us because its constituency benefits from [the Council] and is a driving force behind it.”

Though the SPA match may seem perfect, the Interactive Multimedia Association (IMA), formerly the Interactive Videodisc Industry Association (IVIA), is likely pouting over the selection. Many believed that IMA would be tapped for the job of administering the MPC trademark.

Williams wouldn’t comment on the IMA rumor. But in its IVIA incarnation, IMA was committed to both analog technology and cross-platform compatibility, neither of which is a focus for the MPC Council. But at Comdex in May, IMA announced it would be forming a compatibility steering committee, and it’s said it may be starting a technical working group to help guide future versions of the MPC specification.

- Denise Caruso

Coming soon: flat-panel TVs: Large LCD panels, light valve projectors

The bulky, power-hungry CRT display seems headed for near-certain obsolescence. Liquid-crystal displays, till recently too expensive for consumer TVs and too difficult to manufacture at large sizes, are now coming into their own. Liquid-crystal light valves, a related technology, are being developed for projection TVs.

Beating the CRT. Before liquid crystal technologies begin to displace CRTs in mass-market products, they must drop in price and grow in resolution. LCDs don’t have to be quite as cheap as CRTs — flat panels have advantages of size and weight — but they can’t be more than two or three times as expensive if they are to find use in computer markets. Even in the laptop PC market, where cost is not as important as size and power consumption, most buyers have shied away from the high prices.

The key to price cuts is yield. The more pixels in a display, the likelier that there will be defective cells, rendering the whole unit useless. However, larger displays need proportionally more pixels, or image resolution suffers. That, in turn, raises the problem of controlling individual pixels; due to the comparatively slow switching times of liquid crystals, line-oriented passive scan approaches quickly run out of steam.

Japanese efforts. One large-scale LCD project has been started under the aegis of Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). The shareholders, including Key Technology Center, Sharp, Hitachi, NEC, Casio and Asahi Glass, have pledged funding that totals 2.8 billion yen ($20 million). The project goal: a prototype full-color 40-inch display by the fall of 1993.

The current state of the art is nowhere near a 40-inch display. Ten-inch flat displays are only now moving into the mass-production stage. The largest color panel now made is Sharp’s 14-inch device, although Hoshiden has shown a prototype of a 15-inch unit.

Mobile applications. There’s nothing like a high-volume application to push technology along the learning curve. A number of Japanese firms are looking to automotive navigation systems, along with radio displays and engine meters.

But mobile systems have problems besides cost and resolution. Temperature sensitivity is a critical issue; a display would have to survive a range from 80˚C (176˚F) down to-40˚C (-40˚F), although the working range could probably be narrower. Vibration is also a problem.

Eliminating pixels. According to the June Popular Science, an American firm, Projectavision, has patented a way to boost resolution optically. First, its device superimposes the red, green and blue dots rather than placing them side by side as in conventional systems. Second, Projectavision puts a tiny lens in front of each pixel. The improvement is said to be “dramatic.”

Projectavision’s prototype, described as a medium-resolution LCD panel, is being built in Austin, TX, in partnership with Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp.

- Peter Dyson

Sony’s Mini Disc: the end of tape?

Sony has recently announced yet another digital media format. The 2.5-inch “Mini Disc” (MD) could presage the beginning of the end for audio tape and could introduce a compact CD-audio data format with immense appeal for multimedia and computer applications.

The Mini Disc is made possible by two very impressive technologies. The first is a specially designed laser read/write system that enables an MD player to write (and read) a magnetic-optical disc as well as to play read-only optical CDs. This means that the same inexpensive drive can be used to record (and play back) digitally encoded music as well as to play back mass-produced optical CDs.

The second technology is a digital sampling technique that allows the Mini Disc to record 74 minutes of near-CD-quality stereo sound on a disc that holds just over one-fifth the data of a conventional CD.

The disc itself will be housed in a plastic “caddy” similar to that used for the familiar 3.5-inch computer disks. Data is read off the disc at the same rate as from a standard CD (approximately 1.4M bits/second), but it is fed to the decoder at 300K bits/second. An inexpensive 1M-bit memory chip can provide up to three seconds of buffering and make the disc drive virtually immune to shock and vibration.

Markets. Sony is clearly targeting the audio market now served by tape cassettes, especially “Walkman” type portables, boom boxes and car stereos. The Mini Disc should be able to serve all of these markets better than even digital tape. (Imagine a 15-disc MD changer in your car’s dashboard!)

Although MD players will not be available until the end of 1992, it looks like a winner.

The Sony digital audio tape (DAT), Philips/Tandy Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) and Sony Mini Disc technologies will be examined in our next issue.

- Jonathan Seybold