Philips and Sony Set a Venture With Sun Microsystems
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times
nytimes.com
The world's two largest consumer electronics companies will announce an alliance with Sun Microsystems Inc. to create a generation of networked entertainment devices and appliances that will communicate with each other and with humans via the Internet.
Royal Philips Electronics N.V., the Sony Corporation and Sun will announce plans to link two developing software standards to forge a global computer network that stretches from the living room to the corporate computing center. Virtually any kind of electronic device built with the combined standards, including televisions, stereo receivers and videocassette recorders, will interoperate with and be controlled by the network.
Sun's technology, known as Jini, is based on the company's Java programming language for Internet applications. A new kind of computing environment, Jini (pronounced JEEN-ee) enables programmers to develop software for an entire network of dissimilar machines rather than for just a single computer. It is a "distributed" design, meaning that each device on the network can contribute processing power to the network and can participate in the distribution of information and instructions to all the other attached devices.
Under the agreement, Jini will be combined with the Home Audio Visual Interoperability, or HAVI, architecture, developed by a consortium of consumer electronics companies led by Sony and Philips.
The resulting network, a new kind of computing platform for the anticipated post-PC era, might make it possible, for example, to program a VCR while away from home or to seamlessly route a television program to a computer disk drive or recordable DVD for later playback.
"This is a very good marriage," said Mike Clary, who heads development of Jini, which Sun announced last year and plans to introduce formally on Jan. 25. "It will make possible a wide range of new commercial services."
The link between the two consumer electronics giants and a leading developer of Internet computing equipment also represents an alliance strong enough to take on the Microsoft Corporation in a standards battle for the consumer market. Microsoft, which controls the personal computer market with its industry-standard Windows family of operating systems, has made aggressive moves into new consumer markets. |
