Big technology companies join
to link future electronics
appliances
NEW YORK (AP) - Fifteen top technology companies agreed to create
a common technical standard to easily link a future generation of gadgets
and appliances to each other and the Internet.
The agreement announced Monday could hasten the day when people
commonly use their home phones to access the Internet, or have
refrigerators and other appliances remotely checked by manufacturers
for defects.
The participants in the group, called the Open Service Gateway
Specification, include IBM Corp., Motorola Corp., Sun Microsystems
Inc., Lucent Technologies and Oracle Corp.
The new standard, based on Sun's Java universal programming language,
is intended to help speed the development of networked consumer
devices, which Tuesday follow a hodgepodge of software standards.
By creating devices to a single specification, the manufacturers and
software developers hope to make linking digital gizmos to computer
networks as easy as plugging a telephone into a wall.
"Each one of these applications had its own industry and working group
and standard," said Eric Brown, an industry analyst with Forrester
Research, based in Boston. "It's becoming clear there's an opportunity
to connect everything to everything."
The other members of the group are Alcatel, Cable & Wireless,
Electricite de France, Enron Communications, Ericsson, Network
Computer Inc., Nortel Networks, Philips Electronics, Sybase and
Toshiba.
One noticeable no-show was Microsoft Corp., the largest maker of
computer software which is pushing its dominant Windows as the
operating system for future Internet gizmos. Microsoft's absence could
hamper the widespread acceptance of a new standard from the group.
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