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To: Maurice Winn who wrote (2792)	11/22/1999 6:18:00 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 34857

Sun Micro Execs: Multiple Standards Hurt US Wireless Devt By Rick Jurgens SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Executives of Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW) warned that U.S. companies have be handicapped in a technical field that will eventually play a central role in the development of electronic commerce. John Gage, chief researcher at Sun, told about 350 participants at the two-day Asia-Pacific Information Technology Summit here that wireless information appliances will eventually be the driving force in the growth of e-commerce. Bill Joy, Sun's co-founder and chief scientist, said that the growth of communications bandwidth, or capacity, will eventually make the cost of communicating "close to free."Wireless networks are also extending their reach so that they soon will be "pervasive," he said. But, Joy said, U.S. companies are likely to be at a disadvantage in that market because ofthe country's failure to develop common standards for the most widespread of such appliances, the cellular phone. "The U.S. has done a particularly bad job at this by creating too much competition," he said. There are too many different standards and carriers don't carry each other's signals, he said. That diffusion will give Japanese and European appliance makers an advantage because common standards in their home markets will result in larger markets, he said. Gage and Joy also predicted that the U.S. standard for high-definition television may have to be junked because, they said, it can't receive signals inside of buildings. The process by which that standard was adopted was tainted by politics, and should have been opened for public participation and criticism, Gage said. Companies that supported the current U.S. standard wanted the opportunity to earn royalties from proprietary technology, and so opposed adoption of a pre-existing European standard, Joy said. Looking to the future, Joy said that intellectual property rules need to be developed that offer "a sensible blend between sharing and (ownership that provides incentives) to people who are creating the value" in new technologies. Other key public policy issues that will affect technological development include education, brand protection, the tax treatment of research and development spending, the promotion of employee ownership, merger accounting rules and standards for transparency of accounting, he said. Joy said that in the new century revolutionary developments in technology that are likely to occur will be in robotics, genetics and microelectronics, where entire machines may be put on a single chip. How chips are made may also change, he said, noting the potential to generate new materials at the atomic level and to use chemistry rather than lithography to create circuits. ************************************************************ What Joy says is always of interest to me. Thanks, Mephisto