Godzilla vs. the PC

    I digress, as most people trying to describe Junko probably do. The point is she’s written a barrel of stories. Her on-going career includes scoops about hot topics like high-profile failures of electric and autonomous cars and China’s first multibillion-dollar government fund to fuel its tech race with the US.

In the 1990’s, her best work was focused on consumer electronics. In those days, TV, broadcasting networks and movies were all analog. You couldn’t search or play their content without help from a newspaper and a movie theater. But “the world trend is digital,” according to a speech from a director of Japan’s broadcasting bureau that Junko quoted in a 1994 story.

We all knew the digital transition could take decades. It would require inventing new technologies and standards. New hit products would emerge and current favorites would become passe. In such transitions fortunes are made, leading companies fade away and scrappy startups become the new giants.

In the new digital world, folks said, all products would be “smart and interactive”—though no one knew exactly what they would do. We joked about the digital toaster. Why would anyone need all this tech? But we knew the people and companies we covered were racing to be the first across the threshold. Junko, steno pad and camera in hand, elbowed her way to every split point along the way.

Though she wrote nearly as much copy as the native English speakers on staff, I only got two cover stories (and a handful of sidebars) from her into OEM Magazine. She was laser focused on Page 1 of the weekly newspaper. Luckily for me, one of those OEM covers was a doozy.

“Inside Japan Inc.’s PC/TV Strategy,” our December 1996 cover (below) in the run up to the January Consumer Electronics Show, was a well-timed analysis of how the consumer giants were responding to the computer industry’s push to take over the living room with digital, networked, programmable “entertainment PCs.” 

Junko got execs from Fujitsu, Hitachi, Matsushita, NEC, Sony and Toshiba on the record about their strategies which were all over the map.

She set a dramatic context: Japan was facing “a horrifying scenario.” Over the last three years, its TV sales had sagged, and its domestic economy languished in recession while US computer makers were on a tear and Wintel family-room PCs threatened to portray their TVs and VCRs as “consumer commodities,” destined to become the “dumb peripherals of a new type of machine.”

Her report made it clear Japan’s tech execs were divided. Some set up their own PC divisions that partnered with Wintel. Others believed their soon-to-be-launched DVD products would be PC killers. A few like Sony CTO Minoru Morio, lobbied for a bold partnership: Japan Inc. should develop its own multimedia friendly operating system to rival Windows as the foundation for all their next-generation products, he said.

In this mess, Junko quoted Morio’s warning that the next few years could bring a bunch of boxes that don’t work together, frustrating customers. “That’s when I expect industry-wide discussions [about collaborating on a new applications platform] to catch fire and get really serious.”

Looking back, Japan couldn’t imagine its consumer-electronics giants might falter. “We missed it, that the PC would dominate,” Junko told me in a recent call.

“The Japanese companies lived in two separate worlds with their PC and TV divisions, and it was sacrilege to merge the two. Even reporters sort of took Japan’s side. We mirrored what folks were thinking,” she added.

Tokyo had me in its sway, too. On my first trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in the mid-‘90’s, I was dazzled by Japan’s big bright HDTV displays. Content was limited to nature videos and cityscapes, plotless B-roll, but the colors and details were eye-popping. I would stare at the screens slack jawed. I was sold.

A late adopter, it took nearly 20 years before I actually had an HDTV in my living room.

 

Other Voices: Friends of Junko

Keeping her focus on EE Times, Junko deflected my pleas to write more OEM Magazine stories. Instead, she introduced me to some of the best freelance writers in consumer electronics. The future of TV was typically their focus.

One freelancer (Rebecca Day) wrote an October 1994 cover (below) on the trials and tribulations of HDTV. Back then there was a fierce debate over whether it would initially be an analog or digital service. 

Another (James K. Willcox) analyzed the new Nintendo64 videogame console, a $250 consumer box that used a processor based on the chip inside a $100,000 supercomputer from Silicon Graphics. Such game systems were not only fun they were dark horses in the race to digital television.

Yet another friend of Junko’s (Marty Brochstein) wrote a post mortem of 3DO, a startup led by Trip Hawkins, the Steve Jobs of the videogame crowd. Like the Nintendo64, the 3DO Interactive Mutiplayer aimed to use a high-end processor to deliver digital content to the TV, running an end game around Japan and Wintel.

The 3DO product never took off, though Hawkins coaxed $300 million from investors. Doesn’t sound like much in today’s tech world where AI deals are valued in tens of billions, but back then it was an eye-watering figure. “If I ever have anything to sell, I want [Hawkins] doing it,” one prospective partner said.

In June 1995, OEM devoted a whole issue to the set-top box, another contender on the way to digital TV. Ron Wilson, EE Times’ guru of Silicon Valley, stepped in to give an engineer’s tour of the Time Warner Cable (TWC) experiment in Orlando, Florida, where 500 households acted as lab rats.

TWC wanted to see what users would buy from a souped up digital, interactive cable-TV service of the future. So, it built a super-powerful cable TV set-top box that, like Nintendo, used a Silicon Graphics chip. They linked all the set tops on what was considered a broadband network for those days. Unfortunately, the network was sluggish carrying video and the state-of-the-art processors in the set-tops lacked the ability to render 3D graphics, something every smartphone chip can do today.

The outcome of TWC’s high-profile trial was unclear. We knew cable-TV would be a player in the move to digital consumer services. And it was, for a while. But once semiconductors became powerful enough that every TV, PC and handset could show graphics and video – and the internet arrived -- nobody needed a dedicated service with its own dedicated box to reach the digital consumer nirvana.

Next: Looking Back in 2026