Sony's Workstation Plans

In an interview with Nikkei Electronics, Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Ken Kutaragi laid out Sony's plans for entering the workstation market. Sony hopes to use the development of workstation technology to drive the development future Playstations. "I don't think that the workstation business will be able to turn a profit, but we will supply the funds for development work there from the game machine side of the company," said Kutaragi, "One of the reasons is that we want to maintain our position as a technology driver in order to be able to develop the PlayStation3 and other future products." Sony also feels workstation competitors like SGI will be unable to keep up with Sony's technological pace in the future. "For 2000, we are preparing workstations with capabilities ten times better than the development tools currently available - and in 2002, they will be a hundred times better," explained Kutaragi, "I doubt that there are any other companies that can afford to invest in semiconductor manufacturing technology on the scale necessary to maintain that kind of pace, most companies would go out of business trying to keep up." He added, "Anyway, SGI doesn't have enough strength remaining to go on competing at the very cutting edge of technology."