This was the thrust of a lecture delivered by Hidetaka Fukuda, director of the Information and Communication Electronics Division of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry during the Digital Home Appliances Forum 2003 in Tokyo.
Fukuda said that the individual paths meant that development and production systems of companies tend to be inefficient, Nikkei News Asia reported.
"Middleware will become an important factor in home appliances. However, software is not a manufacturer's forte in the first place," Fukuda said. "I believe that manufacturers should work on technological standardisation, wherever it is not their core business, so that they can concentrate on distinguishing themselves elsewhere," he was reported as saying.
He cited the agreement between Matsushita Electric and NEC to integrate the architecture of operating systems and middleware in 3G as a step in the right direction. "Both companies are able to focus on developing distinctive applications and semiconductors for mobile phones."
Standardisation is all the more important in the production of consumer products. "If it is an incident of a computer bug in mainframes or corporate information systems, it is possible for system engineers to fix the problem on site even after product delivery. This would not be the case for consumer products. Once they go into the market, it will take a great deal of time and effort to collect them," Fukuda pointed out. He brought up a recent blight of mobile phone recalls, where "funds are needlessly consumed on the scale of tens of billions of yen in single cases."
