ABSTRACT
The all-powerful Japanese Ministry of Foreign Trade that targeted exports and directed with an iron hand the Japanese companies’ industrial policy, financed a project to emulate IBM’s mainframes–with a view to conquer a big chunk of the global computer market. Excess computer capacity in users’ hands stood at the lowest level in years, and that was good for sales. Wall Street’s immediate worry was what the computer price war will do to industry profits, as financial analysts cut their projections of 1977 pretax profit margins by about half of one percent for each of the big computer companies. Computer vendors had a different set of concerns. The better managed computer companies have also been keen to assure that directives related to cost/effectiveness are carried out to establish a link between cost control methods and the behavior of individual cost centers. Field maintenance is a whole issue with great impact on the computer manufacturer as vendor of high quality products.
