Kojima Press Conference

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

An interesting move on the Japanese NII front....


On Thu, 12 Jan 1995 19:56:26 -0800 (PST)  John Ratliff wrote:


In a Wednesday press conference, NTT President
Kojima Masashi made a number of intriguing
announcements about NTT's future direction that I
thought would interest EFJers and might be worthy of
comment.


On the one hand, he announced NTT's plan to work out
a specific plan for multimedia business by the ed of the
present fiscal year in March.  This involved the
continuation of present experiments with a variety of
third-party companies.  But more significantly, in what
appears to me to represent a bid to avoid being broken
up, he said that NTT plans to allow any type of service
provider--long distance, PHS, CATV, etc.--to use NTT's
multimedia networks.  He emphasized that this would
involve working out fair pricing among participating
parties.


Kojima also announced that NTT would break with its
traditional hiring practices (new college graduates at the
beginning of the fiscal year), and begin recruiting
experienced workers--Japanese and foreign--with
specific skills.  These workers would be hired on an
annual contract basis.  While the initial hire in the new
system is only fifty workers, Nikkei Shimbun headlined
this part of Kojima's announcement, seeing it as
symtomatic of a general move away from lifetime
employment and the strict seniority system in light of the
nature of new information technologies.


Kojima himself was quoted as saying that the traditional
system cannot be counted on to provide workers with the
needed skills for NTT to be a player in the international
information technology market, especially the
development of software solutions.


Cheers,




John Ratliff <jratliff () weber ucsd edu>
Dept. of Sociology, Univ. of California, San Diego
Presently Visiting Research Scholar, Institute of Social Research,
University of Tokyo