What future for Digital Equipment Corp? Unless the company can repeal the laws of economics, within three or four years, all DEC’s new business won’t be Windows NT on Pentium Pro or P7. About the least bad option now looks to be to sell the company to Microsoft Corp to give it a vast ready-made army of support personnel trained in NT. Microsoft would presumably sell the hardware business on to ambitious personal computer manufacturer like Dell Computer Corp, and the hardware maintenance business onto someone like Wang Laboratories Inc. The sad thing is that it didn’t have to be that way, and unless they was a black hole cash drain at the bottom of the balance sheet that no outsider has ever been told of, the Digital Equipment Corp of five years ago was eminently savable without the sale of almost all the businesses and product lines that gave it its reasons for continued existence. The price would have been postponing a return to profits for another 18 months to two years, but since, after returning to profit, the new slimline DEC is back bleeding red ink again, those demanding a quick fix at any price don’t seem to have won much.
