SunSoft Inc added its two cents to all the industry talk swirling about the Hewlett-Packard Co-Taligent Inc deal last week, which seems only fair since Hewlett-Packard was probably the most sceptical about the Sun Microsystems Inc-NeXT Computer Inc deal when it got done. SunSoft rallied two of the people most intimate with the goings-on, both ex-Apple Computer Inc people, and one, Bud Tribble, also a NeXT founder. They said they wondered how Taligent was going to stretch its resources to accommodate Hewlett-Packard, but that that was the least of it. Taligent, they charged, is using a stand-alone Apple model and its work isn’t exactly what you’d call distributed or client-server, but simply reworking of AppleTalk. That, they said, was the technical reason why Sun decided against going with Taligent. How, they wondered, does such a thing like an object-oriented Macintosh fit sensibly into Hewlett-Packard’s marketplace? Even IBM Corp, they added, has been down to Taligent trying to get it to move away from their Applecentric view of the world. A little more probing, however, revealed that it was the business terms demanded that really put paid to any Sun-Taligent combine. Whatever they were – and we couldn’t get them to specify this time around exactly what they were – they made Sun realise that it couldn’t get the product it needed in the time allowed. With a different set of terms they thought that they might have succeeded.
