As reported briefly (CI No 2,818), the Taligent Inc, the joint venture of IBM Corp, Apple Computer Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co dedicated to building object-oriented tools, is to become a wholly-owned IBM subsidiary. Although the partners claim neither the technology nor the business model was broken, it is clear the companies have decided to cut their losses. Taligent grew out of a landmark 1991 Apple-IBM agreement that also spawned the multimedia Kaleida Labs which disappeared into Apple a few weeks back (CI No 2,805) and PowerPC. It is not clear just how much Apple and Hewlett-Packard have had to write off – funding and ownership details were never made public – but Hewlett-Packard was thought to have paid around $50m for the 15% stake it took in 1993 (CI No 2,327). Apple and Hewlett-Packard get rights to the technology developed so far and possible access to future IBM-created Taligent enhancements – if there are any and if either is still interested – though no-one we spoke to was sure whether these would be licensed freely or be subject to charge. IBM says the new subsidiary, now the Taligent Object Technology Center, based at Taligent’s existing headquarters in Cupertino, California, will concentrate on integrating Taligent technology into IBM products, including VisualAge, and – importantly – OpenDoc. How much of this will be recognisable as ‘Taligent’ once subsumed however is open to doubt. Half of Taligent’s 375 staff will be laid off, including the entire sales and marketing team.

Anything other than a failure

The new head of the operations is Debbie Coutard, one of the Taligent founders and originally from Apple. She will report to tools supremo John Swainson, vice-president advanced development solutions and director of the Toronto Labs. Although the three partners are trying very hard to present Taligent as a success, it is difficult to see it as anything other than a failure. Back in June 1991 Apple chief executive John Sculley was saying that Apple’s prototype object operating system Pink already consisted of over a million lines of tested code and could no longer be considered a research product – Pink lay at the heart of the aborted Taligent object operating system. Four and a half years on, and $Xm dollars later (where X is the unknown), the company has got essentially two products – the Commonpoint set of object frameworks and cpConstructor, a graphical user interface builder. Both are currently available for AIX only. IBM has about 150 customers for the products worldwide and most of those are technical types who are looking at its use in the labs; there are no known examples of production code developed from Taligent kits. It is still possible that Apple will get little or no return from its investment in Taligent: Commonpoint requires a kernel-based operating system to run, so it cannot be used for much until Copland arrives. Even then, Apple says Taligent technology will be developed only if there is customer demand and that no commitments are being made. It said there would be no additional information until the summer and described Taligent inside IBM as being no longer a redundant entity. In the meantime Apple’s emphasis will be firmly on OpenDoc. Hewlett-Packard is even more vague. The company told us it was delighted with Taligent’s progress, and that it had met its research goals. Unfortunately, it didn’t know what any of those goals were, or in what form any Taligent technology might be incorporated into Hewlett-Packard products. From here on in, it could become quite difficult to track the Taligent technology’s progress since the likelihood is clearly that IBM will dismember its constituent parts and roll them into existing products. It told us it hadn’t decided whether the Taligent name would survive into the future. The cpConstructor development tool is to be absorbed into VisualAge, and the company says it does not know yet whether Taligent’s more distinctive features – such as the People, Places & Things metaphor – will see the light of day. Despite this, IBM is still talking about delivering a beta version of Commonpoint for Windows NT in the middle of 1996.