From Microsoft Corp’s point of view, the $65m it has bunged to Digital Equipment Corp to cover the cost of training more engineers in Windows NT – the Maynarder now has 800 people certified in the Redmonder’s products, and it plans to train another 1,500, giving DEC the largest engineering team with that kind of expertise – is the beginning of a wider transition away from Unix to NT at the high end of the personal computer market and low end server space. Whether the market will swell to accommodate NT alongside existing systems, or Unix will move up to higher ground, the analysts are not prepared to say, but Microsoft notes that DEC’s OSF/1-based Unix strategy, where it is the sole developer, leaves DEC right up the proverbial creek. Under the deal, DEC will second a team to Redmond to hold Microsoft to its promise that new versions of Windows NT will continue to run on the company’s Alpha RISC. The two will also cross-license their patent portfolios and work to diminish differences between specialised software, such as their electronic mail programs, and DEC will become a major systems integrator of Microsoft products. Microsoft will license DEC’s clustering technology for use in the company’s future clustering offerings for Windows NT, the two said.
