Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT organisation-wide network operating system will gain about 25 percentage points of market share against Novell Inc’s rival NetWare 4.1, which currently overwhelmingly dominates the market, Roger Addelson, manager of professional services for AT&T Global Information Solutions’ alliance marketing group reckons: he told a Comdex/Spring seminar he sees NetWare’s market share of about 70% falling to 55% to 65% by the end of 1997 while Windows NT’s advances from less than 10% last year to about 35%, and that the market for local area networks is not growing fast enough to enable both companies to compete painlessly; Addelson said the rival systems’ relative advantages are about as important as the differences between Cadillacs and Lincolns and he believes Windows NT and NetWare will increasingly come to resemble each other until they are replaced by a new generation, sometime around the end of 1997.
Prodigy Services Co president Ross Glatzer is to quit on May 1 to be replaced by Ed Bennett, who was a senior executive at Viacom Inc: he follows by one month Scott Kurnit, Prodigy’s highly-regarded executive vice-president, who left to head a new MCI Communications Corp venture providing Internet access to customers; Prodigy said Glatzer decided to retire late last year and that he had agreed to remain at Prodigy and see it through the transition.
Xerox Corp and printing systems specialist Scitex Corp Ltd have agreed to a strategic relationship that they say will enable both companies to advance their positions in the short-run digital colour printing market: under terms of the deal, the companies will share core technological and market expertise and the first offering from the on-going relationship will be a printing system to be distributed by Scitex that incorporates the Scitex digital front-end, providing productive workflow management, with a high speed full colour print engine developed by Fuji Xerox Ltd, Japan.
Hitachi Ltd and AEG Electrocom GmbH of Germany are joining forces to develop a postal automation systems business to cope with the increasing volume of mail in Japan: an equally-owned venture, AEG Hitachi Postal Automation Ltd, capitalised at $118,000 will open on June 30.
United Telecom Investment Kft, a 50-50 joint venture of Alcatel NV’s Austrian subsidiary and US Telecom East Inc says it plans to invest $220m over eight years to quadraple and more the number of phone subscribers in the areas of Hungary it serves as it rebuilds the network.
The decision by Bell Atlantic Corp to rethink its planned video dial-tone network could have serious implications for some of the companies that were to have supplied equipment for the network, and the first to react was Wallingford, Connecticut-based Amphenol Corp, which said that despite a softening in its share price after Bell Atlantic’s announcement, the company was not expected to be a significant coaxial cable customer for Amphenol other than for coaxial drop cable and that would be used in any future broadband configurations.
Motorola Inc has signed China Panda Electronics Group as a joint venture partner to produce pagers, computers and other telecommunications equipment for the Chinese market: the two companies plan to sell 500,000 Motorola pagers under the name Panda by Motorola in 1995 and set up a joint venture factory to produce pagers under the Panda trademark in Nanjing in 1996; the two will jointly produce cellular and cordless phones and are discussing the manufacture of computers, the Xinhua news angency said.
Stamford, Connecticut-based Pitney Bowes Inc has definitive agreement to sell its Dictaphone Corp unit and related worldwide operations for $450m cash to an affiliate of Stonington Partners Inc, a private investment firm: the world’s largest maker of postage meters and mailing machines, wants to focus on its paper-based communications businesses by divesting its electronic side, which also includes its Monarch Marking bar-code equipment arm; Dictaphone dev
elops and manufactures speech processing, dictation and speech recording systems.
GTE Corp expects to complete acquisition of the outstanding 10% stake in Contel Cellular Inc on May 12.
The Westport, Connecticut Singapore Telecom USA unit of Singapore Telecommunications Ltd will invest $193m in a joint venture to establish the first nationwide radio paging network in China: it will have 35% in the new Beijing Asia Pacific First Star Communications Technology Co in partnership with Beijing Asia Pacific Telecommunication Technology & Development Co, Beijing Jinfang Economic Development Co, a nominated subsidiary of the ING Beijing Investment Co; and Asia Pacific (China) Electrical Co.
IBM Corp has opened the European DCE Marketing and Technical Support Centre at Hursley Park, Hampshire, dedicated to distributed computing environment solutions whether implemented on IBM systems or not.
The cc:MailUser Group has changed its named to the European Lotus Communications Group and will support both cc:Mail and Notes: yearly membership of the group is free.
All this talk of dumping old computers in landfills is a bit disconcerting when any desktop computer that still works and has an operating system must be of value to somebody: Jack Schofield reports in the Guardian that police in San Francisco have begun offering used computers in exchange for handguns.
