What’s behind Hewlett-Packard Co’s sudden breaking of ranks and joining forces with arch workstation rival Sun Microsystems Inc on object-oriented technology? The New York Times on Friday highlighted some unhappiness at Go Corp over the fact that it went to Microsoft Corp in its early days, discussed its plans and asked the company if it would be prepared to write applications for the pen-driven operating environment it was developing, and was disconcerted when Microsoft later announced that it was developing its own rival pen-driven environment: as for Hewlett-Packard and its Sun deal, word is that the company was concerned that take-up of its object-oriented NewWave extension to Microsoft Windows was not getting the take-up for which it had hoped, and approached Microsoft and suggested a joint effort behind the environment, which it still believes is capable of sweeping the workstation world; the intimate discussions are said to have gone on for about a year, until last October, when Microsoft rejected the idea of joining forces on NewWave, and was soon announcing that the upcoming Windows 4.0 would include object-oriented extensions.
