* Original Area: OS2
* Original From: Gautam Srikanth (1:259/400)
* Original To  : All (1:259/414)

November 29, 1995 3:50 p.m.

Taligent slated to become IBM subsidiary; big layoffs expected

By Charles Cooper (PCWEEK)

Taligent Inc. will become a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM, according to
sources who say the announcement will be made Thursday.

The venture, which was funded by IBM, Apple Computer Inc., and
Hewlett-Packard Co., was originally started with the idea of creating a
new PC operating system. Taligent's partners have since scaled back
their plans, focusing the company's efforts on developing object
technologies that would run on Motorola and IBM RISC processors as well
as on Intel chips. The products were supposed to also run on AIX, OS/2,
HP-UX, Windows 95,Windows NT and the Macintosh platforms.

About 200 of Taligent's 400 employees will remain with the company,
according to the sources. The people left working at the Cupertino,
Calif., office will comprise the company's core development team.

The retreat on Taligent follows by a couple of weeks the decision by IBM
and Apple to close down Kaleida Labs Inc., another alliance that was
created to develop a cross-platform multimedia standard.

In both instances, say software developers and analysts, the joint
ventures were hamstrung by bureaucratic constraints that resulted in
slipped delivery dates and changing missions.

A spokeswoman for IBM said that Taligent's partners were "in dicussions"
but declined further comment. Similarly, an Apple spokeswoman said "the
companies are involved in the business planning process" but declined to
go much further than that. "When there are results from that process to
be announced, they will be made public," she said.

+-----------------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Gautam Srikanth    morpheus+{at}cmu.edu   |           Cthulhu '96           |
|  www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~srikanth   | "Why vote for the lesser
evil?" |
+-----------------------------------------+---------------------------------+

--- Maximus/2 3.00