Steve Jobs’ hopes of using a deal with Hewlett-Packard Co to propel his NeXTstep operating environment to prominence look doomed. Sources tell our sister paper Unigram.X that that any suggestion that Hewlett-Packard might be interested in licensing troubled NeXT Computer Inc’s NeXTstep interface for the Precision Architecture RISC is a lot of executive hot air. Hewlett-Packard is known to have been casing the industry for new directions – a process witnessed by the winding down of its NewWave interface efforts – and is now thought to be closing in for a stake in Taligent Inc, the Apple Computer Inc-IBM Corp joint venture on object-oriented operating system technology. Hewlett-Packard has been very quiet about its at the time much-touted alliance with Sun Microsystems Inc on the Distributed Object Management Framework, or DOMF.
