IBM Corp’s dismantling of the Armonk politburo to follow Chairman Mao’s Let 100 Flowers Bloom dictum has really let the genie out of the bottle, and Infoworld has been talking to consultants that say the company is planning to enter the tents of the enemy by putting a version of the DB2 database up under Windows NT. It is not clear whether the effort involves simply the client end or the full DB2 – both have just been announced for AIX Unix on the RS/6000. Consultants told the paper that IBM has been dissecting the two most recent pre-release versions of NT at its Toronto labs to assess the time and money that would be required to do the implementation, and reckon a product could arrive at the turn of the year. The move is bad news for IBM Personal Software Products in its efforts to get OS/2 2.0 established, because many corporate users have gone for OS/2 specifically for its relatively easy integration with mainframe DB2.
