By William Fellows
Compaq Computer Corp’s new leadership is ready to give up on the company’s efforts to establish Windows NT on Alpha, and the project, inherited from Digital Equipment Corp, has fallen victim to the cost-cutting measures promised recently by CEO Michael Capellas, it emerged on Friday.
Microsoft insiders told ComputerWire that work on the port of Windows 2000 to the Alpha chip has been stopped. The 32-bit version of NT-on-Alpha won’t be supported beyond service pack 6, which is the next release. While work on the port of the Win64 version of Windows 2000 to Alpha is ongoing, Compaq’s primary focus, as it has already stated, will be Tru64 Unix, OpenVMS and Linux. Compaq reportedly laid off around 100 engineers responsible for Windows NT on Alpha development from its Bellevue, Washington facility. DEC worked closely with Microsoft on the port both before and after its acquisition by Compaq in February 1998.
According to the Shannon Knows Compaq newsletter, less than 15% of the approximately 500,000 Alpha systems that have been sold are running NT. The numbers suggest that Capellas has made a wise decision as he attempts to pull the ailing company up by the scruff of its neck. But despite the relatively small number of NT-on-Alpha sales, there are some markets to which the platform is crucial. For example, up to 60% of the installations of Microsoft Exchange are thought to be on Alpha quad-processors running NT. Much of that business is now effectively under threat. Certainly it means customers running version 5.5 of Exchange are unlikely to upgrade to the new Exchange Platinum, leaving a huge window of opportunity for IBM Corp to win them over to its equivalent Lotus Notes messaging and groupware.
As we went to press, there was reported to be a lynch mob of staff from affected Microsoft profit and loss groups, descending on building 25 of the Redmond complex, site of the NT-on-Alpha porting work to protest against the closing down of the operation.
Although DEC was first out of the gate with a full-blooded NT strategy, few took CEO Bob Palmer’s strategy seriously and the company didn’t win much market share. When Compaq bought DEC, CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer championed the NT relationship it had inherited. One irony of the situation is that Microsoft’s chief NT architect, David Cutler, came from DEC, where he wrote the Vax VMS minicomputer operating system in the 1970s.
Microsoft Corp planned Windows NT as its first multi-platform, but things didn’t work out too well. It phased out support for NT on MIPS in October 1996 due to decreasing demand, and two months later IBM Corp abandoned its own plans to support NT on PowerPC platforms, prompting Microsoft to officially drop support for the PowerPC in February 1997. Executives at DEC were reported to have celebrated the news at the time (CI No 3,099). A port of NT for Sun Spec was mooted for some time but never got off the ground.
