IBM Corp’s embarrassing attempt to make the PowerPC into a credible mass market alternative to Intel Corp’s iAPX-86 architecture promise to keep business school students entertained for many a long semester as it becomes a case study in snatching certain defeat from the jaws of possible victory. According to US PC Week, the latest twist in this long-running comedy of errors is that IBM is now blowing cold on the idea of marketing machines designed to the PowerPC Platform to run both Mac OS and Windows NT for PowerPC – because the silence from potential OEM customers the company hoped would clamour for IBM- built boards or machines to badge has been deafening. The paper hears IBM is also reconsidering whether to continue selling PowerPC-based RS/6000 systems running Windows NT. One dead certainty after another to make PowerPC-based systems a success beyond the narrow confines of IBM Corp Unix and Apple Computer Inc Macintosh systems has been tried and failed, but undaunted, IBM is to try yet another. This time, the PowerPC Platform is being presented as the ideal architecture to run Java applications faster than anything else. IBM’s Microelectronics Group is combining the Java Virtual Machine with real-time operating system kernels to improve performance of Java applications running on forthcoming PowerPC-based Network Computers. As for NT, Microsoft Corp, which has already has abandoned the version for the R-series RISC, now says that it will re-evaluate its plans to put Windows NT Version 5.0 up on PowerPC if the hardware market does not reach critical mass.
