Word is circulating that Digital Equipment Corp will be laying off 1,000 software engineering staff in Europe over the next couple of weeks on top of the 6,000 redundancies worldwide that were announced this week (CI No 2,068): software managers were said to be deciding which projects to kill at a Geneva meeting last week – one of those mentioned was the Network Application System; the aim of the NAS project is to enable communication between different DEC machines as well as between DEC kit and other manufacturer’s boxes; a DEC spokesman said that everything was in the early stages, and that he wouldn’t like to comment on numbers – not even the 6,000 proposed lay-offs; although software engineering staff would be among the casualties, he also couldn’t say if they would be part of the wave of redundancies mentioned above; to put this in context, he asserted, we should realise that DEC was refocussing its software product line and strategy; experts in the NAS team will now focus solely on DEC-to-DEC communications because DEC was trying to concentrate on what customers wanted; work on communications between DEC machines and other manufacturers’ kit will go to internal systems integration teams.
