Digital Equipment Corp intends to lay off 500 more people in the Personal Computer Business Unit, according to several company employees and two analysts. DEC has 60,000 employees now, down from 120,000 at peak, and about 6,000 are in the personal computer sector, where 500 have been already made redundant since January. That may be just the tip of the iceberg however. According to a report in our sister publication ClieNT Server News, Maynard’s also making noises about letting another 10,000 go – others say it could be double that number – with cuts in direct sales, multivendor support and engineering thought most likely. Sources say there may also be another reorganization in the works and there are tales circulating about senior executive staff being under signed internal NDAs about such a thing. It seems that a lot of stuff is getting shifted over to the Systems Business Unit these days anyway and the vaunted Alpha RISC- dedicated SBU, we hear, may be allowed to sell Intel Corp boxes under certain circumst ances. Brokerage house Goldman Sachs is even saying that if DEC lost the PCBU altogether it would be rewarded on Wall Street. The unit is reported to have lost around $60m in DEC’s third fiscal quarter to March 30. The climate of unease is perhaps most acute in Europe where DEC Germany is apparently afraid that there won’t be any DEC Germany after all the pink paper stops flying. DEC watchers believe the September quarter, the company’s fiscal first, will sour on it and it’ll turn in losses.
