Apple Computer Corp is poised to begin offering Windows NT on its servers, apparently in an attempt to keep Macintosh shops which want a strong networking environment from switching to Windows desktops. Apple was expected to make an official comment on the move early today but the move shouldn’t come as a surprise. Yesterday Motorola Inc announced that Apple Australia would begin distributing Motorola’s E Series PowerPC workgroup servers running NT down under. And last month Apple chief Gilbert Amelio said the company had a fair degree of interest in NT but said at the time it had no pre-loading agreement with Microsoft for NT (CI No. 2,913). But Apple may be feeling pressure from large Mac sites such as AT&T Labs or Boeing Co, which may want a more robust server environment and would consider canning their Macs to move to Windows. The strategy seems to go against the company’s publicly announced intention to concentrate on its core competencies, and corporate servers – aside from Internet servers – have not been core for Apple. Talk to the Apple camp and you get an optimistic scenario in which Apple forestalls losing desktop market share and gets a number of Mac or mixed Mac and PC shops to buy its NT servers, which will have easier configurability than other offerings. The Wintel camp predicts Apple will pump a lot of money into its NT drive without finding a large enough base for the servers. Customers may find that Windows NT just doesn’t run on PowerPC as well as on Pentium, said Mark McGillivray, director of HM Consulting. The NT servers would likely be an addition to Apple’s Network Server Line, launched in February and fall under the firm’s servers and alternative platforms division.
