Apple Computer Inc chairman John Sculley and IBM Corp personal computer chief James Cannavino shared a platform at a conference in Laguna Niguel, California on Monday and discussed their proposed alliance, according to the New York Times making it clear that neither partner saw any prospect of a resumption of growth in the personal computer market without fundamental changes. Executives from both companies reportedly acknowledged that negotiations had been going more slowly than expected, although they insisted that final terms were now near. Apple also surprised the assembly by saying that first commercial products from the alliance might appear rather sooner than expected: Sculley said that the Pink operating environment now comprised more than a million lines of tested code and that it might start appearing on products ahead of anything coming out of the proposed jointly-owned IBM-Apple company. The main message is that Pink is not a research project, he said. Sculley also confirmed that for Unix, Apple would be switching to IBM’s AIX implementation – or one of them. Separately, InfoWorld magazine reckons that IBM and Apple will name Apple senior vice-president of object-based systems, Ed Birss to be chief operating officer of their proposed joint venture company while Metaphor Computer Systems Inc president David Liddle is tipped to get the overall top job.
