Taligent Inc, the Apple Computer Inc-IBM Corp venture devoted to building an object-oriented operating environment, is aiming to provide chunks of its technology for inclusion in other companies’ systems. It escaped general attention at the time, but Joseph Guglielmi, Taligent’s chairman and chief executive says that one of his first moves on joining the company was to create three quite separate divisions. The first of these concentrates on Taligent’s native implementation, now firmly based on a version of the Carnegie Mellon University Mach kernel, which IBM has slimmed down and turned into a true micro-kernel implementation. The second group handles development tools, while the third ‘complementary products’ division is looking to promote parts of the Taligent technology for adoption on existing hardware. Its too early to say which bits these will be, says Guglielmi, but the most obvious choices, he suggests, are the big functional blocks such as graphics subsystems or the development environment. Both Apple and IBM will take Taligent work for incorporation in future versions of their existing offerings. The potential pitfall of this approach is that the Taligent add-ons could make the conventional offerings so attractive as to damage the acceptance of the native product itself. Guglielmi acknowledges this but says that if his company had ignored the market it would have given competitors free rein. This way, he says, when native Taligent, finally arrives in mid-1995 it will find an industry well stocked with Taligent-compliant tools and objects – and developers, claims Guglielmi, just love what they have seen so far.
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