Underlining the disasters that civil servants and politicians create when they start believing that they understand the businesses of commercial companies better than the companies themselves, Compagnie des Machines Bull SA, forced by the previous administration to get into bed with IBM Corp, is now being pressured to get much closer to NEC Corp – always the more appropriate partner; IBM has now put itself out into the cold by refusing to subscribe to Bull’s capital increase, NEC did its duty, and now the state wants NEC to increase its stake further; NEC clearly needs to get something in return, and almost the only thing that would fit the bill would be for Bull to adopt the NEC EWS 4800 line of Unix and Windows NT workstations – but that would only make sense if Bull dumped the IBM RS/6000s and PowerPC and returned to the MIPS Technologies Inc RISC to which it earlier committed.
