Data General Corp is aiming to accelerate its recovery by divesting what it regards as non-strategic activities, and the first to go – in a management buyout – is the three-year effort to develop a distributed office-oriented object management system under the name HyperDesk. A new company, called HyperDesk Corp, has been formed to buy the fruits of the development, and it will use Data General’s AViiON Unix machines as one of the first development machines for the forthcoming product. Data General justifies its decision in part by saying that for software to become an industry standard, it has to be open and run on a variety of machines. The first product from the new company is expected next year. There are understood to be two further activities to go in buy-outs, one in the US and one in the UK – presumably related to the company’s European Communications Competence Centre in Cambridge (CI No 1,311).
