If there is any company Hewlett-Packard Co feels comraderie with right now, it is IBM. The general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s commercial Unix business, Bernard Guidon, speaks of a common HP/IBM vision, hammered out over the course of many meetings. It consists of a common approach to the market made up of X/Open Co Ltd’s Portability Guide, Distributed Computing Environment and common libraries, shared SoftBench software engineering tools and a shared systems management approach composed of OpenView and probably the Distributed Management Environment, culminating in apparently shared applications and Motif. Guidon says that the common vision makes the customer feel secure if this is the way IBM is going too, the user thinks to himself, then everything’s all right. And if there is one thing that discomfits Hewlett-Packard it’s the spectre of Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT operating system gobbling up the world. A Microsoft hegemony doesn’t sit well with Hewlett-Packard and so Guidon promises that for all its association with the high end, it is also putting together a desktop strategy and boxes to try and best Microsoft at its own game.
