Hewlett-Packard Co is discovering the penalty to be paid for moving into a major new technology too early with its object-oriented NewWave environment – it is now having to wait for the others to catch up. It has put back launch of the end-user version of its forthcoming NewWave for Unix until next year, up to a year later than planned. The delay is so that it can see what the Object Management Group comes up with and decides, and to give its new partner on NewWave, Sun Microsystems Inc, time to add significant additional functionality to the Unix version. According to Computer Systems News Sun is an equal partner in the effort, and one of the key technologies it is to add is support for distributed objects, something that is not in the Windows personal computer version of the environment. A software developer’s version of NewWave for Windows – which may have another name altogether in deference to Sun’s sensibilities – may be available in the fourth quarter of 1991.
