Will they or won’t they? Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM Corp were still vacillating over whether or not an announcement of the COSI Common Open Systems Interface initiative would be forthcoming on March 17 at UniForum in San Francisco. Although it was originally IBM’s idea, Hewlett-Packard now appears to be taking the lead – but the inclusion of other companies such as SunSoft Inc and Novell Inc is far from assured. The original idea is in danger of becoming diluted, and if everyone’s technology and operating systems have to be accommodated, the danger is that – as with the Advanced Computing Environment consortium – the result won’t add up to anything at all.
