Nothing should come as a surprise in the present climate of endlessly shifting industry alliances, but an eyebrow or two may be raised by the news that Hewlett-Packard Co, so irked by Motorola’s negotiating stance on object-oriented technology that it turned to arch-rival Sun Microsystems Inc and agreed a partnership, finds that it does still have some pressing object-oriented interests in common with Microsoft. Yesterday the two companies announced that they were co-operating in the future design of Object Linking and Embedding for Microsoft Windows, to will ensure compatibility between Windows and HP NewWave, bringing the features of NewWave to Windows-based applications without requiring a separate development effort up to now, developers have had to write additional code to enable Windows applications to take advantage of NewWave: there will now be a single development path for Windows and NewWave applications. Hewlett plans that the next release of NewWave will support OLE 1.0, enabling server applications that use OLE to run with NewWave.
