Weird, isn’t – countries like Mexico and Chile and Czechoslovakia seem to find it simple enough to privatise the phone company, yet in places like France and Germany, state socialism is so deeply entrenched that the idea is anathema and can’t be done: the German government yesterday said it would resist European Commission efforts to impose a guideline that would allow alternative networks in 1996 – but by digging its heels in on the issue, it makes it well nigh certain that the investment by Deutsche Telekom AG and France Telecom into Sprint Corp will be blocked; German Postal Minister Wolfgang Btsch told reporters that the draft guideline would undermine his efforts to create the legal framework for full competition in the sector; the main conflict for Germany has to do with the definition of what will be protected by monopoly status between 1996 and 1998 – under German law, revised last year, Deutsche Telekom’s entire fixed network is to enjoy a monopoly until 1998.
IBM Corp yesterday announced six new models of its PC 300 machines with 100MHz Pentium chips and 540Mb or 850Mb disks: the SelectaSystem dual boot feature provides OS/2 Warp and MS-DOS with Windows+; they have high-speed 64-bit PCI graphics 256Kb L2 write-back cache, but IBM forbore to give prices for them.
Microsoft Corp has shipped the second test version of its desperately late Exchange Server, but still has a much work to do to ship it this year as scheduled, said senior vice-president Jim Allchin.
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe said yesterday it would launch its 32-bit compact-disk-based PlayStation computer games module across Europe from the end of next month, and hopes to sell 1m in year one: it will sell for about ú300 here.
Silicon Graphics Inc has got its Irix 5.3 Unix up to X/Open XPG4 Base profile (Unix 93) conformance.
Reasons to be cheerful, Lotus Development Corp version: InformationWeek cites a Lotus source giving seven reasons why Lotus employees should feel good about vanishing into IBM Corp: Lou Gerstner thinks we’re cool; generous employee discounts on IBM 3090 mainframes; we’re now bigger than Microsoft; Armonk isn’t just our new corporate headquarters, it’s a great mantra, too; IBM’s corporate slogan (Think) is easier to remember than the 10 Lotus operating principles; business attire is always optional on Thomas Watson’s birthday – and, just do the maths – IBM paid over $600,000 for your butt!
