* Panda Project Inc, battered by a rough piece in the Wall Street Journal, says it has won its first contract from the US General Services Administration, which will resell Archistrat servers throughout all Federal Government agencies.
* Apple Computer Inc promoted former Texas Instruments Inc executive Marco Landi to be executive vice-president and chief operating officer. He quit TI last year and is currently president of Apple Computer Europe, Middle East and Africa.
* Based on interviews with 11,500 personal computer users from a larger random sample, Computer Intelligence Infocorp reckons that 38.5% of US households now have one or more personal computers, up from 33.1% in 1994 and 25.7% in 1993.
* IBM Corp’s Lotus Notes will remain the dominant groupware product for another couple of years, Input, Mountain View, California reckons after surveying 200 US and European Notes users. Input says that the survey indicates that all groupware will migrate to the Internet.
* Motorola Inc’s Motorola Computer Group and Compagnie des Machines Bull SA will open a center somewhere in Silicon Valley next quarter to provide all the facilities software developers will need to convert their applications for Windows NT on the PowerPC Platform.
* Cyrix Corp – the iAPX-86 cloner – has signed IBM Corp’s IBM Microelectronics for additional wafer fabrication capacity on a foundry basis between now and December 1997 on top of the capacity reserved under the five-year pact in April 1994.
* Tandy Corp’s Computer City superstore retail division has signed Electronic Data Systems Corp to help it improve service to corporate customers. Computer City will also outsource logistics management to Electronic Data Systems, which among others will install an order management system for the division.
* Most dismissive comment we’ve seen so far on the Network Computer hoop-la comes from Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research Inc, Cambridge. The Boston Globe quotes him saying What we have here is a bunch of companies getting together and agreeing not to change their development plans in the slightest.
* Progress Software Corp ships Version 8 of its Application Development Environment for Unix in July.