The slide back into losses at the end of last fiscal made it quite clear that the recovery at Digital Equipment Corp under Robert Palmer has much more in common with the patchy no-growth perennial battle for survival at Unisys Corp than it does to the IBM Corp recovery. So no-one will be much surprised if, as the rumor mill has it, the board has finally lost patience with Palmer and that he will walk the plank in the next couple of weeks. Trouble is, if you wanted to turn DEC’s into an IBM-style rather than a Unisys-style recovery, you wouldn’t start with DEC as it is today – too much of value has been sold, closed or jettisoned.
