In a drastic return to its core business of making and marketing networking adaptors, hubs and bridges, 3Com Corp, Santa Clara, California is taking a $45m hit against its current quarter figures, firing 12% of its worldwide workforce or about 240 people, selling the rights to its 3+Open network operating system, which is similar to, […]
In a drastic return to its core business of making and marketing networking adaptors, hubs and bridges, 3Com Corp, Santa Clara, California is taking a $45m hit against its current quarter figures, firing 12% of its worldwide workforce or about 240 people, selling the rights to its 3+Open network operating system, which is similar to, but not compatible with, LAN Manager to Microsoft Corp, and looking for a buyer for its Workgroup Systems workstations and servers business. It licensing a host of other LAN Manager-based development work to Microsoft so that the company can make the next release of LAN Manager upwards-compatible with both products. LAN Manager, originally called OS/2 LAN Manager, was launched in 1988, but has been even less successful than OS/2 itself, taking only 10% of the market for network operating systems on Intel Corp hardware, with customers overwhelmingly voting for Novell Inc’s NetWare, which has 70% of the market. Microsoft still hopes to build market share to 30% within four years (CI No 1,558). 3Com’s 3+Open provides LAN Manager links to Macintoshes and NetWare, and Microsoft will also license 3Com’s development work on X500 directory services. As part of the agreement, 3Com’s dealers are to move over to Microsoft, adding to the dealer scheme laun ched by Microsoft last July. IBM and Microsoft announced in November that LAN Manager would be also mer ged with IBM’s LAN Server. 3Com will continue to offer LAN Manager on its 3Server dedicated file serv ers, but that unit is now for sale.
