Joe Guglielmi, chairman and chief executive of Taligent Inc, the IBM Corp-Apple Computer Inc joint venture, made his first public appearance last week as keynote speaker at Object Expo in New York. Nothing in his IBM background could have prepared him for the kind of speech he gave – in fact had to give – […]
Joe Guglielmi, chairman and chief executive of Taligent Inc, the IBM Corp-Apple Computer Inc joint venture, made his first public appearance last week as keynote speaker at Object Expo in New York. Nothing in his IBM background could have prepared him for the kind of speech he gave – in fact had to give – if Taligent is to be seen as the answer to the world’s ills. And the speech was indeed a frank catalogue of the state of the personal computer business today: revenues down 14%, Apple, IBM and Digital Equipment Corp contemplating low margins and sinking market share, the astronomical cost of developing a new package, the failure of personal computers to penetrate much beyond word processing and spreadsheets, the monopoly lock of a few software houses on the marketplace and engineering’s inability to develop an intuitive box, all conspiring to dissuade any sensible personal computer guy from putting any more money into research and development. Result: no innovation. Enter Taligent, with its promised system for rapid applications prototyping and customisation in a hardware-independent environment, just in the nick of time. Guglielmi, of course, declined to describe his object-oriented operating system beyond a few carefully chosen buzzwords. However, once he gets his base plan on paper, probably by September this year, he’s going to start making the rounds of the vendors. He will be seeking their co-operation in getting all of the plugs from device drives to protocols filled, beginning at the desktop level.
