“Compaq Computer Corp. this week laid off roughly 100 engineers
responsible for developing Windows NT on the Alpha platform… In
what may be a related move, Wes Melling, former vice president of
OpenVMS and NT integration at Compaq… resigned…”
“…officials with Alpha Processor Inc., an NT-on-Alpha hardware
vendor and a company backed by Compaq, said their understanding was
that Compaq planned on killing 32-bit NT-on-Alpha support, but that
it would continue to work separately and in conjunction with
Microsoft on 64-bit NT-on-Alpha technologies. ‘It was just too
expensive for Compaq to support 32-bit NT on both platforms [Intel
and Alpha],’ said Alpha Processor vice president of marketing Jeff
Borkowski.
Borkowski added that Linux has taken hold on the Alpha
architecture far more quickly than most vendors
anticipated.”
“One source close to Microsoft said, ‘No one at Microsoft ever
expected that [NT on Alpha] to be a volume play. But they did
expect it to be the architecture play. This was a big deal at
things like [Microsoft’s] Scalability Day, where they showed how
scaleable NT could be.’ “