Bull, Motorola follow IBM's PowerPC NT exit

"The decision is a common decision with IBM and Motorola, not a pure IBM announcement," said Didier Breton, vice-president for open systems at Bull Enterprise Information Systems. "We will focus our strategy on AIX, and our NT strategy on Intel."

Breton said the investment required to make the NT/PowerPC comination a hit was too high to justify. "Basically, what we introduced was a focused strategy in terms of workgroups. We were well received but the investment needed from ISVs, in the channel and in the market was too high. Today, the PowerPC is purely MacOS and AIX."

He added that there was no way back for PowerPC in the burgeoning NT market. "I just don't feel there is a way to succeed with a non-Intel NT platform. This market is becoming very low margin. It's a tricky situation ... I would say good luck [Digital]." Digital's Alpha CPU is, of course, one of the few remaining options to Intel for NT adopters.