Who's driving the Alpha, Romeo?

There is nothing like a spate of mergers and acquisitions to thrill the dealer community. Although Compaq's takeover of Digital last week is the sort of deal that chews up a billion dollars just to buy the lawyer's mints, it causes a ripple of speculation to spread through the IT industry - even among dealers that barely scrape a living.

I suspect that most of those in the trade - tarts like myself - like a good gossip. You know the sort of thing - who is screwing who and whether someone else has his hands so tightly gripped on another's nether regions that they are in danger of sprouting three Adam's apples.

So, that said, what's likely to be the fallout of Digital's demise? Well for one, it's clear Compaq is primarily after Digital's Alpha technology as an alternative to Intel. What I find hilarious is a conversation I once had with Jimmy Tre Big - you remember, he used to head Tandem - about how he viewed Alpha.

After considering the question, his answer was Socratically pure in its reasoning: 'Alpha sucks,' he replied. But then, Tandem was on the same terms with Intel as Clinton appears to have been with Gennifer Flowers.

Now, Compaq has devoured Digital and Tandem and Mr Tre Big has moved on to pastures anew. Quite how he'd view the prospect of his old outfit climbing into bed - technologically speaking - with a company whose processors he deemed only fit for improving the milk yield of dairy cattle is anyone's guess. But does Compaq's Eckhard Pfeiffer have much choice if he is not to fall victim to Intel's monopolistic grip on the processor market? (See Adam's Apple strategy.)

Meanwhile, there are other questions to be answered. With Compaq now poised to up the stakes in the medium to mid-range server market, don't forget that one of the Alpha chip's virtues is that it is fine-tuned for Windows NT performance. So where does that leave the likes of HP and Sun as they doggedly adhere to Unix? Like the habits of the aforementioned dairy cattle, the answer seems to be readily cacking themselves.

And what about Digital's old army of Vax users? No doubt they will soon be contacted by their new caring, sharing Compaq people offering Alpha-based servers that are fault-tolerant to boot. Fine if you are a Compaq rep. Not so fine if you are a dealer still struggling to hew a living out of the Vax market.

Meanwhile, there is talk of Gateway 2000 being up for grabs, of Microsoft buying BT and of mainframes going through a renaissance. Thanks to the internet it seems no company or niche is safe.

The moral seems to be: don't stick your head above the parapet unless you want to be like General John Sedgewick of the Union Army. Who, when counselling his troops on the musket range of the enemy snipers at the Battle of Fredericksburg during the American Civil War, assured them: 'I tell you men, they'll never hit anyone at this distance.'

Dave Evans is features editor of Computing.