Ibm Rivals May Get Windows Head Start

International Business Machines Corp., the first company to license Microsoft Corp.’s MS-DOS operating system for personal computers, said it hasn’t yet signed a licensing agreement to use Windows 95 on its PCs.

IBM, the world’s largest computer maker, is still negotiating an agreement with the world’s largest maker of PC software, said Mike Reiter, a spokesman for IBM’s personal computer unit. MS-DOS was the predecessor to Windows and a key development in sparking the popularity of both PCs and Microsoft’s software.

The delay in getting a licensing agreement could hurt IBM in the next few months as competitors beat it to market with Windows 95 systems.

“If they’re not already preloading (Windows 95), they may be as much as a month off, and that is going to hurt them a lot,” said analyst Rob Enderle of Dataquest Inc.