At the plant where we made the Alpha chip (where palmer was plant manager before being CEO) we kept hearing NT5.0 was just a few months away. Sadly palmer knew squat about software and he kept believing the BS. As he had been plant manager and I was a principle software engineer there, I can say, he was totally clueless about software. Hell the CIM manager was clueless.
By withholding NT, Microsoft killed the Motorola server business as well. This happened about the time Motorola was producing Mac clones, but only Bill knows if there was a connection.