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HP Buys Compaq
MaxVlast was the first to report: "The New York Times is reporting that HP is buying Compaq to form the second-largest computer company (after IBM). Wow."
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What happens if HP and Microsoft fight ... HP are already on record as saying they would go elsewhere if they could ...
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
I was discussing this with my parents a few days ago:
Gateway is apparently in the hole because they don't offer much "unique" and with computer sales allegedly having a bad forecast, this doesn't leave much room for competition: Dell, IBM, and now "HP/Compaq" are here to stay.
Can we expect to see more mergers, or what's the deal? With computer "builders," we don't really suffer from the lack of standards, interoperability, etc. that we see in harware/software...so are these mergers really helping consumers or just gaging the diersity of merchants?
While Compaq hasn't done much with Alpha since it bought out Digital, there was always that hope that something new would eventually come out. Alpha was a lovely chipset for all of its thermal and pricing issues (which could've been solved by a company with more drive and fewer pitfalls than Digital/Compaq had.)
But now that HP is buying Compaq, any life that could've possibly been breathed back into Alpha is completely dissipated. HP is firmly in bed with Intel on the Itanium line (fronting cash, codevelopment, independent liscensing, etc.) Whereas Compaq hadn't had much incentive to improve Alpha, HP has exactly zero interest, since that would mean directly competing with and undermining the success of Itanium.
The polite course of action would be to release Alpha completely into the public domain, but that's a farcically utopian request. I'm just always saddened when competition is reduced and choices are constrained. Let's just hope Apple and the PPC line don't go bust in the near future, leaving us with absolutely no alternative to Intel's offerings (which are beginning to look more and more like crap as the years pass) and AMD's parallel offerings in the same architecture.
This means HP will inherit the Alpha processor. They already have the PA/RISC and are "co-developing" some of the IA-64 line with Intel. They also inherit cool products like the Itsy and the iPaq.
Linux is the only OS that will run on their entire architecture: Alpha, PA/RISC, IA-64 and x86. They sell machines with all of the above processors.
The makes a "Big 3" of Unix vendors: IBM, Sun, HP/Compaq.
SCO was acquired by Caldera, but they, along with all the other Linux vendors, are wannabes next to that bunch.
Unless I am missing someone, that really only leaves SGI as the remaining "big" Unix vendor. I wonder if they are going to be bought; wither-and-die; or if they can make a go of it alone.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Compaq was already dropping the Alpha in favor of Itanium. Itanium is an Intel/HP joint project (and I read about that in Byte when I was still in high school, probably when the Pentium came out about eight years ago -- something like "Intel is working on the 786 with Hewlett-Packard, and it will be a revolutionary change, so much so that they are also working on a backup design (P-IV, anyone?) in case it doesn't work").
I'd say this removes any doubt about the fate of Alpha, but HP might be hoping to incorporate some of the Alpha technology. This might also raise some anti-trust concerns, since I'd been reading (Here? Ace's Hardware?) that AMD was looking at making a dual x86/Alpha instruction-set chip to compete with Itanium. They've already licensed a couple of things. Oh, well, I suppose they could go with SPARC or PowerPC. If they went with PowerPC, that could allow for a pretty nifty PC-compatible Mac, if Motorola went along...
Well, I know Bruce is a regular here, and will probably have some feedback somewhere :), but I'm wondering if this will provide more corporate level exposure to Linux with the modus operandi of "challenge the executive", IIRC, in the Compaq ranks as well as the HP. The actual merging of two companies of this size is rare and hard to predict, but in the fray sometimes new ideas come up that are entertained that might not otherwise be. I am curious as to how this will affect Bruce Peren's (et al) influence on HP and Compaq, but I don't want to speculate on it.
HP has a market cap of about $1.5B, CPQ has $24B. HP will have to issue 25x their current float to make the acquistition which leads one to wonder why CPQ isn't the acquirer. It strongly suggests that CPQ is a mess.
The net result should be a collapse of both stocks in the premarket. But then i've never been able to predict these things.
I suspect the baggage they'll throw away is HP's. Compaq is strongest where HP is weakest.
HP's greatest strength in computer technology is its printers. It's OK in midrange systems, but Sun and IBM are both stronger. HP's midrange systems are all proprietary today; this means their long-term viability is a crapshoot. Maybe they'll endure, maybe not, time will tell. HP's Intel servers are decent, but their strongest market is with companies that have HP midrange systems. Does HP even do desktops any more (and if so, why)?
Compaq, on the other hand, doesn't do printers. Their "midrange" platform is dead - Alpha fans don't want to accept it, but Compaq has no long-term plans for it. As pointed out elsewhere, both Compaq and HP are looking to Itanium for future midrange gear.
Compaq has the Intel server market nailed. Someone with market numbers chime in please, but I believe they're way ahead of everyone else. Compaq is credible on the desktop. Their major competitors are Dell and IBM. especially on business desks. Finally, Compaq has PDA offerings that HP lacks, and has a successful storage business that HP would benefit from.
All in all, this looks like a good move for HP ... if they don't destroy Compaq in the process of assimilating it.
-- This space for rent.
I agree. It seems like HP is going to become the Computer Associates on the hardware side, and just buy up all of these failing companies with proprietary projects, and milk them to the death. Merging two companies of this tremendous size seems a recipe for disaster.
I'm glad someone brought up previous acquisitions. There's a bit of history worth examining here.
Compaq ate Digital, sold the StrongARM to Intel who buried it b/c it was an order of magnitude faster than Intel's low-power chips. Compaq/Digital then shed all their good engineers b/c their corporate culture sucked. Most of the Alpha guys went to AMD, which explains a great deal about the Athlon. (Incidentally, many of the StrongARM guys went to Cadence. Anyone know anything else?) They partnered the with Samsung, but for whatever reasons, Samsung has not been able or willing to sell Alphas here in the States. In op/sys, Compaq/Digital has tried several times to cancel the Digital Unix line; but hey, they renamed it to True64! Compaq/Digital told all their Unix customers that they were switching them over to NT; you can imagine how receptive their customers were about that. Thus, True64, marginal continued development, but most customers just left and went to Sun/IBM/Linux.
Final analysis? Fucking waste of money. The only people who benefited from this were the executives and the competition.
Round about the same time, Compaq bought Tandem. I used to run a Tandem in 96 -- nice boxes. The first thing Compaq did was gut the sales force. Compaq, a PC vendor, assumed that one needs one salesman to sell one machine (or some such). Turns out, you need a small army to sell a mainframe; lots and lots of handholding and a salespeep for each engineer. Tandem would often have several dozen salespeople working on a single client, for a multi-million dollar order. The inevitable response to gutting the salesforce? Yes, they lost all those orders.
Final analysis? Fucking waste of money. The only people who benefited from this were the executives and the competition.
Modern corporations are not innately designed to make money. They are innately designed to get bigger, driven by senior executives with Napoleon complexes. It does not help that standard management training teaches managers to seek larger fiefdoms rather than efficiency or productivity. This is not the usual Green-party ranting -- a survey of CEO salaries indicates an explosive growth over the last decade; even biz-school professors and analysts are worried.
Before I finish this, I should turn my cynicism on HP. In, I think, 1996 HP announced a new direction: dump their processors (PA-RISC) and their Unix (HP-UX), in exchange for Intel & NT. Of course, the customers fled to the other Unix vendors; they sold some nice NT boxes before realizing that no one can sustainably sell WinTel boxes on the margins that a big corp demands, since the clone makers can always build the same thing for less. HP fired the CEO who masterminded that FUBAR decision, and got back behind PA-RISC & HP-UX. Lasting fallout: fewer customers, multi-year development agreements with Intel (witness the Itanium & McKinley.). Is this the sort of company that can integrate a company like Compaq?
Technical acquisitions are perhaps the most complex of any company integration project. When I see an announcement like this, by two companies who have spent the last few years hurting while everyone else enjoyed the boom times, whose product lines overlap and present no clear engineering wins; I think 'golden parachute'. This is a way to manipulate the stock price. I see no clear way or reason for HP/Compaq to become anything more than an also-ran.
From the third paragraph of the NY times article:
"the acquisition amounts to a renewed bet on the computer business and particularly a new operating system for computer servers that was developed by Intel and Hewlett-Packard."
Are they really talking about the Itanium CPU or did I miss a big announcment?
Chris
I'm stunned. I'll admit, I was betting HP or Gateway would fold out of the business some time this year due to plunging market share. Out of the Business = stop making Intel based computers.
I did not expect HP to go out and buy Compaq.
But is this a good thing? HP has never been a player in the corporate desktop world to the extent of the other vendors. So I see the desktop line dropping away. Being in the Intel server business I can safely say that at least in the KS/MO areas HP is not a competitor either. So there goes the Intel Server line from HP.
But, HP is a R&D company. HP has big pockets from other divisions. HP has a service arm that can execute better than Compaq's (even after aquring Digital, I'd say Compaq Destroyed Digital in their blundering of that purchase) and hasn't had a decent service arm (at least in KS/MO/OK/AR region) ever (for Intel Servers).
Should be interesting. A merger of this size should take a good 12 - 18 months, so the fallout will be a while. Wonder what the heck they're going to do. Dell is still destroying the market into a commodity driven vs. quality driven, especially in the server market.
Please ad grains of salt to the last one, I don't like Dell. I'm sure many people do, I don't.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I seem to recall that Tandem did bail Compaq out with a loan though. Flash forward several years to an ousting of the founding CEO, and Tandem being prepped for sale by the new one. Bought by Compaq, who totally destroyed the sales organization (and strangely enough most of Tandem's sale too). Soon after that, they bought DEC, and destroyed it's sales organization in almost the exact same way (takes talent!).
As a Tandem employee at the time of the merger, I found Compaq to not really be a "new wave" company. They talked the talk of employee empowerment, but were more like GE or a telco (aside: Scott Adams of Dilbert fame worked for Pacific Bell), than a typical Silicon Valley company following the true "HP" way. The Compaq CEO and bureaucracy were not used to having a middle class (engineers and professionals); and tried to treat all it's employees as a factory worker or an executive. We were not treated as executives, except for international travel!
The new insider Compaq CEO, after the destroying CEO was ousted, provided some peace in the lands that were formerly Tandem, sounding similar to a manager that valued it's employees. Alas there was still much turmoil, and I parted company to the relative stability of a start-up. I wish my former comrades well. I envision their times might be easier, for I judge HP way is more powerful than the Compaq way; if there is any way left!
Compaq ate Digital, sold the StrongARM to Intel who buried it b/c it was an order of magnitude faster than Intel's low-power chips.
Huh? The guys upstairs in WCCG doing StrongARM and XScale (StrongARM, renamed) would be very interested in knowing that Intel buried their product. The fact is, StrongARM is generally acknowledged as one of Intel's key acquisitions in the last few years, and has a highly bright future ahead of it (at some point, it is likely to replace DragonBall in the Palm). It's a heck of a lot more successful than when DEC owned it, that's for sure.
FYI, the entire original StrongARM team walked out as soon as they were acquired by Intel. That's their fault, not Intel's. The Alpha team seems to have been a lot more cooperative (a whole bunch of them were just named Intel Fellows last week).
Was thinking about the ramifications of this merger, and thought I'd look for some server market share statistics ( http://serverwatch.internet.com/news/2001_08_02_a. html ).
You have Compaq, Dell, IBM, HP, Sun, and the "Others" category.
Now we shall have Dell, IBM, HP, Sun, and "Others".
This stat is entitled "Preliminary Worldwide Server Unit Shipment Estimates for 2Q01", and both HP and Compaq lost market share. Looking at market share off of this chart, HP would then have 37.3% of Server Units shipped (estimate). That alone makes HP all of the sudden the #1 company with servers shipped for Q'2 2001. Impressive...
Also note that the stats I am referring to are for the worldwide market.
Of course, I'll stick with my commodity Dell servers, and (if need be) Sun/IBM Unix servers.
This is probably the only logical merger if any in this industry.
Hmm, I wonder what is going to happen for development between the Jornada and the iPAQ? Maybe the could force Compaq to get the damn device to have more than one input at a time!
I was building boards on StrongARM back in 1998, and when Intel bought them, it just sort of fell off the face of the earth for a while. I think it wasn't until 2000 that I started seeing StrongARM in anything higher than the 233MHz DEC had fabbed on .35 micron. I was really hopeful when Intel bought them; I thought we would see them move it to .22 or .18 as soon as possible. Imagine! 600+ MHz at <1 watt, in 1999! Didn't happen. With other assumptions and evidence in hand, I believe that Intel's short-term business was best protected by sitting on StrongARM until Intel's core chips had caught up. Of course, having the core team quit doesn't help them ramp up quickly either.
While you're here, could you tell me which ARM core they're building XScale with now? Do they have SMP enabled? (StrongARM (v4 core) had the SMP pin shorted).
It doesn't sound like Linux ... or it is ???
Ciao
----
FB
Not that I really care, I think Lexmarks are crap compared to my HP anyways, but it is a potential point for minor fallout between IBM and HP.
The real power with these systems is not the processor, it is the backplane: the buses, the memory, etc. That is where companies differentiate; that is what separates a million-dollar server from a desktop PC.
With this in mind, the processor is almost an afterthought. Why even develop the IA-64; why not use the P4? Well, you need to directly address more than 4 GB of RAM, which is the limit on 32 bits. Also you can operate on larger numbers in one operation, rather than several in a 32-bit chip. There's also a bit of black art involved in developing a chip to play well in a SMP or NUMA memory environment.
Pardon my saying this, but here you have walked from 'flights of fancy' into 'complete nonsense'.This turbulence in the computer market is making it very difficult to know what companies you can trust, what companies you can't trust, and what kind of computer you really need. Custom-building is an option that becomes more and more attractive with each passing day: by buying the components you really need and skipping the ones you don't, you can get a faster, more reliable computer for mess less than you'd pay for a pre-build PC, and you'll learn something doing it.
Although PC building has previously been the sole domain of propellerhead geeks, the controversial news and discussion site Adequacy.Org has recently posted an article demystifying the process and explaining the art of PC building in simple, easy-to-understand terms. It'll explain to you the full process of building your very own PC that you can truly call "your own" without drowning you in technical details. I found it very useful when custom-building my PC.
...being a (former) advocate for Compaq products, I must beg to differ with the statement of:
And if you exclude Compaq, with their non-standard components and horrible support for non-MS OSes.
Since Compaq bought Digital, there has been a conscious effort on Compaq's part to bring Alpha's BACK to the masses. TRU64 UNIX, VMS, and Linux are very well-supported on the Alpha line. As far as the Intel machines are concerned, how many OTHER Tier-1 hardware manufactures are providing direct support for users running Linux?
Compaq R&D's it's OWN equipment - from the server motherboards to the RAM you stick in it, Compaq designs and/or manufactures it all in-house. The price they pay for that is a slower development cycle on new products but it, in turn, allows for a much greater control over defects and quicker solutions to real-world issues.
Hell, if you fsck up your handheld iPAQ trying to put Linux on it, Compaq will support that, as well.
To include some ON-topic remarks here, I'm going on record as NOT being terribly enthusiastic about the HP-Compaq buyout. I have never had good experiences with HP's line of support (servers *or* printers *or* anything else). At least Compaq has a very clear-cut support channel. When Carly grabs Compaq's reins it'll be just one MORE company down the toilet...
-PONA-
+that's funny...I don't FEEL tardy.+