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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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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'.