HP/Compaq Merger Apparently Approved

Spinality writes "Looks like HP's hotly contested merger with Compaq is going ahead. Various news headlines such as this one at Bloomberg.com report that stockholders voted to merge, against the wishes of the Hewlett and Packard families. " There isn't official word yet, but this looks like it's pretty much a done deal. Anyone else think the business world looks like a game of Pac Man?

Comments

Merger a good thing

[klaviman]

With the current state of the (US) economy, it's a very smart move for hp & compaq to merge. in the end, i think the hp families will see that this was in the best interests of the company, since their combined market share will ultimately increase the market value after the merger.

Re:Mediocrity for Dummies

[Ars-Fartsica]

The old HP way was to make money with excellent engineering.

Which is exactly in the opposite direction of where HP is heading, for better or for worse...but lets be realistic here - worse is better, as they say. The markets for highly-engineered, high-margin technology products is shrinking as commodity products take over. You aren't going to be able to run an 80k person company on fringe high-margin products. Look at the deterioration of high-end hardware at Sun and IBM.

Fiorina on the gravy train

[cpeterso]

From what I read, Fiorina agreed to bang all of Compaq and HP's shareholders if they vote for the merger. She'll get $50M out of the deal, but after that train, she'll be pretty sore for a while..