Slashdot Mirror
HP, Compaq Deal Approved
EyesWideOpen writes "The merger between Hewlett-Packard Co. and Compaq Computer Corp. (originally reported in this Slashdot story) is now official according to eWeek as well as SiliconValley.com. From the eWeek article:'Hewlett-Packard Co. today announced that it will complete its $19 billion buyout of Compaq Computer Corp. and that the merged companies will formally launch as the new HP on May 7.'For you investors out there, HP will begin trading under the new symbol HPQ on Monday." A message to the Interesting People list gives some insight into the shareholder voting procedure.
HPQ, what does that stand for, Hewlett-Paqard?
Believe in things of which no person has ever learned
This is fantastic. Thanks to the merger, I now have a one-stop shop for all the bad computer equipment I'll never buy.
Thanks to Compaq and HP for making my life more convenient.
"I think you guys with quotes in your signatures should go have an original thought." -- Dan Miller
Would this make them the largest supporter of Linux?? Or is that still IBM? It will be a good thing for Linux anyway.
if common sense was common, wouldn't everyone have it?
there are going to be a lot of repurcusions from this merger espcially in houston.
lots and lots of lay offs, in an already horrible computer job market in houston.
oh well.
Not it's not tis: Hardly Passable Quality
-- I am Jack's sig line.
There must be someone this is good for...
Err...
Another ill-thought out merger between two unsuitable companies.
Over the past year, we've seen so much god-awful M&A activity - think Vivendi-U or, even worse, AOLTW - none of which adds any value to the resulting company.
HP-Compaq is just going to become even more unwieldy and over-managed. Synergies from merging two entities together, as we've seen from AOL-TW, are pretty hard to come by, and certtainly not worth all the pain...
OK, now for the Big Questions (tm) regarding this merger...
:-)
The desktop business isn't interesting. Neither are the handhelds, or the printer business.
What _IS_ interesting is the Big Iron stuff...
What happens to the PA-RISC stuff? All the HP-UX boxes? Superdome?
How about the AlphaServers? The GS160's? The Wildfire clusters?
OpenVMS?
Himalaya NonStop? Where does _that_ stuff go?
HP's got a history of taking stuff down the cul-de-sac and strangling it in favor of their own products (look up Apollo if you're curious)...
So what happens to all the great technologies that Compaq's bought over the years??
I hope they keep it alive. There's nothing (and I mean NOTHING) that clusters like OVMS. Transaction processing runs like a top on the Himalaya. SuperDome's got some neat functions too.
This is where the interesting stuff to this merger is going to be. Who cares about the desktop business?
Or, are you keeping it around for nostalgia stories like this one?
I really don't see the point of this, for either side. Compaq was doing ok (although they were laying people off) and HP was doing ok (I don't remember, were they laying people off?) Then they go and do this, it's Sure! to lay people off.
So they are going to be the second largest computer manufacturer in the United States (my assumption, someone find out if you would so kindly), that still doesn't make it a very profitable deal. HP may gain some insite into 64 bit because of what Compaq has, and may gain a new base of operations in Houston, but HP was doing ok as a company themselves, serving low, medium and High end servers as well as desktops.
thanks fiorina. now that you've screwed up lucent, let's screw hp. my poor friend may be out of a job as a result of this merger?
...one competitor less.
Well this surely will mean that ppl will lose their jobs seing that they've already setup the number of managers and VP's they have.
From what I hear this is gonna take place over the next year and we really won't see much in terms of action till a couple of months from now. They need to have a plan of action.
Lets just hope they do this in a smart way that way they don't screw to many ppl over. And lets hope that the AOL - TW merge was a lession in what NOT to do. If a particular "thing" works in in area and not in others, don't try to change it to make everyone conform =)
Compaq makes good servers, lets keep it that way!
isnt this just nice...
two companies merging;
overlapping jobs;
company "restructuring" (ie, layoffs);
less jobs out there;
for me, recently graduated with an computer engineering degree, this isnt good at all....
my blog
Does this also mean that Walter Hewlett will finally shut up and go away?
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
The independent vote-tabulation firm, Delaware-based IVS Associates, reported 838,401,376 shares of stock were voted in favor of the merger, 793,094,105 shares were voted against, and 13,950,651 shares abstained.
Who wants to bet that a lot of the folks who voted against the merger sell their stock?
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Who really cares if two aging giants get stomped on together or seperatly? Honestly, this whole court case has been a battle between a rich boy who is living off his father's brilliance, and two CEOs who are desperatly looking for something to lift their reputations out of the duldrums. How will this affect consumers, be they corporate or home? Not one bit other than to have 1 fewer meaningless "label" to choose from.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Kids(I'm looking at you, HP), kids(I'm looking at you, Compaq), didn't we learn anything from the AOL/Time Warner Fiasco?
I guess not.
Let's see how they're doing in a year's time.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
and when the vote was happening, she was inundated with mail from both sides reminding her to vote.
Imagine if politicians were so interested in voter participation!
My other sig is extremely clever...
How fast will 25,000 people get terminated?
The merger has not been a comfortable thing from day one, and the press coverage has been very disquieting. It's clear what people like me in the company should do now - our best to make it work, regardless of anything that happened on the way. I said a long time ago that this could be excellent for Linux, and I still think so. It's going to be fun.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
As for whether this is good for Linux, I think it's less clear, but it probably is more good news than bad. I suspect that the new company will be able to move much more aggressively in using Linux (ala IBM) than Sun has to date.
Compaq's fine consumer printing division will replace HP's struggling print division.
Compaq will dissolve their business and enterprise division, and refer all service requests to HP consumer tech support.
The new HP will announce a redesigned consumer level computer, named the Paviliario. Exciting new features to include 3 seperate proprietary motherboard connections, an LS-120 drive, and Windows ME. The Presarion business line is expected to be launched within the next few weeks.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
$19 billion for Compaq? I'll give you $10 bucks for it.
I have to say I still resent Compaq for buying Digital. They killed off all the good research and turned it into another homogenised, bland corporate. Digital used be be a great company with great products in their time. HP has made some great products in their time. I wonder how long before they become bland and homogenised, selling lowest-common denominator boxes, avoiding anything that looks like risk, imagination or anything else that used to propel the computer industry forward. Now the only ideas they have is a takeover deal (and another and another). Great! That'll keep the industry going for the decades!
I'm just glad that no-one will touch Apple with a 10-foot pole. Everyone expects them to go broke every other week. No-one in corporate land really understands what keeps Apple afloat becuase it can't be boiled down to a finacing deal. And they probably realise that the customer loyalty and brand respect they enjoy will very probably evaporate if someone tried to buy it.
I think this deal is *terrible*. Case in point: Both HP and Compaq make:
(1) Laptops (bad ones at that)
(2) Desktops (worse than their laptops)
(3) Servers (no opinion)
(4) Printers (used to kick butt, now I'm not so sure)
So, with the merger going through, what divisions/departments get slashed?
In my *uninformed, casual opinion* there is too much overlap of products and services, never a good sign. There will be chainsaw-like cuts throughout all departments and the end result will *not* be a good thing.
I'd love to be wrong of course, but considering the rapid decline in the quality of the products bearing the Compaq and HP name in recent years, I really don't see this merger improving this.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I read the email exchange from that link to the IP list... Its not like people didn't have like over a month to vote. Personally, I voted my shares of Compaq (for the deal of coarse) the second I got my proxy in the mail. I would have thought that the six and a half months between when the merger was announced and the deadline of the voting would have been enough time to make up your mind.
As for a plan... I personally know that as of next week, new managers (and VPs) will be meeting with their new staff people to start to get the "clean teams'" integration plans in motion.
Also, with the Tru64 UNIX (Compaq's UNIX) symposium next week in New Hampshire, I would look for some interesting news on how the UNIXes (or is that UNIXi?) or the combined company will be handled. It may be different than you think....
Good for people who are sick of administering propierity crap, now it will be consolidated into one shity computer . . . a universal standard of shit.
Bad for the poor people who will be stuck with these things. In the end it doesn't even matter, Dell has a lock in the PC market, and I don't see HP/Compaq's market share really going up as a result of this.
Hewlett-Packard merge with Packard Bell and form just Packard? or maybe Hewlett-Bell? I would make things easier...
...18...19...20 Submit
Soon, they'll all be trading under the MSFT symbol. Bill Gates will buy out the company from his petty cash account, as part of his ongoing attempt to own every corporation in the United States.
(Next month, Europe!)
Carly's kind of hot, too.
The owls are not what they seem
If they deep-six HP-UX (an unbelievably bug-riddled abortion of an operating system) the cheers will be heard for light-years.
Unfortunately, given their record, they will probably keep their train-wreck of a Unix and kill off VMS instead.
Oh well, now that Linux has "capabilities" (cloned from VMS privs) and the prospect of resource fork support in the FS API (yay! screw the lame *nix rwxrwxrwx excuse for permissions!) it'll be ready to replace VMS in a year or two. And with 50% less bloat, too, I bet.
If Compaq purchased Digital, and HP is merging with Compaq, is HP-Compaq-Digital a Beowulf cluster of corporations?
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
why would such a good company buy out such a shitty company? i dont get it..
You know what really ticks me off? That
...that HP should drop
... and that Compaq should drop
Now both companies will be the purveyors of WinTel trash and technically illiterate stockholders will rejoice.
Thanks to Carly Fiorina and Michael Capellas for utterly gutting Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment!
All the world needs is another PC integrator :-/
Much like AOL forcing Time Warner to use their e-mail system (which subsequently hosed up, cause e-mail to get lost, delayed, or appended with pix of britney spears) I'm sure there will be the typical integration woes.
or maybe they'll all just use Dells...
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
**SIGH**
The thing that kills me about all this is
- As AOL-Time-Warner-Turner-etc have proven, mega-mergers are not a good thing for your business. The best way to run a business is to eliminate inefficiencies. Mega-mergers tend to magnify these problems
- When Compaq acquired DEC, DEC stock went south, in a hurry. Last time I took a finance class, the professor emphasized that a good merger usually resulted in the purchased company's stock going **UP**. What this tells me (nothing new, of course) is that Compaq is a company to avoid.
- Fiorina (or however you spell her name) seems to have missed where HP's core business is. It isn't in selling second-rate PCs to office store chains for resale. HP would have done itself **and** Compaq a favor by dropping that business line altogether if things were looking grim. In fact, HP has a much stronger bread-and-butter business selling mundane things like printers, calculators, and oscilliscopes.
As for Mr. Hewlett...who knows. He certainly lost the lawsuit, but had also said he was considering his options. HP also didn't give him a chance to get his seat back, so when his term is up, he's out. I guess I'll sit back and watch things play out, but I for one think this merger was a foolish idea.What is your Slash Rating?
Compaq has the very popular iPaq line of PPCs, HP has the less popular Jornada line.
Will they continue to make both, or will one get dropped in favor of the other?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
The telling part of this merger, and a lot of answers on "why" will be answered on Tuesday when they announce which product lines they are keeping, and which ones are going away. Some choices are obvious, keeping HP's printers, for example. Others....
Which to keep: NetServer or Proliant?
Which to keep: Jornada or iPaq?
Which to keep: HP Desktops or Compaq desktops
They're both in the consumer and workstation PC markets. Which of those stay, and which go?
All I've got to say is that if anything happens to the Proliant quality, there's gonna be a lot of IBM x440's bought on this end. Anybody got any guesses on which way the axe will fall?
VERY NOOOOOOO!
...is long gone. It's a shame too.
In my previous jobs, HP test gear was a way of life. If you had a budget to buy new gear, no one was ever fired for buying HP. Now, that division is in shambles, the gear actually has flaws or is DOA, getting calibrations is a disaster and they've pretty much kissed-off a solid business for consumer electronics.
I do not know how much of this was the fault of Fiorina, but all I can say is that it's my opinion that in a few years, HP will be remembered for what they once were, not consumer electronics and computers.
It's a shame, but not unexpected. The visions of American corporations are tightly focused on the next two quarters, not on the long-run. They're willing to sacrifice long-term performance for short-term bumps in the financials and stock pricing. This is the crux of the games played in accounting, and it's a disaster that has yet to fully run its course.
"from the massive-layoffs-coming-soon dept"
From all of the employees of Compaq and HP who read Slashdot, Thanks for the reminder.
I've seen a lot of posts giving a positive spin to this merger, simply because HP will now be "the largest Linux" company.
That's an incredibly short-sighted and very callous interpretation of this what this new Golaith means for both its customers and many, many employees and contractors of the old Compaq and HP companies.
Under Carly Fiorina, the old HP never, and I mean never, gave their customers a clear picture of what the company was planning and where the company was headed. That's evidenced by HP's about-face on one of the e3000 platform. One day, HP managers are re-assuring customers that there are long-range plans for the platform. The next day, they are shown as bold faced liars, as HP announces it is cancelling the platform. Then HP announced that the "correct long range plan" for those customers would be to move over to HP-UX and the 9000 series server line. THEN... just a few weeks after that, HP resoundingly embraces Linux for its servers!!
The point is, HP was never able to formulate a lasting and good strategy for its customers to employ with just HP hardware. Now that Compaq and its hardware has joined the fold, who the hell knows what Fiorina and her stooges are going to be pushing from week to week. It ain't Wal-Mart people. Long range plans and sound strategy are needed to win and to retain the enterprise customer, not just weekly buzz words and discount specials.
And as for the unfortunate employees of both cultures, I have yet to come to understand how anyone with a conscience could ever call a deal where 15,000 men and women will lose their jobs a success.
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/200205/msg00008.html
Let me just explain something here. German banks offer depository accounts for shareholders to hold their shares. However, they have a nasty habit of making sure that the shareholder signs over their voting rights to the bank. This tends to give the banks a disproportionate vote. The German Association of Small Shareholders is fighting this, but it hasn't really happened yet.
As the banks tend to have some interesting share positions themselves, this leads to major conflicts of interest. In the case of Deutsche Bank, they certainly have a large interest in IBM (not just as users, as shareholders).
Last point, when was any large merger good for anyone except the banks and the lawyers doing the M&A work? It seems like they may have a win-win situation, with organising the financing and possibly seeing IBM benefit from the transaction.
Here's what I see happening from the tidbits I've garnered from many a customers discussion with their HP or Compaq Rep.
1) Anything without an intel chip in it, the days are numbered. HP invested way too much in the Itanium / EPIC instruction set and they are going to can PA-RISC in favor of Itanium in their future Unix Machines.
2) Compaq already said Alpha going bye bye in favor of Itanium.
3) HP dumped their 3000 line...Can't see any non-intel compaq line sticking around much longer
4) HP will dump their entire business line of Intel products, the Netserver, the Desktop PCs, and the Notebooks. This does not include the Best Buy crap, just the stop corps use, or should I say DON'T Use. Compaq's product line will become HP's product line for corporate intel servers.
5) Toss up in the consumer market. HP & Compaq have been 1/2 in the retail division with the Presario/Pavillion, don't know/don't care what happens to them. In my personal experience of living vicariously through other people HPs Pavillions break more than the Presarios did.
6) HP Should maintain it's printer division while Compaq fades away.
7) The new company will claim all sorts of wlid thing like they've been supporting Linux the longest, they have the most Unix experience, etc trying to woo the Open Source community when in fact the people that are running the new HP never touched Linux, they just bought and destroyed other companies that did (Digital) and desperately have been trying to get some news bites about linux because other companies like VA Linux, Pengiun Computing, and IBM really support linux by giving things back to the community instead of just hoping it sells more of their servers/desktops.
8) IBM and Dell will continue to chip away the lead of this new merger, just prolonging the inevitable die off of even more hardware companies. If past experience of mergers with Compaq involved mean anything it'll be 18 months of a mess before anything positive comes out, and Dell and IBM will continually be beating on that. Dell from a price perspective, and IBM from a technology perspective.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Support the merger: buy a Canon printer!
These massive mergers invariably slash the worth of all the companies involved as they go through their departments indiscriminately hacking away. The only purpose is big bonuses for the execs.
The bright side of this is that smaller companies who can actually produce quality products the people want and at reasonable prices will eat through the market share of the combined HP/Compaq like sharks at a feeding frenzy as customers desert the sinking carcass. And with all the layoffs from HP/Compaq that will be coming, there will be lots of talent around for the smaller guys to pick up.
Deleted
OK, I'm more computer-savvy than your Average Joe - heck, I read SlashDot. I'm a closet geek. But I'm not in the IT industry, nor do I program, nor do I keep close track of all these companies. I have better things to do with my time.
Now, when it comes to desktops, I roll my own, but I've never owned a notebook, and if I were to buy one, I'd buy a brand-name. I always thought Compaq was a good company. People I know and trust have said good things about them, and they even got a good rating on their customer service in this CNet article from December. Plus, both as has been mentioned in other comments here, Compaq and HP were "good for Linux."
Some here have said that Compaq's laptops suck. OK, so I've looked around quickly at the obvious places like ZDProducts.com and CNet, and while they don't have the highest ratings, they seem average and acceptable.
To make a long story short (too late!), my girlfriend just bought a new Compaq Presario 2800 yesterday. And now the merger went through. And now I'm thinking, what if that was a bad decision? We wanted to support a Linux-friendly company, which Gateway is not, and Dell is not, and we wanted better support than she's had through Gateway. We didn't want to buy from a small company; she had a cheapo laptop once before and it had tons of problems. We're both more comfortable with the big players...
So the big question is: what's going to happen to Compaq's support? Any thoughts? Should we try to cancel this order as quickly as possible? Or will everything probably be acceptable?
There must be someone this is good for...
Yes. A handfull of executives.
The focus of business/government these days is to make a few execs very rich in a short time.
The product is the company itself.
Being a millionaire these days ain't much. Life starts at 100 mil.
It's impossible to earn that kind of money by creating something, especially when you need to raise that kind of cash for a dozen or so people in a hurry.
So the teams of suits come in. Rape and run.
What do they care about the wake of destruction behind them?
They leave flush with cash and besides, those laid off engineers can be employed as caretakers of the estate.
I hope they'll be first up against the wall.
After flailing around for the last few years, now she has an excuse for her poor performance, both in the past and moving forwards: "Walter Hewlett!"
Her big goal has been to buy something, anything, to distract the street from her poor performance. First it was PWC, but PWC was a bit too intelligent. So she went and bought a computer has-been, Compaq, the inheritor of the DEC assets and the DEC dysfunction.
Heck, she couldn't afford Dell.
So much for HP. In a few more years, it'll crater just like Compaq would have.
HP and Compaq will only succeed if they completely drop desktop/pda/etc. support (since they suck at it anyway) and strictly develop servers and enterprise server management software.
I'm still trying to return this damn dvd100i. The thing is worthless, can't even play music CD's let alone burn anything.
I have *very* fond memories of my HP-9100A and HP-41C calculators, but frankly, everything I've bought from HP after that has been shit.
I'm getting sick of the smell.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
That is one valuable thing is that if they can combine forces with Compaq, they can put themselves in a better position in the commodotized market of PC's. The problem with a commoditized market is that margins are razor thing so you have to be able to produce in vast quantities to make any money. There is still good money there, but only for the biggest players. Seperately they might not have the power to survive in the market, but together they stand a better chance.
Sure the growth rate in PC's is slowing, but it's still growing at least and there will always be demand for upgrading of old systems, etc. It stands to be a cash cow for many years to come but only if you are a big player or a niche player (game machines, etc).
Also, in this deal, think about hand helds which is definitely a fast growing market. The two leading manufacturers (I think they are leading, but correct me if I'm wrong) of WinCE devices are becoming one. That's certainly putting them in a better position in that market.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I have always worked at small companies in out of the way places doing interesting work, and not worrying too much about who paid the best. HP is the only big company I ever interviewed at, and would have been interested in working at, because they were not the typical Silly Valley company. They used to stand for long term patience and steadiness. Quirks in their equipment to be sure, but quality was there too. Carly is destroying that.
The 15,000 layoffs coming are a good example, as was spinning off Agilent. The point about not laying people off is not socialism or workers' rights, but rather the management mentality. If you know you can fire like crazy, you are more likely to hire like crazy. If you are reluctant to fire, you will also have a more long term outlook on hiring and expansion. If a project needs cutbacks, you will have the attitude of needing to find a new project for the current staff, rather than cutting back in a hurry and losing all that expertise, then later hiring like crazy and trying to integrate new staff.
That long term outlook is gone from HP now, with the Carly (and Curly) gang in charge. There are no doubt lots of the old guard still around, but they aren't in charge, and HP is on the road to being just another huge corporation, nothing special.
That's what Walter Hewlett tried to get across.
Infuriate left and right
Maybe now HP will get back his scientific calculators, one of the few $$$ divisions. But I believe that the corporate ulture of this mergewill be the most big issue. Probably in a few months they will be back again as 2 differents corporations again. But then DELL or SUN or whatever will take the place of most knonwn brand.
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
I don't know where you took your finance class, but the behavior of aquired's stock price post-merger announcement has nothing to do with the strength of the merger, it's sometimes affected by public perception of the merger though. It all depends on the terms. Almost always the aquired company gets a premium on top of whatever their stock was trading at last. The question is what type of currency is being used to buy them out. If it's cash(see the Intel + Xircom merger and the Sun + Cobalt merger) then the aquired stock will trade at the aquisition price minus some small percentage of uncertainty factor, the chance that the merger will not go through from some reason(not approved by shareholders for example).
BUT if the currency used to aquire is stock in the aquiring company then there are two terms that I've generally seen: 1) Share holders gets a fixed number of aquiring company shares(say 5.2 or something) for each share of the aquired company they own. And 2) Share holders of the aquired recieve a number of shares of the aquiring equal to some fixed dollar ammount on the day the deal goes through(IE $50 in the aquiring company's stock).
NOW situation #2 usually behaves like the cash buy out I taked about before. Situation #1 is the only one that sees the stock price of the aquired have a chance to drop after the deal is announced. But like I said before, it's not about strength of the merger, it's about perception. If the public thinks that the deal stinks then they will sell the aquiring company down, which will bring down the aquisition price, which will in turn bring down the price of the aquired. Also this will happen if the public thinks the aquiring company overpaid.
Can I get dec.com, please.
What I don't understand is why the Hewlett-Paqard merger is called a merger - not a takeover, which it is (it may not be a hostile takeover, but it's a takeover nonetheless).
My Dad always told me that there are never marriages in business, only rapes. Calling it a "merger" is just to make it sound nice and huggy-feely when it's really takeover and destroy.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I have a hard time understanding the MPE world. The CTO of a big MPE consulting firm sat me down at HP World last year and told me why Unix would never make it in business. Not Linux, Unix. So, I decided I would only worry about the Free Software operating systems at HP.
In the case of HP-UX, on the IA-64 it will be binary-compatible with Linux. If you write to that interface, you have an application that runs on two operating systems, one of which gives you the option to self-support indefinitely (or buy consulting) and not worry about when someone decides to de-support it. HP had no choice but to embrace Linux, the company has to go where its customers are going.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Then you'll love this web site
I can't say anything too specific due to my location (NW Houston along Hwy 249 & Louetta) but what I will say is there aren't many people inside who are looking forward to Tuesday. I don't think this was a good idea but not for the reasons alot of people might think. Houston has a very strong tech industry (TI, NASA, Schlumberger, Lockheed Martin, Northrup/Grummond, etc.) but if you ask someone from the East/West coast what Houston is about you get basically 3 answers COWS/OIL/COMPAQ. (Sometimes they get Houston confused with Dallas and say JR Euwing or Da'Boys) Growing up here one of my first real jobs was on the assembly line here at Compaq. It was awesome straight out of HS to watch the company take on Big Blue and be winning. There was a real sense of ownership. I think that was lost around the time Rod Canion was "retired". Since then Compaq has become more about making money and less about making innovative technology. Good or bad I think it will be a step back for Houston. I mean without Compaq all we have is COWS & OIL, right?
here
Fortunately there is strong community support, even if it is not to be had from the major corporations. When it comes to laptops a good place to start is http://www.linux-laptop.net/. It seems that no one has written up an article on your girlfriend's particular model yet, but I would not be surprised to see that change in the near future. The information on this site helped me a great deal in setting up my HP Pavilion N5430.
I will be watching to see what happens, but at I fear the worst. Maybe when it comes time to replace my laptop it will be time to take a look at what IBM offers [assuming that they do not opt to pull out of the consumer market all together].
Hope this destroys the crappy compaq brand. The ones who destroyed everything that was cool about digital (vms, alpha, vax, pdp 11...)
Laughing his arse off, its not every day that two of his biggest competitiors in corporate space commit mutually assisted suicide.
Carly allegedly fscked up Lucent, now she's working her wonders on bigger fish.
Curmudgeon.
How soon will it be before Microsoft, and HPQ-sun-aol remain?
:)
As soon as the big guys realize monopolies and cartels are more profitable than competition. Who ever said capitalism worked?
I just got off the phone with Compaq tech support. Apparently the Compaq logos are going down and the HP logos are going up. The new stronger company is going to improve customer support by discontinuing toll free support. Thanks Federal Regulators!!
I think a change of titles is appropriate...
May I suggest the "HP Pavillion"?
So, will Montoya now use an HP laptop instead, to check his car's performance?
Hewlett Compackard Dell.
I guess it is sort of fitting that two companies that have recently continued to fail to capitalize on their investments would merge. Compaq bought Digital and failed to really do anything worth while with them. The Alpha was a badass of microprocessor engineering. Had something been made of it the entire industry might have been turned on their head. The 21164 whipped other processors of the time like little bitches. By 2000 only about 500k Alpha systems had been sold. That is bad marketing and poor capitalization. HP for some retarded reason thought the internet bubble boom was going to last for some long period of time and dropped their slow growth steady divisions and spun them off into a separate company. That is another failure to retain their market capitalization. They may sell a lot of computers and not go out of business no one is going to remember them for anything other than for a stupid merger.
....
Jeff Clarke: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Peter Blackmore: We get signal.
Mike Capellas: What !
Blackmore: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's You !!
Carly Fiorina: How are you gentlemen !!
Fiorina: All your Presario are belong to us.
Fiorina: You are on the way to destruction.
Capellas: What you say !!
Fiorina: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Fiorina: HA HA HA HA
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Not offtopic. The Deutsches Bank voting was the pivotal issue in the Packard lawsuit (alleged enough DB shares were switched to favor the merger conditional on side deals, etc.)
The new company will becalled "Hewlett Paqard"
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I don't think you need to question HP's Linux committment. We have to go where our customers are going, and we get very firm "Linux" signals from them.
You now have Jim Gettys, me, Bdale Garbee, David Mosberger, and Jeremy Allison in the same company, along with another 100 people I really should mention. There's a bigger array of Linux expertise than VA ever assembled, and most of them are working on GPL projects, and are also driving the company significantly. That's got to be good for Free Software.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
GODDAMIT!!! These were two classic brands. Its really sad to see these mergers and classics like these two lost as they morph into one.
Although they were strictly industrial and out of my price range at the time, I have fond memories of the early Compaq's.. A "no frills no nonsense business machine" on par with the IBM PC.
And we all know the legendary accomplishments of the HP skunkworks..
Its sad.. all these mergers...
The world lost something a little special today.
mje0w!!!1!
It can now be revealed what Carly Fiorina meant when she said on the eve of the merger vote that "we may have to do something extraordinary" to get Deutsche Bank to vote the HP way. Shortly before the meeting, Fiorina opened her portfolio and showed DB Chair Hilmar Kopper all her assets. Then she gave him vigorous oral arguments and afterwards personally debriefed the entire DB board. No one knows what she told the board but shrieks of, "Das ist gut, Carly, das ist sehr gut!" reverberated throughout the meeting place during a 40 minute delay before the vote. A HP spokesman said that the DB board put up stiff resistance at first, but afterwards they were putty in her hands.
Just bught to netservers, and we also bought a 5 year extended contract with that too. YOu bet your ass we're holding them to supporting us on that for exactly 5 years...
Oh yeah, what support. Doh!
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
This is an admirable assertion; one which companies such as Sun and Oracle seem to be reluctant even to say aloud.
However, there are more than a few 3000 shops who had no plans to go anywhere. They wanted to stay with the 3000 line, regardless of similarities with the 9000 line.
Now, faced with HP's edict to move from the e3000/MPE platform to the 9000/HP-UX platform, there is quite a bit of anxiety among many HP shops. This anxiety stems from the absence of a clearly defined OS strategy.
Here are just a few critical questions that HP clearly needs to answer. Is HP-UX going to stay? Is the PA-RISC architecture one that HP shops can bank on? Or will it soon be cast down the same de-support path as the e3000 line? Is Itanium HP's future? If so, why not cast aside all OS's in favor of Linux?
Most importantly, can we trust that what HP tells we customers today will not change within a week or two?
They should rename themselves to Helwett Compakard or something similar. ;)
HP
push
Compaq
push
merge
drop
..Carly did it for the marger bonus alone. She did not demonstrate a lot with Lucent, and she is not doing good to HP.
In Europe, HP was synonimous for the HIghest Quality. Then, when they spinned off Agilent, this perception or brand-name recognition, if you wish, started to weaken.
And now, HP is preparing to become an Intel-whore. Good for the short-to-medium term, bad for the long term, for sure. But what does Carly care anyway, she is just laughing all the way to the bank, and by the time HP will be in shambles, she will be busy sucking the lifeblood out of another company.
Only hope: W. Hewlett sells all his holdings in HP, waits till the value of the HPQ stock goes down enough, and buys back a controlling share of the company, and then kicks the ass of the weasels... if they have not jumped ship by that time.
Sigged!
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?
The nice thing about Windows is: it does not just crash; it displays a nice little dialog box and let's you press 'OK'
Although I might sue if they use it. I was planning a startup consisting of door-to-door hockey puck saleshumans.
Long live Compaquard Bell. /me observes a moment of silence for Digital Equipment Corporation and the old HP, both of which made quality products before being pimped out.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Its pretty clear I think. They will support a new version of Unix which will be mostly HP-UX with some Tru64 grafted into it, running on IA-64, and they will call it HP-UX because it has marketshare already.
Linux and Windows will also be strongly pushed. Anything to move IPF for Intel.
As for Trust. Ahhh. Who knows? What can you trust nowadays. Truth often collides with flexibility.
If the old version was HPUX, does this mean we have H-Puques now?
This sig no verb.