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.
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
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.
$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....
Read a bit about HP in, say, Good-to-Great, or other management books, and you'll understand that Carly Fiorina, current CEO of HP is a massive departure from the companies long term values, and it's showing in things like this purchase. I predict long term loss to shareholders from this merger -- it just doesn't make sense for HP. And the long-timers at HP knew it!
I'm disappointed in the shenanigans the poster to the Interesting People list described, and frankly, Ms. Fiorina, if you ever read this, I'm disappointed in you. Please stop telling people the HP way is one that makes office politics irrelevant! You just look like a jerk.
Not that it affects me. I beat the rush and got laid off from HP last year.
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.
What kind of test equipment do you mean? Their test equipment and lab supplies spinoff, Agilent, is doing pretty well: many lab supplies you'd be crazy to buy anything except Agilent, and I'm (starting) to grow fond of the Infinium oscilloscopes, though Tektronix is still my preferred (I do NOT like seeing an oscilloscope bluescreen!). If you're buying lab power supplies, you're best off buying Agilent, as they're the most well known.
:)
Then again, it could be because I'm still IN a lab that's Agilent/HP dominated, so I might be biased without even knowing it. HP itself I don't think is that bad: printer-wise, they're still in the top running, IMHO.
I'd be sad to see HP flounder simply because the high-end stuff faltered. Maybe they can spin off their printer division as well, so the stupid parts can die in peace.
This is not what our people heard from their briefing last year. We have been promised that OpenVMS would be on Itanium in a few years, this is nothing to do with the merger. The issue here isn't that Compaq would love us to move to other platforms but like many others we can't kick the cluster habit.
Compaq has a number of agreements that it inherited from Digital and many of those are with the Feds (hard to wriggle out of) for OpenVMS systems over the next 15 or more years.
We've bought a couple of batches of HP desktops here and they've been no worse or better than any other desktops (Compaqs, Dells).
We've bought nothing but HP x86 servers here and have yet to disappointed by quality or workmanship standards. Even the documentation feels like it has links to the olden days when you actually got *good* documentation.
The few Dell servers I've seen seem pretty cheap. They have been low-end boxes, but there's a flimsyness about them that makes them feel like desktop boxes with server nameplates.
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
Another joke going around is that they wanted to drop the "W" to remind folks that Walter is OUT!
"HPC" would've been another useful one, but it's taken by a chemical company, Hercules.
Lots of rumors floating around about what will go, what will stay, but we'll all know on the western hemisphere's Tuesday morning.
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?
The combined company has (among others):
So what are they going to try and sell you? They have *three* processor families, all officially to be replaced by something that doesn't work yet, two Unices, VMS, Windows, and maybe Linux. On top of this they need to unify the groups of people making these things, including finishing the digestion of DEC.
This is just horrible. If you go to Sun, you know they're going to sell you a big SPARC box running Solaris. If you go to IBM you know they wrote the book on big machines and reliability. If you go to HPaq, it's probably going to be because you want a printer or a commodity PC, because the rest of their range is just completely confused.
I've been an HP-UX admin for about 3 years (out of 10 years of being a unix sysadmin), and at this point I'm pushing my clients to go with Sun or IBM. HP support used to be the best in the business, but it's been rapidly going down the tubes for quite a while now. Ever since the merger was announced, it's been impossible to get someone who knows their ass from a hole in the ground on the phone. I guess all the good people beat it while the beating was good, and now they're staffed with whetever lemons they could catch with a butterfly net at the local bar. The FE's who service our account tell me morale is in the toilet, and their resumes are spread as far and wide as the fall leaves. All too frequently, they just blow off service calls without even bothering to call. I guess they know they're short timers.
One good thing, if you need spare parts, hardware support will send you virtually anything just for the asking, whether it's covered by contract or not. I guess they just don't give a shit anymore. And who can blame them?