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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
Not it's not tis: Hardly Passable Quality
-- I am Jack's sig line.
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?
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.
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.
Then they go and do this, it's Sure! to lay people off.
Mergers pretty much always result in layoffs, since you end up with a lot of duplicate departments (HR, marketing, sales, some of the technical groups, etc.). Sure, the resulting company is bigger so you (maybe) need more people in each of those departments, but not as many as the sum of the two pre-merger companies.
Compaq went for the deal because it was effectively a bailout for their stockholders. H-P went for the deal because...hmm, that one's tougher, which is why the vote was so close.
Nominally it was to gain Compaq's foothold in the PC market, where H-P has been losing share. Why anyone would want to pay good money for such a position in a market that is slowing and rapidly commoditizing itself is another question.
-- Alastair
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.
"from the massive-layoffs-coming-soon dept"
From all of the employees of Compaq and HP who read Slashdot, Thanks for the reminder.
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.
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
I think a change of titles is appropriate...
May I suggest the "HP Pavillion"?
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.