HP/Compaq Merger Official Today

Ankou writes: "Today (May 6th, 2002) marks the first day of the Hewlett Packard and Compaq merger. The finalized buyout of Compaq is expected to be done today and are expected to be working together "as a combined entity" by tomorrow. This also means a new stock symbol will replace the old HWP to the new symbol HPQ. Behind the hype this merger will cost, according resources at CNN on this article, a total loss of 15,000 more jobs with over 150,000 following the next two years. The same article details more information regarding the new merger and the recent events which have lead to today." Update: 05/06 15:03 GMT by T : Note: that job-loss figure is off; the 15,000 jobs projected to be cut are from a total of 150,000 between the two companies.

Comments

Is it all that good?

[dalassa]

I admit I don't know much about the merger so feel free to take my comments with a grain of salt:

Right after all the reports about the massive money pit that is AOL and how it is hurting Time Warner why do these companies rush into mergers? And why right after the Enron and Global-Crossing fiascos is no one examining the benefits to the CEOs of the companies? While the Compaq-HP deal was announced last year there was alot of criticism about the benefits to both companies, where has it all gone? Was this a self defense merger? Were the two companies afraid that with out a merger they wouldn't be able to compete with other companies?

Well I suppose I can look foward to good printers being sold with lousy computers and less hope of HP ever having decent Mac support.

As I said, not knowing much about the deal and the two companies, feel free to ignore.

Re:HP + COMPAQ IBM

[red_dragon]

Consider also that most of this overlap isn't exactly in a profitable area (PC and PC peripheals)

Are you sure of that? To me, it looks like the two companies are almost identical. To list:

• Pavilion v. Presario
• Vectra v. Deskpro
• Omnibook v. Armada
• Jornada v. iPaq
• Kayak (name no longer used) v. Evo
• Visualize v. AlphaStation
• Netserver v. Proliant
• HP 9000 v. AlphaServer (Tru64)
• HP 3000 v. AlphaServer (OpenVMS)
• ... and so on.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head, but I know there are many more parallels between the two. The only differences I can recall are HP's printing and networking hardware product lines, for which Compaq doesn't have equals.