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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.
From now on, you will refer to them collectively as "Hewlett Paqard".
Change is good!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Read the article. It says:
It also will result in the loss of at least 15,000 jobs out of a combined work force of 150,000 during the next two years.
Not that 165,000 jobs will be cut....
-Chris
This is quite a surprise to me. Considering the company's respective markets, and the amount of products that they produce, I would have suspected that Compaq would have bought out HP, not the way it turned out. Seems to me as if Compaq produces a lot more products in general, does more research, has more of a market presence, etc..
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
15,000 jobs out of 150,000 jobs total in the company over the next two years will be eliminated. Not great but, not 150,000 jobs lost.
Keep the synergy flowing! Anyone know any good replacements for HP laser printers?
sPh
Compaq has a stellar track record, from their sleek designs to their top-of-the-line reliability and support. Their support of the old standby DEC technology has truly been a boon to IT and engineering houses. As I type this, I am using a svelte Compaq tower with a P4 chugging away. This baby is sweet, and runs Linux with nary a hitch.
As for HP, they have demonstrated time and again that they can reign supreme in the realms of laser printing and server mainframes. Their own Unix OS was a champion in its heydey, and with their recent efforts in the Linux world, we have nothing but good things to look forward to from them.
In short, in a few years we will be looking back at this as the beginning of a new era for enterprise technology. Let's hope they keep raising the bar.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
a total loss of 15,000 more jobs with over 150,000 following the next two years.
The combined payroll of both companies is 150,000.
Someone you trust is one of us.
a total loss of 15,000 more jobs with over 150,000 following the next two years
It sounded as if a lot of people were against this in the first place - and considering the job losses indicated above, explain to me who exactly is going to benefit from this?!?!?! Why was this a good idea? Both companies' computers are just "eh" to begin with..
I'm a 2000 man.
these layoffs are all the fault of big business capitalism... why if we were all communists like most of you /.ers want, we would all have jobs. Of course we would all be farmers, we wouldn't actually get paychecks, and oh yeah, we wouldn't have this internet thingy...
just makes me sick all the anti business stuff on here, lets all go work for the government because they somehow aren't as evil as a business.... then want to explain how America kicks everyones ass in just about everything?
Okay, mod me down, flame on, troll, and all that happy crappy, but after you do that go take Economics 101 at your local place of learning.
Well.. they had to do something to stay alive? Both companies were having problems that would have made them a serious takeover target for other companies. They decided that they would rather risk a merger than to be taken over by a company like Dell or IBM.
And yes, they seriously were in that position.
If they made a wise decision or not is something for the future. Although some "visionairs" say they know the future of the new company.
There's a saying which could be applied here:
A visionair (or pundit or whatever) is someone who can explain _exactly_ to you why a merger will not work before the merger and when the merger succeeds they can tell you _exactly_ why this success was the unwritten exception on the rule..
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.
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
I could swear this article talks about the same thing....
Seriously, the thing I'm curious about is what's going to happen to the Unix divisions? Both HP and Compaq have their own flavors of Unix. Will we see a merging of the two (Join me...and together we will rule the root as father and son!) or will they decide to ditch both, and focus on a FreeBSD-GNU/Linux style solution?
There is some interesting possibilities between these two companies with their development houses and expertise - it all depends on whether they can actually make the good pieces fit together to make a better whole.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
So it doesn't matter how many jobs are lost or how much restructuring has to be done as long as the investor gets his 'bang for the buck'. In my own opinion, this is a bad idea. But I can see why the shareholders voted for the merger. They just did some simple calculations and figure 'we're gonna get ourselves some big bonuses, and pocket a whole lot of money if we go this route'.
- Tempestdata
When a company goes into bankruptcy, a 'Q' gets appended to the end of the ticker symbol. HPQ. Hmmm.
The article says 15,000 jobs will be cut out of a workforce of 150,000 over the next 2 years, not that 150,000 jobs will be cut. Original post wasn't that clear....
I've been told that tomorrow is "Day One."
But if you prefer to start counting at zero, then I guess you might think it's official today ("Day Zero").
But then, I just work for Digital^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCompaq^H^H^H^H^H^HHP...
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They may have sold the investors on HP+COMPAQ=IBM but previous experience shows that X + COMPAQ X seems more true.
I would be surprised if it only cost 15 thousand jobs as they have a lot of overlap in products. Consider also that most of this overlap isn't exactly in a profitable area (PC and PC peripheals)
I think its best HP bought Compaq and not the other away around. The key to the merger will be how much control HP maintains over the process...
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
;)
Timothy, are you sure you want to make that correction? Your previous statement, while more speculative, may actually be closer to the truth!
Anyone notice that hpq.com is active. (But it's just hp's home page right now.)
I really love it when newspeople mention how the economic downturn is over, yet in the same breath mention that company abc is laying off thousands of worker.
With 15,000 being layed off, it seems the matter of this merger being a "good thing" depends entirely on who you ask.
Rave on, brother. I still can't figure out why anybody thinks this is a good deal, unless there's something in Compaq's server offerings that I'm missing. It strikes me that HP's got printing, and some relatively big iron, while Compaq is just nowhere, competitively. Esp. since you can't make serious money with PCs any more.
Prove me wrong, kids.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
That is, firing trails the downturn and hiring trails the upturn. First things go to hell, then people get fired, then things get better, then people get hired.
Best Slashdot Co
Gotta run. Have to go rally the proleteriat.
Not hardly. Compaq's just a screwdriver shop, albeit a huge and stupidly-run one. There's no one at Compaq with brains enough to pour piss out of a boot -- the only thing that they do is package up other people's research (while taking a massive loss.) Sadly, this is also becoming true of HP.
I give HPaq 18 months, until they sell off printing and imaging and go bankrupt in an orgy of finger-pointing and recrimination. Fiorina, the architect of this train-wreck, will, naturally, be fired upwards. Again.
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Compaq is a major player in the storage industry. IIRC, HP's offerings are rebranded OEM, while Compaq actually did something with DEC's StorageWorks platform.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Well, as of noon Eastern US time, HPQ is up a whopping 2%. Any buying into the stock is likely a combination of "ok, the wait is over, the merger is done" buying (arbitrage crowd closing out their positions), and mutual fund start-of-quarter buying. Given the sell-off of the previous several months, it's questionable to say that market liked this deal.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
just like the merger of AT&T and NCR, the merger of Burroughs and Sperry, and the merger of Digital and Compaq.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The heading above is mistating the facts just a little. The new HP doesn't roll out until Tuesday, May 7th. Today is the last day that Compaq is an individual.
Beware the wood elf!!!
This is not true, and has not been trued for about the last two years. HP used to rebrand storage offerings, but in the last couple of years they have actually developed their very own, in house, Virtual Array series.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
we see the obsolescence another one of those cute little topic icons on /. RIP, Compaq.
You know, maybe it would be nice for nostalgia's sake to post an article under the Digital logo once in a while. Of course, a small piece of DEC lives on in the Digital Networking Products Group. It's a real shame that Compaq cut off the DEC.com and Digital.com domains this year. DEC = 3 letters, Compaq = 6. More to type.
Maybe this signals the need for a mechanism to merge topics of old in the slashcode.
Time to go see if that VAX I booted 9 years ago is still heating, er, running...
Are you sure of that? To me, it looks like the two companies are almost identical. To list:
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.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
I think it would be better to compare H-P to the Monty Python dead parrot sketch; it is an ex-company, it has ceased to be, it has gone to meet its makers.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Oh, you mean "big" like a 64 processor E10k? Or "big" like an SGI Origin 3k? Or "huge", like an IBM zSeries, for that matter?
Oh, sorry, you meant "big" as in quad processor x86. Or were you referring to the Tandem Nonstop technology that Compaq bought (*not* designed)? Or the big DEC Alpha machines -- again, you do know that they didn't do anything to Alpha but fuck it royally right up, yes?
Putting the best quality parts -- as purchased from other people -- into a box with a copy of NT and a custom powersupply doesn't really qualify as building "big" computers.
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
I just heard from a friend at HP that he was told today that his position no longer exists. Sounds like there's a lot of that over at HP today.
Gotta pay those executive bonuses somehow.
Heh.
"The simple truth is that you are wrong about Compaq purchasing all of the parts from other people and assembling them."
You are of course correct. I plead rhetorical exaggeration: in this instance, because the HPaq merger is idiotic for HP, which at least passes a semblance of being a research-driven technology company. Truly, you have to admit that there's nothing at Compaq like the PA-RISC people (oops, sold to Intel), or their compiler team (uh oh, off to MS and Intel), or their printer and instrumentation folks (how much longer can they last)?
Compaq's been on a downward spiral since, well, since Dell. The fact that the DL740 (or whatever the 8 Xeon box is) has some tidy h/w engineering in it is swamped by the fact that nobody needs them, at least, nobody needs them badly enough to shell out the premium over Dell's offerings.
The commodity PC market -- and yes, those servers *are* commodity PCs, even if they're bigger -- is dead. HP is buying a huge exposure to zero margin commodity PCs in addition to the dysfunctional and hateful "services" group. The only winners are IBM and Dell. Oh, and Fiorina, who'll no doubt ride off with another $18,000,000 payday as HPaq dies an ignominous death. Lucent, anyone?
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
The gold "Compaq" letters were removed from the old DEC Systems Research Labs building in Palo Alto just a few minutes ago. Unknown at this time whether they get replaced with "HP", or "Available".
Seen in rec.humor.funny (by King Ables)
With apologies to Don McLean...
A long, long time ago
I can still remember how computing
used to be worthwhile.
And I knew from the day I was born
that I could make that code perform
and maybe I could do it with some style.
But last September made me shudder,
with every 'nouncement Carly uttered.
Bad news in my In-tray,
I couldn't take one more day.
I can't remember if I sighed when I
read about our latest stride,
something cut me deep inside,
the day the HPWay died.
So
Purge, purge, Ms. Technology Scourge,
Drove my Beetle to the Needle,
Now my job's on the verge.
Them Compaq boys were
drinking Starbuck's and Surge
singing "This'll be the day that we merge,
This'll be the day that we merge."
Did you write the Book of DOS
And do you believe an albatross
Can really save our company?
Now do you believe in buying time?
Can Compaq save our bottom line?
And can you teach me how write a resume?
For all the words in a much better formated way (thanks lameness filter!) go here
I agree, HP's printing business accounts for the greater share of the company's revenue, and looking at it that way, it is obvious that HP is much larger than Compaq. And yes, there are other product lines in HP's catalogue that Compaq doesn't have (cameras and projectors, as you mentioned, as well as scanners), mostly targetted at consumers. The point I tried to make was that their offerings could be matched item by item (and then some, in HP's case). Basically, HP has acquired a subset of HP, which more than likely will end up in the scrapper, and that oh-so-important-to-Princess-Fiorina services unit. In the end, HewCom PackPaq != HP + Compaq.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"