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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.
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
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)
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.
Carly and Mike, and a number of senior execs, are going to take home about $75 million in bonuses, IIRC.
And you thought that management worked for the shareholders...
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You know, the parent post was a little light on content and heavy on ire, but if I had any points today I would have been willing to spend one just to encourage unpopular opinions. I, too, get frustrated with the vocal "Slashdot hippies" who spend all of their time advocating "free" software-- which carries a pretty twisted definition of "free," by the way-- and complaining endlessly about the "evil" actions of any and every corporation, big or small, good or bad, right or wrong.
While the Slashcode moderation system is inherently a good thing, I think, it also serves as a pretty darn good object lesson in Plato's critique of pure democracy.
When a company goes into bankruptcy, a 'Q' gets appended to the end of the ticker symbol. HPQ. Hmmm.
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?"
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.
Life is about balance. Business does many good things but it has to be kept in check. Left unchecked it becomes as bad or worse than communism with a few powerful people controlling the whole deal.
/.ers want" is completely without foundation. My view is that /.ers are more open-minded about the benefits of different forms of government and are happy as long as it works, allows them freedom to create and allows them freedom to put food on the table. However, my view is as baseless is yours and we could both be completely wrong.
We have laws to try and keep them in check. Laws against abusing monopoly power, requiring companies to be responsible for their actions, and other things to keep them from being totally cut-throat, screw everyone as long as I get my money sort of entities.
I think we have every right to complain when they misbehave and a responsibility as voters and government to keep them in line.
As a small business owner I have other issues to contend with, such as big business making barriers to entry for small businesses and amateurs.
Of course the layoffs are the fault of big business capitalism but the existence of the jobs in the first place is also the fault of big business capitalism.
I'm not sure who or what you are arguing against but saying "if we were all communists like most of you
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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.
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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.
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!!!
Are you willing to explore what this twisted version of "free" is, which you claim that others purport?
Yup. It's not very complicated, and it's also not a new argument.
The BSD license is a good example of a free license, in the traditional sense of free: "Exempt from subjection to the will of others; not under restraint, control, or compulsion; able to follow one's own impulses, desires, or inclinations; determining one's own course of action; not dependent; at liberty." Webster's, 1913.
The GPL, on the other hand, doesn't meet that definition of "free." GPL-licensed software is rife with restrictions. If I want to use GPL'd software in my own project, and not release the source to my own project, I am prohibited from doing this. That, to me, doesn't meet the definition of "free," sense 1, as given by Webster's. Whether the GPL is a good thing or not is a point for another debate. My objection-- at the moment-- is to what I perceive to be the misuse of the word "free" in characterizing that particular license.
Are you also willing to explain your use of what seems like an arbitrary appeal to authority (ie, Plato's Laws), and why it lends support to your argument?
Yeah, but Google does a better job than I could. Finding more information is left as an exercise for the reader.
Plato's Republic contains a dialogue on forms of government, one of which is democracy. The problem with democracy, as defined by and discussed in this dialogue, is that political power rests with individuals who have no responsibility. Democracy, therefore, is fundamentally unstable and rapidly descends into tyranny.
Contrast Socrates's definition of "democracy" with the modern definition of "democracy." Modern democracy is more like what Socrates would have called a republic, although we have long since abandoned the idea of the philosopher-king. Alas.
Slashdot is similar, by analogy. Instead of political power, we're talking about editorial power. In a pure democracy, a charismatic individual could accumulate power by giving the masses what they want to hear, because democracy is based on the idea of positive feedback: you vote for, not against.
On Slashdot, it's possible to accumulate karma (the Slashdot equivalent of political power, although karma carries with it no actual privileges) by giving the masses what they want to hear. Moderators are more likely to moderate comments up than down, so some ideas and patterns become highly moderated regularly.
The old joke goes, "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!" This comment, or one like it, appears with virtually every article. Because this particular idea was so over-used, it became a joke. Comments that were once moderated "insightful" are now left unmoderated-- unless they're funny.
Similarly, every story about some software product seems to include at least one comment either applauding the vendor for releasing source code, or deriding the vendor for opposite of same. These comments carry an implied converse, and they get moderated up often enough that an outside observer might conclude that the prevailing opinion on Slashdot is that keeping source code secret is unacceptable. I don't believe that's the most commonly held opinion by Slashdot readers. It just appears that way because of the way moderation works.
The same principle applies to this particular story. Every time an article appears about a corporation, it seems that there appears one or more highly moderated comments on the subject of the "inherent" evils of commercialism or corporations. Again, I don't believe this is the majority opinion among Slashdot readers. It just appears to be because comments that have been moderated up are less likely to be moderated down.
These situations all basically reflect the principles that were laid out thousands of years ago in the Republic: pure democracy, be it political or editorial, is unstable, and leads to tyranny, either social or intellectual.
That's why I said that I would have spent a moderator point-- had I had any at the time-- to support the poster of the comment to which I replied. Contrary opinions are a good thing, and should be encouraged.
In closing, I'd like to let you know that the fact that your post challenged the structure of my post, and not its content, is not lost on me.
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?"