[Info-vax] OT: Carly update
JF Mezei
jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca
Fri Nov 5 13:08:34 EDT 2010
David Mathog wrote:
> This has nothing to do with VMS (hence the "OT" in the topic). VMS
> was kicked to the curb long before CF by her predecessors in the "CEOs
> who are paid fabulously yet make dreadful business decisions" club.
La Carly promised great things with her insistence that buying Compaq
was a great thing. Remember that she had a hard time convincing certain
key bankers to vote "YES".
At the end of the day, all HP did was acquire Compaq's 8086 market
share. The rest (such as the DIgital and Tandem leftovers) have shown
over the last 10 years to not be key assets.
HP not only inherited Compaq's wintel customer base, but it also changed
the marketplace. For Servers, it is HP against Dell and IBM. For
desktops, it is HP against Dell. I suspect IBM may have benefitted more
from the transaction than HP since IBM got a portion of the customers
that would have gone to Compaq without having to pay the billions to buy
Compaq.
Unless you remember history, it tends to repeat itself. And it is
important to remember LaCarly's folly. Bankers make money from mergers,
so they aren't about to stop recommending them. A truly unbiased
analysis might show that LaCarly paid way too much for Compaq and that
fixing up her own shop (as Hurd appears to have done) would have yielded
better return to shareholders than spending megabucks to buy Compaq.
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