Flutterby™! : HP swallows Compaq 2001-09-04 15:26:33+00

HP swallows Compaq

2001-09-04 15:26:33+00 by TC 3 comments

The article indicates that HP is going after Big Blue but I can't help but think they are tired of Dell beating them up. Yes, there is more than PC sales going on here. Wouldn't it be cool if HP became research focused like IBM has in recent years?

She is merging with her biggest competitor in the big-name PC market. This comes after splitting off the more 'interesting' divisions of HP - the hospital and scientific test and analysis equipment branches. The only interesting new technology HP gets is the remnants of DEC - the best parts of which Compaq already sold off.

A few years back IBM had a really dismal spell but pulled back out of it - mostly on the strengths of their R&D efforts. IBM spends billions on R&D - it probably gets more in patent royalties from Intel than it pays for all the processors it buys. Not to mention the hard drive patent royalties from Seagate and Maxtor.

It's this 'core technology' and 'core intelligence' that gives these companies real value. SGI witnessed this when it spun off MIPS. All of a sudden this subsidiary became worth more than the original company. Why wasn't MIPS carrying SGI? Because of the braindead management - the same management that shutting down the free web server that employees at SGI have used for almost a decade to share various technology.

HP also lost sight of it's core technology when it tried shifting customers away from HP9000 and HP/UX towards Intel and Microsoft. They got caught up in the GUI hype.

Check out Xerox, BTW. It's trading under $10/share. Didn't Xerox invent the GUI? Talk about management fubars... Xerox, by all rights, should have owned the business desktop - they create the GUI, the mouse, had technicians in and out of offices all the time, and had a name that became a generic term.

Traditionally, the first industries that might try something don't get it. Why didn't the locomotive manufacturers like Baldwin go into the auto business 100 yrs ago? They were focused on selling big expensive items to a few railroads. It took the man who saw beyond that paradigm, Henry Ford, to invent mass personal transport. Conversly, the auto companies had the skills to make airplanes, but never really got into it. Perhaps because planes were more like locomotives, very expensive and most sold to the government. And need I mention Bill Gates and Steve Jobs? Steve saw that an inexpensive computer on every desktop was the way to go, which Xerox never could. Gates saw that the PC revolution would be in separate chunks (OS, hardware, Apps etc) instead of IBM's trying to sell them like little mainframes.I guess people get married to their worldview.

IBM, however, has relearned to take the long view. Some of their current ideas, like nanocomputing and the ASCI White super-dupercomputer may not show a return for 10 years or more. But they have the capital to wait for the big payoff.

I do know that Microsoft is now doing quite a bit of research but not really generating products. They still come up with products through acquisition of the competition or by devastation of the competition.

BTW, I saw mention in one of the articles about the merger that Intel and the new HomPaq are trying to push a new operating system. Anybody have any idea what that was about?