Hewlett-Packard to buy Compaq for $25 billion

[xortam]

Wow!

[Maggi]

yup, I just heard it on my radio while I was driving to work.

[ayoub_ibrahim]

wonder if there's going to be a name change somewhere down the line!

[Maggi]

afaik, they'll name it all HP ...

[xortam]

I was watching their announcement meeting this morning and they stated that HP will be the surviving brand and Compaq sub-brands will continue to be used.

[Wombat]

I'll be the first to say, I have no F@%king clue what this means, or what my high ups were thinking.

We just laid off 6,000 people, but we'll buy another huge company, sure.

I guess I work for HPaq now

[EdSki]

Well they still have to sneak this one past American and European anti trust laws.. Somebody is bound to notice that this company would utterly dominate pc & pc server markets

[xortam]

Anti-trust

They've had a team of lawyers investigating the anti-trust issues for the last several weeks. The planned merger went ahead because they didn't feel they would violate anti-trust laws based on fierce competition and low cost-to-entry. They did say that only a couple companies will land up serving the server/service market and they will be one of them.

[Wombat]

Well, IBM is still bigger than us. But wow, did our stock tank today. From 24 to %lt 19.

[xortam]

stock drop

That's usual. Have patience for the merger to take hold. They said the deal should be accretive in one year. Things could look very interesting in a year if they manage to execute the reorganization quickly and effectively. Without the merger, those two companies quite possibly would be struggling for survival within the year. The decision had to be made to get out of the server market (like everyone was telling HP to do) or get more serious about it.

[EdSki]

Well you never know..GE and Honeywell thought they were home free, only to have there plans foiled at the last minute..

Also the fact that ibm is bigger then hp/compaq is just a matter of how you look at it. I think that at the pc market compaq on its own still has a bigger market share then ibm..

Grtz,
Ed

[Wombat]

I think that the PC market is the area we're least likely to be contested. There's still a (dying)Gateway, but Dell is strong, and "netpliances" are springing up.

If they stop us for sake of the PC market, then they shouldn't have let MS buy WebTV.

[Dr Mordrid]

I spent some time watching the financial news channels today. Some interesting stuff said there;

1. they expect this to result in a further 15,000+ layoffs in the combined entity. This over and above 6-7,000 each laid off by HP and Compaq earlier this year.

2. the analysyts are confounded. They say that the best thing for HP to do is to get OUT of the computer systems market totally and just concentrate on services and their other hardware. HP buying Compaq just floored them.

3. HP/Compaq have announced they expect an operating LOSS for the next couple of years. Something else the analysts don't like.

We'll see what happens.

Dr. Mordrid