

HP to spin off Compaq - cek
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-18/hp-said-to-be-near-10-billion-autonomy-takeover-spinoff-of-pc-business.html

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ansy
What the hell? This is a serious change in direction. HP was supposed to
transform its PC division into a higher margin business by more aggressively
pursuing the luxury market. Also the PC division was part of the WebOS master
plan by bundling it with every new PC by the end of the year.

What does this mean for HP's consumer business? What does it mean for WebOS?
It seems like Leo is returning to his SAP comfort zone which looks a lot more
like IBM than Apple.

Even though the article does not mention Compaq, I can see the new company
inheriting the brand name instead of sharing HP. But just how much of the
consumer business do they plan to abandon?

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jameskilton
I've got a good friend who was in EDS when HP bought them, and is still there
now. This move by HP doesn't surprise me at all. That company has been
floundering for a while, and their management is clueless as to where to go
from here.

Nice little tid-bit: HP finally ended the EDS name after a yearly financial
report (I don't remember which year) showed that the EDS division was the
_only_ profitable group in HP that year, and not only that but profitable
enough to offset the losses _everywhere else_.

HP should go back to printers and stay there. Their computers have been
horrible, buying Palm AND Compaq destroyed their bottom line, and the WebOS
tablet is failing miserably.

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adolph
Do you mean EDS? What was EBS?

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jameskilton
Bah yes, EDS. Fixing my post, thanks.

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larrywright
I can't imagine how much money is wasted by this constant acquiring,
rebranding, spinning off that seems to be getting more prevalent (in the
banking and tech industries especially). Is this a US-only thing, or does this
occur elsewhere as well?

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VladRussian
>money is wasted by this

somebody's wasted money is somebody else's revenue/fee/salary/bonus. Follow
the money :)

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larrywright
That's a fair point, but as a consumer it's frustrating to know that things
likely cost more because of this wasted money. Ditto for an investor, I
imagine.

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bryanwb
HP's twists and turns over the last 10+ years really reflects management-by-
mbas

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rbanffy
Next week, Compaq will spin off Digital and they'll will relaunch their Alpha-
based lineup...

One can dream...

~~~
ChuckMcM
Oh no, bring back the PDP-10 architecture, that was a nice piece of work. Of
course you'd want to update it to be a 72 bit architecture instead of 36,
maybe it could be the xPDP-72 product line :-)

~~~
rbanffy
That would be really cool. And a small gizmo you could hang off the DVI port
of your LCD, attach a VT-440 keyboard and serial cable and have a VT-440.

Or a VAXStation. Or a DECStation... Would be cool.

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RandallBrown
Where does it say anything about Compaq?

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binarycrusader
It's implied in the first sentence:

"...plans to spin off its personal-computer business, people with direct
knowledge of the matter said."

And given Compaq's parent company is HP and is a personal computer
manufacturer:

    
    
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq
    

But you're right that it doesn't explicitly say.

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starwed
HP made personal computers before they bought Compaq. The headline is
misleading, because it implies they would continue those lines while only
spinning off Compaq.

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bh42222
Watching many large companies, merge then split again, one might postulate
that:

Free markets look for solution by brute force, this means that most business
(both small and large) is unprofitable, but the few winners make up for
everyone else and then some.

~~~
VladRussian
evolution.

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gamble
I have a couple of friends who works at the former Compaq campus in Houston.
They've been laying off former Compaq staff and outsourcing for years. The
speculation has always been that they've been trying to entirely outsource the
PC business to Chinese subcontractors and shut down the Houston campus
completely. It's already a ghost town. This is just the other shoe dropping.

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RexRollman
When this is all said and done, I wonder if they will change their ticker
symbol from HPQ back to HWP, which is what it was before their purchase of
Compaq.

