Jason: There's nothing really new in that article from UPSIDE; ...
1. Culture CLash
Of course, there will be culture clash. That's why one is CPQ, and
one is DEC; one is buying and one is selling. Many intelligent
people have left DEC's bureaucracy slow dancing party, and some
have joint CPQ, these people knows DEC's problem more than DEC
knows DECs, and they will help CPQ well prepared to handle the
culture clash.
The "Digital apparatchiks who have fought and survived a dozen reorganizations and downsizings during the past decade", will fight before going down. Of course, they'll fight, but this time its DIFFERENT type of fight. The old fight was internal power
struggle, those made their contributions during DEC old glorious day are deeply rooted in DEC's power structure, and they created a system and culture to protect the power structure, that's why no one can really change their culture from internal. But this time the fight is blood change. People who doing real work will not be let go.
2. Channel Conflict: UNIX competes NT
Why not? As long as customer happy! Looking around, S420 competes E420, I328 competes I528, town car competes continental, it is not about compete but rather to provide customer with more choices. Remember, you can not be an enterprise computing provider with PC shop only to offer.
3. Service With a Smile?
The calculation is misleading. in most case, service contract
is closed upon sale of hardware and/or software with minimum
additional sals/marketing/admi/RD expense. To simplely subract 1/4
expense from service revenue shows how little the author knows real world biz practice, accounting, cost analysis.
4. "Size Ins't Everything"
Nothing is everything!
Size is certainly not the major gain of this deal. Of course it is
more challenge to CPQ leaders to manage enterprise computing. But
before we know cpq's detailed merger plan, it is too early to assume the worst case that this deal brings almost nothing to the table.
Wish I have more time to go through the details of this article.
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