July 22, 1999 4:55pm
Why Compaq didn't turn to Mr.
Outside?
By Charles Cooper ZDNet News
Meet the new boss.
He's nothing like the old boss.
Michael Capellas, Compaq's new president and chief
executive, comes to the job armed with a resume that's
separated by a world of difference from Eckhard Pfeiffer,
his ousted predecessor.
Unlike Pfeiffer, who was
given to sketching out lofty
scenarios for Compaq and
the computer industry,
everything in Capellas'
background points in
another direction. Appointed
chief information officer when he came to Compaq in
August 1998, Capellas put in stints at both Oracle and SAP
after a long career at Schlumberger Ltd., the oil services
company where he served as its first ever director of
information systems.
Knows tech
"Michael offers a good balance between being a thinker
and a doer," said Ray Lane, the No. 2 executive at Oracle
Corp. and Capellas' former boss. "He always had bright
ideas that he managed through to execution."
Indeed, in introducing Capellas to the press today,
company chairman Ben Rosen praised his new hire's
superior grasp of technology and said Compaq was so
impressed that it only offered the job to Capellas.
Ever since Pfeiffer was shown the door three months ago,
many analysts had assumed the company would turn to an
outsider in much the same way IBM looked to Lou Gerstner
who was at RJR Nabisco. There were a number of critics
who said the company needed to bring in a marketing
maven who could impose a grand vision.
But Rosen was having none of that during a
question-and-answer session following his prepared
remarks.
"We focused our search more on people who understood
the industry," Rosen said.
Precedent for choice
There is a precedent for bringing in an insider. For
example, Jim Barksdale, the former chief executive of
Netscape, earned his stripes as CIO of Federal Express
from 1979 to 1983, where he built and implemented an
extensive customer service and package-tracking system.
In 1983 he was appointed chief operating officer of FedEx,
which grew from $1 billion in sales that year to $7.7 billion
by 1992 when he left FedEx to become the president and
COO of McCaw Cellular Communications. A couple of
years later, he was picked by Jim Clark to take the helm at
upstart Netscape, which he guided until the completion of
its sale to AOL earlier this year.
Plumbing work
"This is a very clever choice," Oracle's Lane recalled.
"Michael always understood the buyer, which is vital now
that Compaq's future is in the enterprise."
f Capellas has any broad plan to reshape Compaq -- such
as exiting the low-margin business of making consumer
PCs -- he wasn't sharing them
today. Compaq faces increasing
competition in the retail market
where smaller, more nimble
rivals such as eMachines have
nibbled away at the company's
market share. Upon hearing the news of Capellas'
appointment, eMachines CEO Steven Dukker chuckled
when he heard Compaq had opted for a nuts-and-bolts
information services specialist.
Said Dukker: "Let's hope they all concentrate on plumbing.
And we can pick up the pieces" of the market that Compaq
might opt to ignore as its focuses on other areas. |
