John, re "Compaq buying DEC. Implications?"
I don't know about buying two companies the size of Tandem and DEC in such a short period of time. I would think it would take at least a year or two to "digest" a company as big as Tandem, before putting the burden of ingesting an even bigger company such as DEC on CPQ. Also, there are a lot of overlaps among CPQ, TDM and DEC; e.g., all three make NT servers. Looks like the street agrees, CPQ down about two and a half. Also, why such a big purchase price for DEC? They'd been losing money big time until recently.
I like Cisco's expansion through acquisition much better. They've been buying much smaller companies, with a rare medium to biggie size (Stratacom). Even they have had their struggles, however. A friend there said recently that, they've been growing so fast, that the typical department was like 75% new people (less than one year at Cisco). So, looks like they've slowed acquisitions, at least for now.
Tony |
