I know I will probably get blasted for this, but let me offer a quick insight on the rumors of HP or Compaq purchasing Novell. While I think Novell stock is attactive at these levels, and offers tremendous opportunity for the right suiter, I do not believe that a HP or Compaq purchase would make sense.
HP & Compaq rely too much on sales to Novell, Unix and Windows NT environments. Their relationships with all players is too important to them to upset that balance by becoming a competitor to the likes of Microsoft. The potential conflicts, etc., would be the same as the IBM of the eightees where IBM was out pushing OS2 to their own detriment.
I do believe that IBM would be possible, since they already have a competing product (OS2), and they have had a commitment to NOVELL for many years i.e. Blue Box Netware. Moreover, the Netware for SAA product has been big with IBM, etc. The other rumors like Netscape, Seagate, Oracle, etc., would be interesting, and a clear strategy that makes sense could positively surprise us all.
Conclusion is to forget Compaq and HP. If I am wrong I too will eat 3 floppy disks, and some hard drives from HPs recently discontinued hard drive division (there are still some of those drives in the channel). |
