Nadine, Very simple. I dislike companies that are masters of PR spin and from whom it is impossible to get a straight story. Remember, they also were "reducing" inventories in their official announcements the entire time they were stuffing the channel. Between the flat out lies and the half-truths, it is hard to accept anything they say as fact.
Scamming the earnings is an area where CPQ is quite efficient, but they have lots of competition from just about every other "growth" company out there. ONce again, some of this has to do with the channel stuffing where CPQ kept nominal earnings looking strong by filling the warehouses of their distributors. In the last quarter, analysts have noted that they reported a profit of 2 cents while any halfway balanced approach to the numbers would have produced a loss of 10-12 cents. Thus, by "beating the numbers" with a sharp pencil, they again suckered the fish into the stock.
All the boxmakers will not go broke. All the boxmaker stocks will soon be priced at more realistic levels. Not all the color t.v. makers went broke when the margins got skinny. They just stopped being market darlings. That is the future for Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett, and IBM.
They did get something useful from DEC. A big white elephant behind which they could hide all manners of losses and mistakes. The seller ALWAYS knows more than the buyer about the true worth of a company.
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