Franz -
Thanks for the vote of confidence.
what you think of Pfeiffer's tenure at the helm?
Rod Cannion, one of the founders of Compaq and it's CEO until 1991, was respected by almost everyone and loved by many. He had such fierce loyalty from the majority of employees that they would literally do anything for him. He allowed Compaq to become uncompetitive by not pushing hard on cust cutting measures, by allowing "gold plated" designs when competitors showed that less expensive components worked as well and sold as well, and designing and building components in-house when equivalent parts were available with no R&D. He got about a year to propose a fix to CPQ's problems, and then about a year to fix them. Then he was out.
If CPQ's board and Ben Rosen decide that EP is not the man for the job, I'm sure there will be no hesitation in replacing him. But I have not heard serious suggestions that such a decision is on the horizon.
What do you think should be done to improve CPQs situation?
I think they are doing most of the right things, but they need to move more quickly to consolidate the DEC and Tandem acquisitions and develop a coordinated, focused message in the marketplace. I believe that they still have way too much invested in the development of technologies which bring marginal benefit. They need to make the hard calls on what will be in the Compaq of the next 5 years, then find a graceful way to manage the transition to that vision. I would assume that much of that would need to be disclosed at Innovate in a month or so. I will be very interested to see if there is a coherent vision of the future, or just a department store of computer technology. |
