Howie: I was reading postings to the CPQ Club over at Yahoo! last night to see if people over there had any insight/information we did not have. One posting I read, by she_x, was about AltaVista. She had heard about an internal memo about shareholders being offered shares of AV at the IPO offering price. Since she said the wording of the memo would be very important, she was going to try and see it with her own eyes so she could determine exactly what was being said.
In a very cynical state of mind [when it comes to CPQ management] since last night's bomb I thought: Great, squeeze every penny you can out of your shareholders. You have a ready made group of people whose shares are down, down, down. One way or another, the IPO will get you [CPQ] the money you want. The 'value' of shareholders stock right now is rechid. Now tell them, "We want to increase shareholder value, this is very important to us--because we truly care about our shareholders--so we have decided to spin-off AV in a way that best helps you, our shareholder: come up with some more money so you can buy whatever shares in AV your holdings in CPQ will permit you to buy. Then you won't have to care about CPQ shares being down--the value of your AV will make up for it! Don't have any money to buy AV shares? Well, toooooooo bad. We tried :o)"
Lynn |
