Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rudedog who wrote (72508)	11/21/1999 4:31:00 PM
From: rupert1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

rudedog: The lynchpin of your analysis is alleged privileged information which your informant had about the two opposing approaches to AV which are alleged to have been in play between Rosen and EP even before the DEC acquisition was finalised. Since neither I nor any non-privileged shareholder had that information, and since it was never disclosed to the market, it should properly remain in the realm of speculation. However, since we are speculating retroactively - if such an oppositoon existed between Rosen and EP from the beginning, that might explain why COMPAQ was so slow to come to market with AV despite EP's enthusiasm for it and perhaps the dispute over AV was a contributory reason why Rosen sacked EP. That does not make Rosen decision's right. But it does support the theory that the reason Rosen did not appoint an outside candidate to replace EP - which was his apparent intention at the beginning of the selection process - was that a man of woman of substance would not want to be CEO of a company whose chairman would use dismissal as an instrument to have his strategy imposed over that of the CEO and his management team. It supports the theory that Capellas is merely an enabler of Rosen's strategy. I also disagree with the substance of the Rosen strategy if your informant was correct. If Rosen wanted to leverage the "lemons" he acquired from DEC, he would have planted the seeds of AV, let it grow for a year or two, and then used its immense new leverage to trade for alliances in other areas and to negotiate new custom with a stronger hand. There is nothing that has been achieved since the sale of AV, or nothing in the known strategy for the coming year two, which would have been detrimentally affected by COMPAQ being the majority shareholder in a publicly owned Alta Vista - quite the contrary. COMPAQ with or without Rosen's "guiding hand" - is a good investment. I think many shareholders would not have suffered the losses they have this year and the company's reputation would not have been diminished in the way it has been this last year, if Alta Vista had been floated this year or next by COMPAQ. My gripe against EP is his failure to give a true picture of the results for the 4Q and 1Q, his fixation with a target of $50 billion in revenues by 2000 without a corresponding concern about adequate profits, his overly optimistic progress reports on the DEC acquisition and possibly his head to head snarls with DELL. Apart from that he did a magnificent job in bringing COMPAQ from the status of a small, troubled clone-maker to a world-class intergrated high tech company. Apart from the way in which AV was dealt with, I see nothing in the Rosen-Capellas strategy so far which was not already in the EP strategy. As I understand it, Rosen has never claimed that EP was off-message - he claimed that he did not and could not execute quickly enough for the next stage of COMPAQ's development and that his style was stiff and pompous.