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

To: rupert1 who wrote (73295)	12/6/1999 10:13:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

victor - Time to get off your high horse - you were the biggest booster of this management team "before the fall". Your analysis relies on blind faith in the omniscience of Rosen My analysis relies on a careful reading of the facts with occasional tidbits from mostly mid-level CPQ execs who may or may not be in the know. Rosen has hardly proved himself Omniscient but he did react swiftly, within the bounds of CPQ's governance, to fix a management problem which he was admittedly partly responsible for in the first place. Furthermore, your description of EP's present position is slanted. If he intends to exercise his options he has the largest or second largest individual holding of COMPAQ shares (after Rosen) as well as an active position in several other companies. My opinion of EP is just my opinion, slanted as always by my less than perfect knowledge of the world. Pfeiffer is undoubtedly a capable executive as demonstrated by his spectacular run in the first 5 years of his tenure at CPQ. But he either lost his touch or events exceeded his ability to cope in '97 and '98. Your statement that EP is the largest shareholder after Rosen is not correct. Nor is Rosen the largest shareholder. All of the founders (cannion et. al.) have considerably larger stakes than Rosen. Gary Stimac has a larger position than either Rosen or EP. Many current long time CPQ employees have very large positions and several hold founder's stock. Those folks are not out sniping at current management. The fact is that Rosen not only did not sack Earl Mason - the main culprit acording to you and most others - but he went out of his way to praise him. Nor did he sack the head of EMA. Nor did he sack several of the others. Since I was not at the board meetings where these things were discussed, nor were you, we can only conjecture. But (as I posted here prior to the replacement of any of the management team) the rumor mill at CPQ in February and March of this year said that Mason would fall on his sword in an attempt to save Pfeiffer, and that if Pfieffer also left, that most of his management team would go with him. One wag said "the gods may not be satisfied with one or two sacrifices". There was a ditty going around at the time - "Earl is done by 4 0 1" - the notion being that April Fools' day would be an appropriate time for Earl's Hari Kari. You may cling to the notion that those were all voluntary resignations, possibly in sympathy with Pfeiffer, but I think that is nonsense. In a period of a few weeks, everyone associated with the integration of DEC "suddenly decided to pursue other interests"??? Give me a break. Pfeiffer, Mason, Mike Heil, John Rose - the whole of the "A" team - all decided to move to greener pastures at the same time, and the board had nothing to do with it? According to a former member of Barth's staff, he resigned because he was not given the post of head of WW sales. I suppose you could say that was voluntary but when the job Barth was holding was eliminated, and he was not selected for the new power base, it seems a lot like "my way or the highway" from the office of the CEO, rather than a sudden decision late in life to make a career change. Everyone knew that Barth would not accept a level 2 report after all those years as the Duke of EMEA. Spin it as much as you like, they moved to other jobs or they retired after selling their shares in 1Q before Rosen and crew told other shareholders that the company was not doing as well as they had been telling the public. I don't think I attempted to spin that - clearly there was heavy insider selling near the peak of the stock price, but not greatly increased over similar sales in years past. I doubt that there is any basis for a lawsuit over those sales, but time will tell. "Moved to other jobs or retired" - how is that different than getting sacked? You have said several times that you do not understand the internet sector. I believe you. So I interpret your judgement of my understanding in that light. At least I am attempting to learn. The change in the nature of that sector this year has caused me to revise my notions of what will work and what will not in that space. A year ago I thought that a centralized model in which CPQ developed the whole range of internet capability would be a winner - I now see that I was misguided and that I did not understand the evolving market as well as the CPQ executives making those choices. I still have a lot to learn but it is easy to see why the strategy that CPQ pursued was much better than hanging on to AV - at least IMHO...