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Technology Stocks : Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom M who wrote (3247)	9/21/2001 5:18:17 PM
From: John Sladek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3276

Tom, I agree it'll take a while to weed out all the overlap from merging Dec, Compaq & Hwp, There is a fair bit of overlap - and eliminating it will decrease some of the values of the companies. For instance, in the Unix area, Compaq/DEC has Tru64 Unix, while HP has HP-UX. CPQ makes PC's so does HP. etc. if they do it right and retain the best, it'll be one of the only other one-stop shopping picks. I agree that each of these companies has some good products and services (and customers for that metter), and if they do the merger correctly, then the merged company could eventually be a good one. I see a couple of problems: - Does HP's management have what it takes to do the right thing in the current challenging environment? - Has CPQ's VMS business been destroyed by their decision to drop the Alpha, and to move VMS to the Itanium. I know of several VMS systems integrators who are evaluating which alternative software environment they will be moving too (hint: this is good for Sun). - HP/CPQ will have difficulty is competing with IBM's big iron machines. Since new Alpha's will not be developed after 2003, there will be no new high-performance architectures for supporting VMS. I don't like the "quality" of IBM's valuation. I think that IBM has been pretty expensive lately and PC and UNIX sales have been slowing (according to latest 10Q). Problem is that PC and UNIX sales would be a big part of the revenue of the combined HP/CPQ.

To: Tom M who wrote (3247)	12/21/2001 11:54:21 AM
From: George Dvorsky	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 3276

Tom, Good timing on the cpq buy. Even though DEC is gone I think DEC's ghost is what is making cpq act so strange. One of DEC's characteristics I see in other companies is that leading edge technology does not always signal a good investment. I laughed when I read that a 266MHz? "Intel" StrongArm was in a PDA. DEC could have had that out 5 years ago. If we all had our money in ARM rather than DEC we would look a lot smarter now. I agree with John that it doesn't make sense to talk about DEC anymore but since it never made much sense to invest in DEC then why not? Happy Holidays to everyone that is still here. gd