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

To: hlpinout who wrote (95625)	3/3/2002 8:42:45 AM
From: hlpinout	Respond to of 97611

Compaq flogs off Ayr plant 240 shuffle off to Jabil By Mike Magee, 03/03/2002 01:09:01 BST THE FOLK IN AYR, SCOTLAND must be feeling fed up as confirmation comes that the plant Compaq has there will be sold off to Jabil, which will become a "strategic global supplier" and even supply the Big Q with some help. Jabil makes circuit boards, manufactures and provides assembly faciltiies worldwide. Compaq will "consolidate" its manufacturing operations into its main site at Erskine. Once the sale is completed, Jabil will enter into a three year supply agreement to provide some services to Compaq. The 240 Compaq folk who used to work for Captain Capellas, now will work for Jabil Circuit, so at least they won't lose their jobs. Christina Hanger, for it is she who is a VP of Q's enterprise supply chain, said that the employees are joining a strong business focused on growing its manufacturing operations. Which, of course, Compaq seems no longer to be... µ

To: hlpinout who wrote (95625)	3/3/2002 6:49:00 PM
From: hlpinout	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 97611

Amen. -- March 03, 2002 15:56 San Jose Mercury News, Calif., Dan Gillmor Column By Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News, Calif. Mar. 3--Maybe Hewlett-Packard will succeed in buying Compaq, maybe not. However the vote goes, the HP Way has withered. But it's not entirely fair to solely blame HP's current management. The HP Way was fading before Carly Fiorina arrived on the scene. It was a victim of its times. Silicon Valley grew up on the example of William Hewlett and David Packard. Theirs was an era when actual innovation, honest hard work and concern beyond one's own immediate sphere were core to the corporate mission. Profits mattered, of course, because a business couldn't exist without them. Under the HP Way, though, profits and humane values fueled each other. The icy equations of today's shareholding and wealth-building don't account for humanity, sorry to say. They calculate financial value only. The current generation has defined a new American system. This has been a time when corruption, greed and hype took over our financial and political systems. We've celebrated superstar executives for whom honor has little meaning in the context of business. Oh, we're hearing lots of loud talk about honesty for the moment. But Enron and its scheming cohorts are disgraced only because they failed so spectacularly and ripped off so many average people in the process. Microsoft, ever contemptuous of law and truth, is still widely admired. This has been a time when speed to market meant more than quality, a pernicious gift from the technology industry. Customers became bug-finders, and companies then decided if the flaws were sufficiently bad to fix. Our political leaders weren't just owned by the special interests. They proved downright cheap to purchase. The legal bribery we call campaign finance only shows how little it takes to get legislation that rewards the few at the expense of the many. Insiders rigged the system, getting laws to make most of their chicanery legal. Conflicts of interest prevailed. Accounting professionals jumped into the ethical tank for the people who paid them. Corporate chiefs served on compensation committees, ratcheting up executive pay and rewarding each other in an escalating spiral. Investment bankers richly rewarded their ventriloquist-dummy securities analysts, who wrote such glowing reports on the companies paying the banks huge fees. When the fix is in during good economic times, even the people on the short end of the deal figure they have a shot at success. It's a lottery mentality, a get-rich-quick mania that's overflowing with false promise. In fact; not only has wealth continued to concentrate at the top, but the middle class has steadily eroded. In tougher times, as today, the self-dealing of the wealthy and politically connected is impossible to stomach. Now, as we grasp how thoroughly the insiders have rigged the system for their own benefit, average people are getting mad. Yet today we hear almost total silence from corporate leaders about the corruption in their ranks. At a time when the public grows more cynical with each new disclosure of yet another deception, we want some sign that the business community cares about its sagging reputation and wants to earn back our trust. Is the silence simply a shrug of contempt? Or is it something more pernicious, like guilt? How can the HP Way relate to real life in times like these, in a place like this? Maybe it can't. Maybe we've gone too far down the path of pure self-interest to take the risk of caring about other things. Sometimes the economic climate, and capitalism's famous creative destruction, leave little choice. Even Agilent, the HP spinoff that promised in a more genuine way to adhere to the values of Hewlett and Packard, ended up laying off thousands of people. We know we can't legislate honor. That doesn't preclude a serious attempt to clean up the cesspool of politics, challenge the rampant conflicts of interest and give authorities more power to police the fraudsters. Perhaps there will be room again for big companies that expect more of themselves and their people. The HP Way may have faded at HP, and that's immeasurably sad, but it's still a valid template -- for Silicon Valley, for America, for capitalism. Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday. Visit Dan's online column, eJournal (www.dangillmor.com). E-mail dgillmor@sjmercury.com; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917. ----- To see more of the San Jose Mercury News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to bayarea.com