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Technology Stocks : Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Piotr Koziol who wrote (55)	5/6/2002 9:43:32 PM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 4345

Piotr, I am looking forward to Tuesday when Carly and Mike will celebrate with ALL employees the start of a NEW and powerful computer company. I do hope that I will hear a much more positive view of this merger than your "dog eat dog" ... I am very, very pleased to hear that. But I don't believe that this is a merger of equals. We'll have to agree to disagree, I suppose. I see that you don't work for HP, you are a consultant. On the other hand I DO work for HP. I am not Piotr_K, but Piotr Koziol, and I do not hide behind last name initials... We have at least one thing in common, as I see we are both MIT graduates. Let's hope it's "a beginning of a beautiful friendship" as they said in Casablanca... If you check the HWP and RMBS boards, you'll find that I posted my full name long ago (Dave Burns), and that I worked as an employee for the company from 1982 to 1984 (as the Product Manager for the HP 150 Personal Computer -- the first MS-DOS-based computer HP produced), and that I've consulted for about six different HP divisions (including the laptop and server folks, the Enterprise server folks [a different division], the direct-order folks, and the channel folks), as well as serving as the representative to the Y2K team for the laptop division, and helping to manage the relationships with SAP and Novell. In addition, my wife has been there for over 20 years in a variety of positions, mostly on the R&D side. We have quite a bit of HP stock (in our retirement play, through the employee purchase program, and in options sitting mostly underwater right now) that I've watched tumble during Carly's reign, including big hits on the days that the merger was announced and days that the merger looked more likely to go through. I spoke to approximately 50 HP employees during the holiday season, and found exactly one who supported the merger. I've seen numerous mergers fall apart in the valley, especially those identified as a "merger of equals". The statements made already on this board have sounded as if people expect the "Compaq-way" to be the surviving culture in this merger, and I'll restate right now that if Compaq employees are going into this merger with that expectation, it will fail. I've seen nothing and heard nothing that contradicts that impression. If you read the boards, for the most part, the Compaq people were for the merger because they saw it making them stronger. The HP people were against the merger because they saw it weakening HP. You can do the math from there. I'm sure you will hear a much more positive picture painted on Tuesday, and I hope everyone takes it to heart and works toward a better company. But there are virtually no examples I can come up with that support a positive expectation for the merger. The Compaq people are going to have to work harder to fit into the HP culture than the other way around. If they resist at all, this whole enterprise is going to sink. JMO, Dave