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

To: Kirk © who wrote (59)	5/6/2002 11:30:43 PM
From: MeDroogies	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4345

I'm doing nothing of the sort... But your response to my post is immature. I was simply pointing out that names are meaningless. AOL's price is down for a number of reasons...not the least of which is the piss poor management of Gerald Levin, a TW holdover. "Purchase" and actual ownership are frequently different things. Cultures will clash, and one will win. That is typically how these things happen. In AOL's case, AOL lost not because it wasn't as good as TW (it was earning money and had cash whereas TW was losing and had debt). It lost because it was 10,000 AOL employees versus 80,000 TW employees. AOL "merged" with TW, was the purchaser (on paper), but wound up hobbled. I think this "merger" was ill advised for both parties, but it's clear CPQ didn't need it nearly as much. Dave B says CPQ was losing share in stagnant industry sectors and losing share to Dell. I think if you review the data, Dell and CPQ were frequently trading places, and given Dell's current problems, there is no guarantee they'd have taken over. They engaged in a costly price war, and lost a ton of money on put options. CPQ, on the other hand, has been growing in the very profitable and high-margin storage end of the business. I hardly call that a bad business to be in. HP was nowhere in the handheld industry, while CPQ is the CE standard. I want this company to succeed. But I see more pissing and moaning by HP people than CPQ. Weird Wally is more representative of HP than most people would like to hope. His negativity, more than anything else, is going to be the problem that the combined company has to overcome, not a bunch of name calling on stock boards. Considering that Wally may be HP's legacy to this merger....that's a frightening thought.