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

To: ed who wrote (21783)	3/14/1998 1:01:00 PM
From: Jason W. France	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Ed, don't want to get in argument here but just consider the following IF DEC did have antyhting to offer in the enterprise world it was in the mid-range unix space. Have you seen the market predictions for UNIX growth (or lack of growth) over the next few years. pretty bleak. please tell me that Eckhard didn;t spend your money to become a leader in the UNIX market. you would better off in say the market for 10lb notebooks or 386 processor desktops as those probably have better projected growth rates then for unix... kidding of course The NT market which is exploding and will continue to explode with MS Wolfpack, was a market CPQ had a 45% share in (down to 35) and could continue to own. what value does DEC bring to this environment. Also you are underestimating the power of CPQs customers (ie vanstar/entex/microage) etc etc. Do you know what % of CPQ sales (servers, deskpro, and armada notebooks) go thru this channel and thru the 7 biggest of those customers. I dn;t know for sure but I would guess it is like 70%. If you owned a business and suddenly started competing against a customer that provided you with 70% of your sales, would you be a bit concerned, well acutually if you hold CPQ stock you do own business that is in this exact situation! And above all else this issue is the one keeps Eckhard and Mr. Mason up at night. Jason

To: ed who wrote (21783)	3/14/1998 4:26:00 PM
From: Chris McConnel	Respond to of 97611

A few thoughts on the CPQ/DEC Merger: Hi, I'm new to the thread and just wanted to put my two cents on the cpq/dec merger. There was a series of articles in the Financial Times two weeks ago that talked about the corporate move back to a more centralized computing model, akin but not exactly like mainframe computing. It seems there have been quite a few companies that have been burned on internally and externally developed client/server systems. Client server and three-tier systems work well for small companies, but are not always scalable enough or the development tools are too immature for large projects. Anyone, who has struggled with a Visual Basic project, knows what I mean. (I write client server programs for small money management firm, so I have some first hand experience with this.) I'm not suggesting that large companies are going to toss their PCs and put in dump ascii terminals, but it is easy to have a centralized computing and still have GUI based clients. The GUI clients can be Xwindows terminals, which are now used in several banks. The servers for these terminals are almost always Unix based. Some firms are exploring web-based development, where the browser serves as the front end of the application. The clients would not necessarily be an NC station, cheap PCs with a browser for the in-house apps and MS Office for prod. apps. would work just fine in these situations. In these scenarios, it really does not matter what server is on the backend. It could be IBM or Hitachi big iron with tweaked Cobol that sends out HTML to the clients or an NT system using active server pages. Also, Microsoft's Terminal Server version of NT (a.k.a. Hydra) will give Xwindows functionality to NT (but with a different protocol from Xwindows.) One 4way NT server box will be able to run somewhere in the range of 25 to 50 clients, and all the apps will run on the server. The clients can be a cheap 386 PC (or better) or a windows terminal. All this comes to one thing: lower and lower profits on the clients. If you believe (like I believe) that centralized computing is the direction large corporations are going, then the merging of CPQ and DEC makes really good sense. CPQ needs heavy servers, support and software services, and networking if they are to continue growing. DEC provides the quickest path getting there. Good luck to all those long and short CPQ. I'm long at 27 and 25. Will buy more if it goes down. - Chris Note on Alpha: Some industry pundits believe that all DEC has to offer is the support services. I would disagree, CPQ needs everything that DEC has (except DEC's PC division :) ), including the Alpha chip. Because of NT's limited scalability, it can not be used for many large SQL projects. Because Alpha is much faster then a Pentium Pro or II, it will give CPQ a leg up on the heavier database and transaction processing projects, providing at least a two year window until Merced based servers come out. Even then, it will take time to work the kinks out of Merced hardware and software (Merced is a RISC chip, with x86 compatibility, and will require it's own compile of NT and a new kernel to get full speed out of it) while Alpha servers will be proven technology.