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

To: Jason W. France who wrote (21956)	3/15/1998 11:50:00 PM
From: Jason W. France	Respond to of 97611

Some closing thoughts on DEC merger............. Folks I am more than willing to continue this discussion with any interested parties, though I would like to summarize what I think I have heard and provide some my summarized thoughts on this topic (p.s. the DEC deal is the first of many juicy topics/issues I would like to discuss if given the opportunity) There were two general thought themes that were presented as reasons the merger was good: 1) DEC deal will get CPQ into the "ENTERPRISE" I am still a little fuzzy on what "ENTERPRISE" is but it sounds good! And the "ENTERPRISE" sure served CAPT. KIRK well! 2) The First Boston report that Ibnbatutaa provided looked at the hidden cash of DEC. I will have to brush up on my financial and mgmt accounting before I can make any intelligent comment on this report other than to say "this is one analysts opinion" To summarize my current thoughts on this let me make only two points 1) This graph: techstocks.com Sums up the "horizontal vs vertical" model discussion better than anything I can say. CPQ's "new" model is actually quite old. Customers have voted loud and clear with their checkbooks that this model holds no value 2) You all will have to have some "blind faith" in me on this one. This info was provided to me by people inside the halls of CPQ. but the following is probably closer to true than you would care to believe: In the internal CPQ team's final report to the Cpq Execs re: buy or not buy DEC; their reccomendation was to NOT buy DEC. The CPQ execs (earl and eckhard) chose to ignore the teams report and went to the board with their own reccomendation. Why did Earl and Echard do this???? each for differnet reasons, I suspect. In the case of Earl... he is a goof (oh yeah he is also the one running the DEC merger, hmmmmmmm) In the case of Eckhard who is in fact a very astute business man he is obsessed with one and only one thing... beating Dell. This has clouded his judgement. Instead of being so focused on beating Dell, Mr. Phieffer should instead focus on his customers and shareholders Thanks again for all the insightful conversation on this that allowed me (and others I hope) to expand our thinking. I even would like to thank feargreed, although he did not any value to the conversation, his banter did on occasion make me laugh! humor rules see you all soon, and as always these comments are just my humble and honest opinion Jason