To: Neil H who wrote (28597 ) 7/7/1998 11:14:00 AM From: mauser96 Respond to
With it's DEC acquisition Compaq has become one of two companies that can offer a wide range of computing systems, from a sub $1000 desktop to a Alpha server, and more important has a huge hand-holding support staff to iron out problems. Personally, when I have looked for computers I found that DEll and Gateway offered better performance for the dollar, but big companies are not looking for that extra 10%. They are looking for a package of goods and services that can solve their information processing problems. THe new CPQ is in a unique position to do this. The old DEC was such a badly managed company that there has got to be plenty of ways to improve. Sluggish PC sales and the difficulties of integrating two big companies will mean that the company will have to prove itself with actual earnings rather than expectations, so stock price gains are likely to be slow in coming. I'm encouraged by the news that Compaq will stop building it's own motherboards. This did nothing except encourage unnecessary confrontations with Intel. I just hope management can learn from Dell that inventory turnover is vital, and sophisticated purchasers require real choice. They could do a lot better job on their WWW page. For instance, last time I checked, the desktop PC's are available only with a generic Compaq sound card. I use speech recognition software which works best with a few specific sound cards, so even if I'm a stockholder, I'm not a buyer of their products. I'm afraid that the CEO reallydoesn't believe in build to order, and WWW purchases, which IMHO are the way most non corporate purchases will be made in the future.
