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

To: Mark Woolfson who wrote (45219)	1/26/1999 12:15:00 PM
From: AJ Berger	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 97611

The Service from Compaq IS Nothing to me case in point: my VAR spends $2,000 in consulting overtime to diagnose a intermittant bad tape drive on a Server, Compaq only reimburses him $130 labor to do a simple tape drive swap and leaves out the diagnoses time. This is a brand new Proliant server with 100% Compaq components and bearly 30 days out of the box. Now the purchase price rose 10% more from this labor because of Compaq's eroding quality control and VAR reimbursement policy's. case in point: out of the 20 DeskproEN's (their high end corporate line) I bought last quarter, 2 of them had bad NIC ports which required motherboard replacements. 10% failure rate out of the box is what I'd expect from Packard Bell, not Compaq's top of the line products. Insiders will tell you that much of the restructuring at Compaq is ruining Company moral, and clearly their corporate quality control, and less generous Service offerings are suffering as a result. Distributors will tell you that if Compaq's doing white box, hell then we'll just do our own white box inhouse, which is exactly what Ingram Micro, is doing, and their Compaq prices are now less competative because they would simply push their own stuff then suffer Compaq's thin margins, while Compaq tries to steal VAR's customers lists so they can sell direct and squeeze the VAR's out. Xmas may be good for this quarter window dressing, but after that CPQ will have to own up to new problems, and they won't be as easially explained away as their previous reletively simply inventory problems.