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

To: Kenya AA who wrote (59464)	4/22/1999 6:09:00 PM
From: Elwood P. Dowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

How would I know??? I just post this stuff. If I knew anything I wouldn't be holding CPQ at a loss 2 years later. R U, or is anone on the thread thinking of jumping ship for DELL, GTW, or another stock??? I would, but I think that CPQ is near a low and, although I see more immediate upside for DELL, if the air ever goes out of this market and pes beecome more realistic, DELL could drop from here. BTWTHDIK??? El

To: Kenya AA who wrote (59464)	4/22/1999 6:27:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 97611

Some of my observations from the shareholders meeting - Rosen was relaxed and comfortable with the audience. He seemed to me to be genuinely interested in the people he spoke with and intent on understanding their perspectives, a sharp contrast to past years with EP who struck me as aiming for a polished performance. EP seemed to regard the shareholders as an unfortunate distraction. Rosen treated everyone as colleagues with a common goal and common problems. When he spoke about CPQ and its accomplishments and challenges, he was speaking from the heart on a subject he knew well. I sensed a depth of understanding behind his discussion of each point, which again had been lacking in prior years under EP. Some interesting things came out of the presentation which I did not know. CPQ gained more than 2 points of share in the PC market in 1998 on an annualized basis. The consumer PC business is profitable and was not a factor in the earnings shortfall. In the enterprise space, CPQ handles more than 90% of securities transactions, 60% of interbank transactions and 70% of cellular authentication traffic. The services business operated at a 32% gross margin. IBM's service business, by contrast, is closer to mid-20s GM. CPQ has more than 50% of the market for the top 3 messaging platforms - Exchange, Lotus Notes, and Novell Groupwise. A very surprising statistic - CPQ has more than 34% of the commercial internet web server market - more than twice Sun's share. For whatever reason I had assumed that Sun was the market leader. Throughout the meeting, I got the impression that Rosen answered every question as honestly as possible, without any attempt to hide the facts or spin the story. It is also obvious that he has great confidence in the company, believes it is currently strong and will get stronger, and that the problems over the last few years were the result of a failure to execute, a failure to pull together key pieces, and a loss of focus on the key business issues which will make CPQ successful. He spoke several times about "excessive bureaucracy" and the resulting inability to make quick decisions as a major factor. I left feeling pretty good about both the current state of the company and its future prospects. Now let's see that reflected in the stock price.