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So Long; We Won't Miss You (9/4/01)
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The good news (if you're the type who has no qualms about taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others) is that another PC manufacturer has gone kablammo. The bad news is that it's not Dell. On the plus side, though, according to faithful viewer Oren Krinsky, it is Compaq, who only a couple of years ago was looking to be the ruler of the roost. And while the company hasn't exactly imploded, filed for bankruptcy, and sacrificed its CEO to an angry mob to avoid widespread destruction and horror at the hands of creditors wielding pitchforks and torches, it's not a massive stretch of the imagination to interpret Compaq's $25 billion "merger" with Hewlett-Packard as the "let's just sell ourselves and go play golf" exit strategy of a shrinking giant with its back against the wall. After all, the post-merger entity will apparently be called Hewlett-Packard, not Compaq.
According to a CNN article, this merger (which has been unanimously approved by the boards of both companies) will "create a new Hewlett-Packard with a total revenue of $87.4 billion," second only to IBM's $90 billion. More importantly, the genetically-spliced HP-Compaq Brundlefly will have Dell beat in another vital area: whereas Dell has only laid off about 4000 people to offset the effects of the slowing economy, Compaq and HP combined have laid off twice that many-- and now plan to axe another 15,000 positions due to the merger. Now that's some cost-cutting carnage! (Meanwhile, Apple is woefully behind, having trimmed a mere fifty jobs in the past year. It's rather pathetic, isn't it?)
More to the point, though, unless the new Hewlett-Packard decides to keep selling Pavilions and Compaq's Presarios (heck, they look enough alike) in the embattled home market, one of those product families is about to go bye-bye-- which means there will soon be even more room for Apple to assert its destiny as the king of the consumer computer. Don't forget, barely two months ago analyst Tim Bajarin predicted that when the dust settles, it'll be Sony and Apple still left standing as companies catering to the consumer market while all other manufacturers will have self-destructed or left for greener pastures. Are we witnessing history in the making?
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 9/4/01 episode: September 4, 2001: We've only just recovered from the topsy-turvy world of the Apple Store Northshore. Meanwhile, Motorola finds a cost-effective way to combine silicon and gallium arsenide to crank out chips that are thirty-five times faster than today's, and Compaq sees the writing on the wall and sells out to Hewlett-Packard, thus paving the way for Apple's inevitable conquest of the consumer market...
Other scenes from that episode: 3281: This Am Bizarro Apple Store! (9/4/01) "So where ya been, AtAT?" Glad you asked. Well, let's see, here... you last heard from us late Friday afternoon, after which we collapsed in a heap from prolonged sleep deprivation. On Saturday morning we arose at some ungodly hour typically reserved for chickens and farm reports and motored on up to Peabody, Massachusetts to attend the Apple store grand opening... 3282: Motorola: The Comeback Kid (9/4/01) Man, it's like Motorola's got some kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing going on. On the one hand we've got a company whose semiconductor arm is spurting red ink like a busted fire hydrant and who spent a year and a half trying to punch through the 500 MHz barrier while the competition duked it out to 1 GHz and beyond; on the other hand, according to faithful viewer Eric, the same exact company just discovered a commercially viable method to combine silicon and gallium arsenide (two great tastes that taste great together) to create a computer chip that an Associated Press article describes as "35 times faster than today's models."...
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