“Everybody's Heard About Compaq and Hewlett Packard”

There are lots of people talking today about the merger agreement between Hewlett Packard and Compaq. Lots of surprise.

I'm not surprised.

Macrobyte Resources (my company) started working with Compaq in the early summer of 2000. In fact, our first invoice was issued to them on June 22, 2000 (incidentally, that invoice wasn't paid for almost four months, a problem that became a trend with most of the invoices we submitted).

Macrobyte was making some decent progress with Compaq, starting to get a little bit of attention around the company and I had hopes of providing our software to a very large audience this year.

Then, early this year, Compaq started laying people off. These weren't manufacturing positions, they were company-wide. We were working with a group that sold Compaq's services to the financial industry, and their department lost people... professional, white collar workers like project managers were being laid off.

Then they laid off more people. Budgets were frozen.

All of this is public record, if you dig a little. I only found out about this stuff by listening to the news. My ear was very sensitive to the word "Compaq", far more sensitive than it ever was to "Apple".

Obviously, if budgets are frozen, they can't start new projects, even relatively small projects with flea-sized companies like Macrobyte Resources.

Dad asked me, Monday morning, if there was any prospect of new business with Compaq. I said that I didn't think so, and he asked if they were too upset with us. I said, "Not hardly! They like what we've done. The problem is them... they're dead in the water. They're going to go under, or get bought out soon, it has to happen. A company can't exist for long with all of their budgets frozen, and it's been months." He was surprised, of course, and not sure if he should believe me... after all, I don't know much more about Compaq than anybody else does, and what little "insider info" I had was not exactly coming through high-level executives.

Surprise, everybody, Seth was right. Compaq will shortly be no more... the proposed merger of Compaq and HP will result in a new company named.... Hewlett Packard. The CEO will be... HP's. They're 'trimming' the combined work force by 15,000 people. Where do you suppose most of those jobs will come from?

I'm sorry to see this happen. I really like the people I worked with at Compaq, like Roger Lang, Cynthia Hester, and Ian Michiels. They're all intelligent and talented people, and I hope they're all going to have a soft landing at HP or wherever they end up. Good luck, guys.