Compaq plays ketchup with botched plan

I was at the Etre conference back in 1994 when the then CEO of Compaq, Eckhard Pfeiffer, tore into Intel's Hans Geyer for alleged monopolistic practices.

In fact, Pfeiffer sat next to me just before he"went off on one", and I saw him scribbling some data down on his notepad about the relative market shares of the then contenders - MIPS, PA RISC, Alpha, IBM Power PC and of course Intel.

You can find my account of this remarkable episode in The Register No.5.

Pfeiffer was ambitious and it didn't particularly surprise us when at his prompting Compaq acquired Tandem, then Digital.

He was well aware even seven years back that the market for PCs was contracting and that Compaq had to diversify.

But the repositioning of Compaq never really worked because everyone kept thinking of it as a PC company rather than a solutions and services provider.

Its X86 division found it hard to square the circle and explain just why an Intel server was better than a DEC server.

While Carly Fiorina has been struggling to emulate Lou Gerstner's success in this sphere, Mike Capellas has obviously been attempting a similar miracle but he does stand the danger of being far too late to turn round the unwieldy ship made of the Compact Quality firm, Tandem, Digital, and a heap of other smaller firms.

Capellas is giving himself 180 days. I guess that means he gives up if he doesn't succeed in pulling a particular rabbit out of a hat by then.

Dell will be watching the goings on with more than a passing interest... µ

See Also
180 days to Meltdown memo
Intel likely to buy Compaq Alpha